Sandra reviewed Never Flinch by Stephen King (Holly Gibner, #4)
From "Always" to "Never"
1 star
Content warning Spoilers, including plot spoilers, for Stephen King's "Never Flinch".
It's time for "Never Flinch" a.k.a. Holly 7! Or Holly 6 if "If It Bleeds" doesn't count or Holly 4 if Mercedes trilogy doesn't count or Holly 3 if neither of them count. I've seen the book sold under all four of those numbers.
Throughout the series King is being really nasty to those who missed the previous books. He always take care to spoil the climaxes of the previous books. I'll use a made-up example (so don't worry, there are not really any weresharks or boats): "Holly thought back to when she defeated Jane Doe who in a surprise twist was revealed as the were-shark onboard the S/S Atlantica. She doesn't talk to Barbara and Jerome about it anymore." He unabashedly writes about the endings of previous cases but under-explains who these people are and how they know each other. You're supposed to just get who Izzy, Barbara, Jeromee, Charlotte, Bill, and Pete are, and how Holly was before the start of the series. Barbara and Jerome are main characters so you get to know them during the course of the books, but Holly even though she is such an excentric but you have to just carry that with you into this one from previous books because that's not shown here.
All that to say is that read the books in order or get punished.
Or don't read them because they're pretty messed up.
So spoiler warning: I'll spoil the twist that's revealed about a third through of this one.
Here, there conincidentally are two killers and both are plural and one of them has a female alter and that's not handled great. Another protagonist, one of the targets, is a pretty unkind caricature of a girlbossy [second-waver][s] on a pro-choice speaking tour. Ultimately I like her but reading the book without flinching (as the titel admonishes) was not easy.
The book also sometimes veer into copaganda but ultimately (okay another spoiler and this one towards the very last chapters, at the apex of the story) the cops are unredeemed as Jesus Christ's divine intervention miraculously causes a brutal fistfight between them and a station of macho firefighters.
Overall this is one of the weaker King novels. He is in a writing mode where an idea pops into his head and he'll use that idea a couple of times even in the separate threads rather than just once. Like someone would use a gesture or an unusual phrase and then it happens again in the other thread. Often this is lampshaded which does mitigate the problem a lot or almost even fully, (lampshading is seriously one of my favorite tropes as a reader. When something is weird or looks like a bug, it helps my immersion when the author lets us know that "okay, that sounds weird but that's what happened") but not always.
Am I going to read "Holly 8, Holly Goes Buick" or whatever the next one's called? Probably but that's more because of sunk cost than actual high hopes at this point. Not happy with this one. Maybe I won't. I did quit Discworld half-way through Unseen Academicals and while I've reread many of my old faves since then, I've often wished I had gotten off that particular train one or books earlier.
[s]: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-wave_feminism "Second-wave feminism - Wikipedia"
