Holly is no archetype, however. She is the flower of King\u2019s late career and his forays into crime fiction. Occasionally, she reckons with an otherworldly evil, as she does in 2018\u2019s The Outsider<\/a>, but she\u2019s more likely to find herself tracking down merely human monsters, as she did in 2023\u2019s Holly<\/a>, in which a client whose daughter has gone missing contacts Holly\u2019s private detective agency, Finders Keepers, for help. True, Bonnie Dahl\u2019s fate is remarkably grisly, even for a Stephen King character\u2019s; she is captured and devoured by a pair of cannibal college professors who have convinced themselves that human flesh will fend off old age. But the novel makes it pretty clear that the couple is deluding themselves about the salutary effects of their horrific version of keto. Similarly, while Never Flinch features not one but two homicidal lunatics, neither of them possesses (or is possessed by) forces beyond our ken.<\/p>\n When Holly first walked into Bill Hodges\u2019 life, she was a meek and rather peculiar woman in her 40s and completely under the thumb of Charlotte, her controlling and critical mother. In Holly, she learns that her mother has concealed an inheritance from her that would have made the rocky early years of the Finders Keepers agency much more stable. Charlotte did this presumably in the hope that Holly\u2019s bid for independence would fail. Destructive parenting has been a King theme going all the way back to his first novel, the aforementioned Carrie, published in 1974. In Never Flinch, both Holly and one of the novel\u2019s two villains hear the judgmental voice of a dead parent at moments of stress. The difference between good and evil is learning how not to listen to it. The bad guy in Never Flinch even goes full Gollum at the novel\u2019s climax, arguing with himself by alternating between mimicry of his own voice as a child and that of his abusive father. \u201cYou aren\u2019t doing anything,\u201d the internalized father tells him, calling him \u201cMr. Useless\u201d and a \u201cworthless fucking flincher.\u201d (The novel\u2019s title comes from a demand the killer\u2019s father made while flicking hockey pucks at his son.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n \n By Stephen King. Scribner.\n <\/p>\n \n Slate receives a commission when you purchase items using the links on this page. Charlotte insisted that Holly\u2019s obsessive-compulsive disorder made her too emotionally fragile to live on her own. Bill Hodges, who becomes a surrogate parent to her, initially writes off the tremulous, mumbling Holly as someone who \u201cdoesn\u2019t have a damn thing going for her \u2026 not a single scrap of wit, not a single wile,\u201d although King adds that Bill \u201cwill come to regret this misperception.\u201d When he sees mother and daughter together, they look to him less like a parent and child than \u201clike a matron escorting a prisoner\u2014probably a drug addict\u2014into county lockup.\u201d When Bill\u2019s client, who is Holly\u2019s cousin, is killed by a car bomb intended for Bill, she becomes drawn into Bill\u2019s investigation of the crime, revealing an expertise with computers that proves invaluable. By the end of the novel, Holly is clubbing the bad guy on the head with Bill\u2019s \u201cHappy Slapper\u201d\u2014a sock filled with ball bearings\u2014to protect her friends.<\/p>\n In the books that followed, first as Bill\u2019s sidekick, then later\u2014after Bill\u2019s death\u2014on her own as the head of Finders Keepers, Holly blossoms, sort of. She remains mousy in appearance, which suits her just fine. Now in her 50s, Holly is, according to Never Flinch, \u201csmall and graying, rather plain in the face but well-groomed,\u201d and with \u201ca talent for being slightly dim\u201d\u2014that is, able to go unnoticed. She achieves this even in her fictional hometown of Buckeye City, Ohio\u2014i.e., Cleveland, as Derry, Maine, is King\u2019s version of Bangor\u2014where she has figured in several spectacularly gruesome cases.