Andy Hageman
Stephen King casually dropped into an online interview with Linwood Barclay at the 2021 annual Bloody Scotland International Crime Writing Festival that his next novel would center on Holly Gibney. Holly is one of the all-time great King characters. From her first appearance in his fiction to the present, Holly gives the impression that she wandered onto the narrative scene only to capture everyone’s attention and desire to know more of her story. She’s like a literary equivalent of the actor Dick Miller who popped in as Mr. Futterman in Joe Dante’s Gremlins movies and as Vic the trash collector in The ‘Burbs.
On September 5, King’s new novel, titled Holly, dropped. This is a timely exploration of Holly’s character arc of development through the Bill Hodges trilogy that introduced her to readers and set her on a path of realization. If you’re new to Holly Gibney, this can pique your interest to read those earlier appearances or situate you enough to jump into the new one somewhat grounded. If you’ve read some or all of the Holly works, this can point you to the prose moves King uses to shape our perceptions of her such as how she makes her first and last appearances in each book, how verb and adjective choices establish Holly’s agency, disability, and status of being valued and loved by others. The point is to get us all ready to savor the form and function of the new tale when you get your retinas, eardrums, or fingertips on it.
Before turning to the texts, the main takeaway from the close readings assembled here is to recognize Holly as a robust and responsible, yet flawed like all folks inside fiction and out, representation. Holly is a disabled character who is not defined by her disabilities. She is not set up to overcome her disabilities, to leverage them as a super(natural) power, or to solicit pity in order to boost the ethical portrayals of other characters. Like so many Stephen King characters, Holly is emerging from a lifetime of being bullied in multiple ways and by multiple people, including her mother and uncle who’ve shaped her daily life from youth. She works at healing, feeling her way to agency, and responding to being respected, valued, and loved.
Intro to Bill Hodges Trilogy
Before highlighting Holly’s character development arc within each novel in the trilogy, a very brief introduction to the principal characters will help if you’ve not read, or read recently, Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch. We meet Bill Hodges in his earlier days of retirement from his career as a police detective. In the first novel, he’s been targeted by Brady Hartsfield, a devious and demented criminal whose mass murder Bill was unable to solve during his time on the force. As Bill picks up the case from his civilian social position, he meets Janey Trelawny, a relative of one of Brady’s victims. When Brady accidentally kills Janey in an attempt to murder Bill, Holly Gibney, Janey’s cousin, enters the story.
Bill is the only person in Holly’s life who has seen her as a person and who treats her with care and respect from the first. Holly’s mother and uncle have shaped her life by bullying her nearly as much as her classmates and former employer have, deeply undermining her self-confidence. Across the trilogy, Holly’s relationship with Bill is extremely healthy and she blossoms wonderfully and rather responsibly in terms of character representation. Holly works as Bill’s employee for a time before becoming his full business partner. Along the way, Holly and Bill work with and grow close as friends with the Robinsons, a Black family in Bill’s neighborhood. Their son, Jerome, in particular features across the novels, and their daughter, Barbara, is a vital character in End of Watch. Of course, there are many more characters involved in the plots, but for this feature on Holly, these are the most influential figures you need to know in order to follow the map of her development and why she’s one of the absolute best among the hundreds of characters Stephen King has brought to life.
Mr. Mercedes (2014)
Holly first appears about two hundred pages into Mr. Mercedes. Initially, readers access Holly only through others’ perceptions of her. Janey tells Bill, “At least Holly’s just weird.” A voice that remains unspecified as a narrator or Bill informs us that, “Holly Gibney never speaks above a mutter and seems to have a problem making eye contact,” and “As for Holly…who knows.” The fact that these different perceptions are consistent is a writerly feint that lures readers to build an idea of Holly. But just as we do, King uses a subtle move that’s in many of his novels: “Holly looks at him out of her naked face. She doesn’t have a damn thing going for her, Hodges thinks, not a single scrap of wit, not a single wile. He will come to regret this misperception, but for now, he finds himself once more musing on Olivia Trelawney.” Right there in the midst of presently unfolding action, there’s a temporal leap into the future. In literary terms, this is a prolepsis, where the insertion of a future event—in this case, a radical reassessment of Holly—disrupts the chronological flow of events. That King chose to use this formal technique for Holly implies that she’s a key player for him and therefore us.
