Holly opens with a scene of peculiar horror. In 2012 Jorge Castro, a creative writing teacher in a university town, is jogging on a misty evening. He sees two colleagues, professors Emily and Rodney Harris, struggling to load Rodney in his wheelchair into their van. “She can’t be much more than seventy. Her husband looks much older.” He offers to help push the chair up the ramp. Too late, he realises their objective. Jorge wakes confined to a cage in their basement. To what end, we do not know, but the specially constructed cage does not bode well, nor do the tools hanging from the wall, or the other facilities provided: “he knows what the Porta-John means: someone intends for him to be here a while”. Emily Harris enters and offers him a raw calf’s liver, “a slab of dark red meat floating in an even darker red liquid”. Eat this or nothing, she tells him.
Eleven years later, Holly Gibney has just finished participating in her mother’s funeral over Zoom when a new client, Penny Dahl, leaves a voice message begging her to investigate her missing daughter Bonnie. Slowly, Holly begins to connect the dots between Bonnie and other disappearances in the neighbourhood over the years.
Stephen King’s resilient, solitary private detective has appeared in four recent novels – Mr Mercedes, Finders Keepers, End of Watch and The Outsider. But this, as the title implies, is her book. As a character, she leaps off the page – dogged and resourceful, drawn to a profession that requires the sorts of interpersonal skills she struggles with as someone on the autism spectrum, with obsessive-compulsive disorder and sensory processing disorder. “Tears are hard for Holly to handle”, but she has chosen a path where tears are all she sees.
Macabre college professors the Harrises are no less acutely observed. The tenderness and loyalty between them, the care as well as the emotional attrition born of a long marriage, is both plausible and chilling. The novel is not so much a whodunit as a whydunit, moving between Holly in the present and each of the Harrises’ victims over the years. Each capture is evoked in devastating detail, from the vegan who refuses to cooperate to a teen skateboarder whose mother descends into alcoholism after his unsolved disappearance. As the narratives converge and the true nature of their project is revealed, the horror mounts. Holly, as one would expect from a King novel, goes deep into the darkness.
King has said that the novel originated with one scene: a daughter at her mother’s virtual funeral. Holly Gibney’s fictional universe is rooted firmly in our reality. The story takes place during lockdown: characters bump elbows in greeting, exchange the names of their vaccine brands. Holly’s mother, an anti-vaxxer, died of coronavirus. The peril and the isolation of Covid-19 are everywhere. There’s a lot of sorrow in Holly: for the lives lost during the pandemic; for the inevitable decline and failure of the human body; for the flawed power of familial love. “Like so many of her mother’s teachings,” Holly reflects, “it had stuck with her only child. Oranges are gold in the morning and lead at night. Sleeping on your left side wears out your heart. Only sluts wear half-slips.” Later, Holly dreams of her mother “in Holly’s old bedroom. ‘Remember who you belong to,’ Charlotte says. She goes out and locks the door behind her.”
The Harrises’ objective, eventually revealed, may be a sly commentary on the parasitic nature of academia – because this is also a novel about writing. Jorge Castro, the first victim, is a creative writing teacher; Emily Harris reads creative-writing submissions for the department; Jerome Robinson, a young Black character, is writing a book, and his even younger sister, Barbara, is an aspiring poet. Barbara acquires a mentor in Olivia Kingsbury, a celebrated poet now in her final years. Like all the plot strands, this weaves itself into the novel’s conclusion, but it’s a pleasure in its own right for its meditations on writing and truth. “They don’t teach that in college, do they? No,’’ says Olivia to Barbara during one of their many talks. “The idea that the creative impulse is a way to get rid of poison … no. They don’t teach that.”
Lyrical and horrifying, Holly is a hymn to the grim pursuit of justice. The detective’s dogged search for truth drives the book; Covid-19, Black Lives Matter, Trump and the 6 January insurrection are all persistent themes. Even the Harrises are railing against the injustices of time and age. And the novel itself is striving towards an expulsion of poison, and a healing.
• Catriona Ward’s Looking Glass Sound is published by Viper. Holly by Stephen King is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
