Stephen King, 77, is a writer of towering brilliance whose fiction appeals to a reading public both popular and serious. His 60th novel, Never Flinch, unfolds in Buckeye City, Ohio, where a serial murderer is on the loose under the alias of Bill Wilson – the name of the man who co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous. Wilson has sworn to kill 14 people in revenge for the death of a friend and former alcoholic who was framed and convicted for child pornography offences. The plot is steeped in AA lore (‘Honesty in all our affairs’) and an awareness of the deleterious effects of drinking to excess.
It’s no secret that King is himself a recovering alcoholic. His scariest novels – Carrie, The Stand, The Shining – were written in the mid-1970s when his life was dangerously tipped by booze. Never Flinch, a superior crime thriller, opens a window on to the world of smalltown American AA meetings and the vexing devil of substance abuse among the Ohioan poor. In pages of heart-pounding suspense Wilson targets various innocent people, among them even AA old-timers he has known (one of whom is called Big Book Mike for his habit of quoting verbatim from the AA handbook).
Parallel to this is an equally disturbing campaign of violence against a feminist activist called Kate McKay, whose bookshop signings attract unwanted crowds of angry white men disgruntled by all things woke. The private investigator Holly Gibney, who made her debut in King’s 2014 novel Mr Mercedes, offers to help the Buckeye City Police bring the AA killer to book and lend McKay the bodyguard protection she demands. A cast of minor characters, ranging from the gospel singer Sista Bessie to the hip-hop artist YoungBoy Never Broke Again, enlivens the intertwining storylines.
This is a zingy, fast-paced cliffhanger with moments of signature horror. If it falls short of the author’s best work, it remains very respectable. King’s frightscapes are among the most haunting in contemporary fiction, and Never Flinch does not disappoint. The novel is brocaded with allusions to Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson and other maestros of horror-suspense. Before King became the emperor of bestsellerdom he studied American literature at the University of Maine, his birthplace. He achieved AA sobriety in around 1988 and has not looked back.
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