{"id":130055,"date":"2025-05-25T07:13:12","date_gmt":"2025-05-25T07:13:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/130055\/"},"modified":"2025-05-25T07:13:12","modified_gmt":"2025-05-25T07:13:12","slug":"never-flinch-book-review-stephen-king-tries-plotting-and-comes-out-plodding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/130055\/","title":{"rendered":"Never Flinch book review: Stephen King tries plotting and comes out plodding"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stephen King<\/a> doesn\u2019t do plotting. \u201cPlot is,\u201d he decreed in his memoir On Writing, \u201cthe good writer\u2019s last resort and the dullard\u2019s first choice.\u201d Instead, he likes to drop his characters into a situation, start writing and see where things go. If he gets stuck, he follows the advice of Raymond Chandler: \u201cWhen in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.\u201d<\/p>\n

This freewheeling method has served the king of horror well for 65 novels and more than 200 short stories, many of which are universally recognised as masterpieces. Yet at 77, he has ditched his usual approach to write his latest book, Never Flinch, a detective mystery thriller. \u201cThis once I wanted to try to write something different,\u201d he explained in a promotional video. \u201cAnd that meant that I had to have a plot.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, the plot. In the fictional city of Buckeye, Ohio, a serial killer seeks to avenge the death of a man wrongly imprisoned for a crime he didn\u2019t commit. His perverse form of justice means killing 14 random people, \u201c13 innocents and one guilty\u201d. The case comes to the attention of Holly Gibney, a private investigator whom King fans first met 11 years ago in the Mr Mercedes trilogy. Holly helps the police while at the same time working as a bodyguard for a feminist activist, whose pro-choice rallies attract the righteous wrath of an extremist church that\u2019s on the FBI\u2019s radar as a terrorist threat. The serial killer\u2019s spree and the church\u2019s violent campaign against the activist finally converge into an action-packed climax that plays out hour by hour, then minute by minute.<\/p>\n

I found it hard to shake the feeling that, not only has he done much of it before, he\u2019s done it better<\/p>\n

The killer, we learn from the outset, is a recovering alcoholic who introduces himself at AA meetings as \u201cTrig\u201d. After his first murder he feels no guilt, \u201conly a dull regret that makes him think of his last year drinking\u201d. Trig knows his murderous impulses are a mad new form of addiction, \u201cbut he knew driving with an open bottle of vodka was crazy, too, and it never stopped him\u201d.<\/p>\n

King, who was hooked on booze and cocaine for many years until his wife Tabitha staged an intervention, has written often about addiction. He wrote many of his best works during periods of self-destruction, several of which are about addiction either explicitly (The Shining) or metaphorically (Pet Sematary, Cujo). <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Stephen King\u2019s imagination feels constrained in his latest novel<\/p>\n

Leemage<\/p>\n

With Never Flinch, I found it hard to shake the feeling that, not only has he done much of it before, he\u2019s done it better. There are even some things he directly recycles, such as a moment of mistaken identity in which a woman is attacked because she\u2019s wearing a hat that looks like someone else\u2019s. The same thing happens in an earlier Holly Gibney novel.<\/p>\n

Likeable though she is, King\u2019s heroine Holly has run out of road. In her debut, she was a wisp of a woman, cursed with an inferiority complex and crippling neuroses. Over five novels and one short story, she overcame her insecurities time and again, defeating an incel serial killer, an obsessive murderous fan, the incel serial killer again only this time with psychic powers, a shape-shifting vampire who feeds on suffering, another pain vampire (they\u2019re like buses, aren\u2019t they?), and an elderly cannibal couple. The tagline on the cover of Never Flinch is \u201cface your fears\u201d, but Holly has already faced hers and then some.<\/p>\n

The 10 best Stephen King books<\/p>\n

Stephen King’s best books<\/a> as chosen by Saskia Kemsley, a fan of the horror master<\/p>\n