This character development payoff comes during an extended funeral sequence. During the funeral service, Holly nearly faints and needs to leave the room. Her mother and uncle chastise her sharply, deliberately infantilizing Holly even as their remarks undermine her for being childish. They claim that her behavior is driven by her mere desire for attention. As readers, we, along with Bill Hodges, witness the damage a lifetime of bullying, by family no less, has done to Holly and how it’s stolen her capacity to work through loss and begin mourning. However, in the next part of this sequence, Holly demonstrates the wit and wile Bill believed absent in her. Holly asks to ride with Bill as she can observe that he actually cares for her wellbeing, and the plan ends up for him to ride with Holly and her family and Janey to take Bill’s car. But his car’s been boobytrapped, and Janey is killed in the explosion. Chaos and horror reign as everyone reacts to this eruption of violence. When Bill asks Holly insistently to give him her cellphone number so he can pursue the culprit, she seems to be immobilized by the shock, sliding her sunglasses on, as if to remove herself from the world. Here’s where it gets awesome. Just as Bill starts away, devastated and disappointed, Holly slips him her sunglasses case behind her back, out of her mother’s line of sight. He sees right away that it’s got her name and number labeled inside. Bill clocks that Holly knew her mother would intervene if she’d spoken to or written her contact info for Bill. Instead, she performed the Holly her mother expects while assisting in the investigation clandestinely. Pretty wily.
Later in the novel, as Holly has a lot more dialogue with Bill and Jerome, she says, “I always do my best, Jerome. And it’s never good enough.” If you’re not paying attention, you could mistake this as King making Holly an object of pity. What’s vital to notice is that Holly says this in the middle of collaborating with Jerome and Bill, and her positive results become clear quite quickly. Holly plays a massive role in solving the crime, anticipating a potential atrocity, and preventing Brady from committing it. Holly’s remark articulates the prejudice she’s working in the narrative to overcome. It’s a savvy ethical position that can universally appeal to all readers. Anyone’s best efforts remain flawed and fallible. The key is to use this insight as a provocation to keep striving for ethical action rather than lapse into fatalistic irresponsibility. King is conjuring a highly sophisticated character development in moments like these.
Mr. Mercedes ends with Holly inheriting enough from Janey to move out of her mother’s house. Her last spoken line is intended to comfort Bill, who’s crying as he thinks about Janey, “Dr. Leibowitz says crying is good…She says tears wash the emotions.” Combined in this line is Holly’s empathy and care for Bill and evidence of her own journey towards healing. Holly is transforming, on her own and with the support and resources of friends and health professionals. King leaves us happy for her and keen to know what’s next for Holly.
Finders Keepers (2015)
In Finders Keepers, the second novel of the trilogy, Holly enters on a note of confidence and acumen. After about one hundred ninety pages of introducing the criminals, victims, and crimes, we turn to Bill staking out an airport as a skip tracer. The narration informs us, “Holly Gibney has assured him that Madden is already on the way—she got his flight plan from a computer site called AirTracker—but it’s always possible that Madden will smell something downwind and head in another direction.” King’s verb choice “assured” functions dually here to show us that Holly has continued to grow her self confidence and that Bill has full confidence in her detective skills as well. Bill’s preparation to react to a fluid attempt to apprehend the high-end thief Madden is solely based on his wariness of the criminal.
After Madden is dispatched, and Holly and Bill start getting pulled into the main mystery of Finders Keepers, King writes a scene with two young women coming to them for help—one of whom is Barbara Robinson, whose brother, Jerome, is friends and sometimes colleagues with Holly and Bill. In this instance, Holly asks Bill for help. Specifically, she asks him to talk with the girls as their emotions tied to whatever they’ve come to discuss are strong. Of note is that Holly readily identifies that emotional intensities are an area where she’s still building her interpersonal abilities and overcoming her past as a bully victim.
King works his subtle character arc construction within the same interview situation once Bill has diffused the high-strung energy of the pair who’re understandably on edge. Covering multiple pages, Holly and Bill collaborate to interview the two teenagers effectively. Holly and Bill are described as equally perceptive of each other’s nonverbal cues and those of the interviewees yet in complementary ways. It’s an admirable move by King to show Holly working through her past while discerning agency as an autistic person. She doesn’t transcend her disability or wield it as a superpower, which is not to say that King hasn’t rehearsed those and other problematic ideological figures in previous novels. But it is to say that as King has created and continues to create Holly, he’s in a productive mode.
As in Mr. Mercedes, Holly plays a major role in solving the crime at the heart of Finders Keepers. Holly, herself, describes the intersection of research, intuition, and deduction as a “Holly-hunch.” In branding her detective abilities, Holly is truly achieving a level of self-confidence that was unthinkable from her character when Bill first met her in the previous novel. We’ll soon find out how such gestures might reflect Holly’s continued growth in the newest novel.
Holly appears to be growing strong while still occasionally fragile at the end of Finders Keepers. We last see her hanging out with Jerome. The two joke and discuss their love for Bill. By absenting Bill from the scene, King makes Holly’s final note about her emerging comfort in transferring her self-confidence and enjoyment of being with other folks beyond Bill. In this gesture, King sidesteps the potential of making Bill a sort of patron savior of Holly.