<\/p>\n Holly loves coffee, enjoys Colleen Hoover novels, and hates insurance companies, even though they often hire her. She wears \u201cstylish\u201d but \u201csensible\u201d shoes. To her delight, she has a cozy little apartment of her own and no desire to leave flyover country, which King depicts with a loving familiarity, as he does so many nondescript and unglamorous working-class haunts. King\u2019s crime fiction may lack the clockwork construction and procedural exactitude of the great detective novelists\u2014Holly\u2019s friends compare her to Sherlock Holmes, but most of her solves come from flashes of intuition, and in Never Flinch it takes her far too long to make a significant connection\u2014but he has no rival when it comes to evoking a sense of place. He may not do misdirection, but no one can capture a church-basement AA meeting, or two drunks hanging out behind a laundromat enjoying the warmth of the heating vent, with more genuine, uncondescending affection.<\/p>\n The pandemic, and the OCD anxieties it activated, made Holly\u2019s P.I. work more challenging\u2014Holly features scene after scene of its heroine assessing the potential contagions in every encounter. It also claimed the life of her anti-vaxxer mother. Yet by Never Flinch, Holly has become more than competent, agreeing to a bodyguard gig with a firebrand feminist on a lecture tour while, on the side, helping a friend in the Buckeye City police track down a serial killer.<\/p>\n Holly is, in a way, the quintessential King protagonist: an ordinary (albeit quirky), unprepossessing person who, in the clutch, discovers untapped reserves of smarts and, most important of all, courage. Her antagonists in each book may be florid madmen and malevolent spirits, but in the overarching narrative of her series, the real Big Bad is the self-doubt instilled in her by her mother. At 5-foot-3, Holly makes for an unlikely bodyguard for Kate McKay and her assistant in Never Flinch, although Holly does manage to save Kate\u2019s life on more than one occasion. Nevertheless, she still dreams of her mother whispering, \u201cThe idea that you can protect those women is ridiculous. You couldn\u2019t even remember your library book when you got off the bus\u201d\u2014a rare incident of forgetfulness from Holly\u2019s childhood that comes up over and over again. Defeating an evil clown who lives in the sewer system is a piece of cake compared to erasing the insecurities written onto us in our early years.<\/p>\n King\u2019s fiction is, of course, full of darkness, whether it\u2019s the nihilistic narcissism of Mr. Mercedes or the grotesque selfishness of those demented college professors in Holly. In Never Flinch, the ultimate culprits are two old King boogeymen: religious fanaticism and addiction. One of the novel\u2019s maniacs is hell-bent on assassinating Kate for her pro-choice rabble-rousing, and the other, while claiming to be a pursuer of justice, simply discovers that he gets a kick out of killing random victims. In King\u2019s earlier works, individual fortitude was enough to defeat such forces, but a key distinction of the Holly Gibney series is that its heroine inevitably requires a little help from her friends.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n Rich Juzwiak <\/a><\/p>\n Foremost among these are Jerome and Barbara Robinson, the son and daughter of Bill\u2019s Black neighbors and in time Holly\u2019s own surrogate niece and nephew. The siblings are kids when first introduced in Mr. Mercedes, and by Never Flinch are in their 20s. Much of Holly and Never Flinch is taken up with developments in Jerome and Barbara\u2019s lives that feel tangential to the main plot, even if they do tie into it eventually. There\u2019s an avuncular fondness to these passages. Truth be told, Barbara and Jerome aren\u2019t very convincing as 21st-century zoomers, but what they do resemble is the rosy vision of a young person as seen by a doting older relative or mentor. Somehow this works. Holly\u2019s pleasure at seeing Jerome publish a book and Barbara get the chance to join the backup singers for an Aretha Franklin\u2013like soul legend is infectious. In turn, they regard Holly and her many eccentricities as very dear.<\/p>\n Netflix\u2019s Latest Inevitable Hit Is Gorgeous, Well Written, Well Acted, and Rather Stupid The Follow-Up to A24\u2019s Most Successful Horror Movie of All Time Is a Giant Leap Forward The Single Best Survivor Contestant Ever Is Back for the 50th Season. It\u2019s Not Who You Think. Wes Anderson\u2019s New Movie May Be His Worst Yet![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/6f824930-f360-4ab4-9722-72dde95c6c82.png\")
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\n The Follow-Up to A24\u2019s Most Successful Horror Movie of All Time Is a Giant Leap Forward
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