End of Watch (2016)
With End of Watch, Holly realizes several different potentials and is set up for her life, continued by King, on her own without Bill—I won’t spoil the details of this if you’ve not yet read the trilogy. Near the start of the novel, a description of Holly informs readers how she’s becoming integral to King’s long-time exploration of how and why some folks are able to imagine and accept strange and unsettling mysteries:
Izzy gives Holly a glance. Holly doesn’t notice. She’s measuring the room. Taking inventory. Sniffing the air. Running a palm across the back of Mom’s easy chair. Holly has emotional problems, she’s breathtakingly literal, but she’s also open to stimuli in a way few people are.
The short sentences formally imply the precision Holly brings to these tasks. She doesn’t hesitate or worry about others’ judgemental glances. Holly works. Where King makes her unique is in triangulating Holly’s openness to stimuli as a product of emotional vulnerability and literal focus. Again, King avoids representing Holly as supernatural or superpowered. Instead, she’s an investigative team member, and she’s valued by Bill, Jerome, and others, even as Izzy, a police detective, and her partner Pete are happy to dismiss her as they’re unsettled by Holly.
Holly’s nearly unique openness to stimuli itself sets her apart as an adult character who can flex really far in order to follow where the evidence leads. In King’s subsequent Holly narratives after the trilogy—The Outsider and If it Bleeds—it’s precisely her readiness to grasp the existence on Earth of “outsiders” who can impersonate human beings in order to feed on our grief and trauma that saves lives and ultimately saves the day. If we go way back to King’s IT, the inability of adults to accept such things imperils the folks in Derry. And this idea runs through many other King tales as well. So, within a long-time fascination of his, Holly is a rare positive role model. That alone makes the forthcoming novel a thrilling prospect—to see how Holly stretches in being tested by new scenarios.
Furthermore, we find out that Holly is now a full partner in the investigative business Bill started. She’s structurally equal, and Bill recognizes all of the larger organizational contributions that Holly makes in addition to her sleuthing. This professional equity is matched in a powerful scene where police detective Izzy verbally attacks Holly. At this point of the novel, Holly has told Bill that she’s been bullied her whole life by people like Izzy who distort her disability and label her crazy. King gives us a glimpse of Bill’s interior during the scene to show that he registers Holly’s pain and he’s increasingly furious. But after a narrative beat or two, Holly proceeds to explain what she sees and why it’s significant. What King does is show us Bill’s care and empathy while giving Holly room to grow. Holly’s had decades of domineering parents who tried to control how others understood her. Now we as readers get to know that Bill’s there as a support, yet he doesn’t infantilize Holly by immediately defending her.
Later in End of Watch, Barbara Robinson confides in and looks to Holly for support in the wake of a suicide attempt. Barbara was manipulated by the arch-criminal of the novel to step in front of oncoming traffic. Even though she nearly died under this hypnotic influence, Barbara has realized that some part of her might be capable of self-harm. To start coming to grips with this new self-awareness, Barbara chooses Holly as the only person in her immediate circle who she believes can empathize and help. In other words, Holly helps Barbara here in parallel to Bill’s care for Holly. Simply put, Holly is a flawed character who’s working through past damage wrought by others while also building friendships, self-awareness, and authority. Her vulnerability and flexibility are tied to past problems, yet they are also the keys to friendship, camaraderie, social responsibility, and mad detective skills that grow stronger each day for her.
When End of Watch closes, King has shown Holly’s transformation from when we, vicariously through Bill, first met her to be so significant that we can imagine her continuing without him in her life. In fact, her final self-branded concept comes at the tail end of the novel when she remarks three times that when it comes to Bill’s future, she has “Holly hope.”
“Oough”
I want to end with this expression that Holly has uttered in all of her narratives to date. As a Hollyism, “oough” captures her character as a person navigating who she is for herself and for others, her interiority and her exteriorities, her past, present, and future. At a glance, “oough” doesn’t have an obvious set pronunciation. It feels like it’s akin to “ew,” yet there’s more to the picture, a more sustained and sophisticated reaction to something troubling. Perhaps “oough” articulates a form of repulsion that’s connected to the uncanny. It’s like Holly is able to be grossed out fully and simultaneously consider the logical and/or unsettling implications of what is affecting her.
Weirdly, when I revisited the trilogy novels to write this piece, I realized that the number of times Holly actually says “oough” are extremely few. This points out how Holly draws forth some of King’s strongest, savviest writing. With only a few drips of this word across one thousand-plus pages of the trilogy, he’s designed a symbolic neologism that stands for Holly’s complexity and charm. “Oough” is the one-word tip of the iceberg of character architecture across the trilogy. I can’t wait—and hope you’re equally keen—to get more time with Holly.
