Billy Summers

“‘Is it a bad person?’

Nick laughs, shakes his head, and looks at Billy with real affection.

‘Always the same question with you.’

Billy nods.

The dumb self might be a shuck, but this is true: he only does bad people.”

This quotation highlights the short, to-the-point dialogue of questions, answers, and short declarative phrases that characterizes the way characters talk. There is an undercurrent of unspoken thoughts, however, that are made explicit through free indirect discourse, in which the third-person narrative reflects the thoughts of the central character. The passage further develops the interplay between Billy’s different selves, illustrating how he uses the naivete of his “dumb self” to express genuine moral concerns.

“Nick is a bad guy. Hard not to like him a little, though.”

This is an early example of Billy’s moral judgments, which are typically absolute and uncompromising, showing shades of gray. The idea that some people are innately “bad guys” is repeated throughout the novel, so it becomes a sort of refrain. Here, it is undercut with a joke.

“He is now starring in his own last job story.”

The metaphor of acting a role or playing a part recurs throughout the early chapters of Billy Summers. Here it appears alongside an allusion to the genre conventions of the “last job” plot, a plot that this novel will adapt by playing with other genres and conventions. This metatextual commentary is one of the ways King develops the theme of readers and writers. In this case, Billy is a self-aware “reader” of his own story; it is less clear whether he has the agency to “write” that story.

“The man my ma lived with came home with a broke arm. I guess he must have went to the hospital first because it was in a cast. My sister was trying to bake cookies and she burnt them. I guess she forgot to keep track of the time. When that man came home he was plenty mad. He killed my sister and I don’t even remember his name.”

This is the first paragraph of Billy’s own novel. In it he adopts plans to adopt the voice of his “dumb self,” but as his writing continues, he modifies this judgment and calls this voice his “child self” instead. This voice makes grammatical and punctuation mistakes, and his sentences are simple and declarative. This bluntness may also reflect Repressed Violence and Trauma, as it suggests an effort to distance himself from the emotions the event inspired.

“Billy thinks it’s good. And good that it’s awful, because awful is sometimes the truth.”

This quotation sees Billy assess his own work and judge it “good” because it’s “awful.” This apparent oxymoron sees Billy ascribe to the tenets of Naturalism, a convention that he alluded to in his reference to Zola at the beginning of the novel.

“The door to the past is open. He could push it shut, latch and lock it, but he doesn’t want to. Let the wind blow in. It’s cold but it’s fresh, and the room he’s been living in is stuffy.”

This metaphor of a locked room that has been unlocked through the act of writing offers a concrete image of repressed memories finding relief. It creates a parallel between Billy’s situation, in which he must literally hide, and the mental state of a man living with the legacies of childhood trauma.

“[H]e must eventually get out of a business that makes him—admit it—just another bad person.”

Billy confronts his own self-deceptions. One effect of free indirect discourse is that it tends to blend the narrator’s voice with that of the character, making it hard to pinpoint exactly when the former ends and the latter begins. In Billy’s case, this heightens the moral ambiguities surrounding his character, as it’s unclear to what extent the narrator agrees with Billy’s self-assessment.

“Benjy Compson […] is just enough not-Billy so Billy can look at painful memories he usually avoids.”

Billy uses multiple identities to create distance from “painful memories,” finding a double for himself in Benjy. He writes many different versions of himself as characters in stories. Moments such as this interrogate the relationship between fiction and reality and suggest that some degree of invention is psychologically necessary.

“He’s totally down with that other Don, the one who sits in much grander digs at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He especially agrees with the other Don when it comes to the issue of immigration (‘Don’t want to see America painted brown’, he says).”

Here colloquial language is used to mock and puncture the illusion of closeness between two very different ways of life, represented by two very different “Dons”: Trump and Billy’s neighbor, Don Jensen. Jenson may believe himself to be “totally down” with Trump, but the latter’s “grander digs” reveal a fundamental difference and distance.

“[T]he man said you picked up a scorpion Mrs. Compson and he stung your little girl to death. You could have lost your son as well. You didn’t but this trommer will be with him for the rest of his life.”

In this passage, a member of the panel holding the hearing into the death of Billy’s sister tells a story about a scorpion and tells his mother that she is responsible for allowing a similar “scorpion” to harm her child. The mimicking (and perhaps light mocking) of his accent—“trommer” for trauma—distances an uncomfortable truth. Billy has, in fact, carried this trauma with him.

“The child’s voice is truth. That voice never had a chance to speak, not even at the hearing. He answered the questions he was asked but no one asked how it felt to hold Cathy with her crushed chest.”

This is another instance of Billy fragmenting and objectifying his own identity as a way of coping with trauma. This is “the child’s voice”—himself as a child—and he conjures it here because when he was younger, he wasn’t given “chance to speak.” Writing now becomes a therapeutic mode of self-expression.

“What I learned in the House of Everlasting Paint: There aren’t just 2 kinds of people, good and bad, like I thought when I was a kid who got most of his ideas on how people act from TV. There are 3. The third type of people go along to get along […] Those are the most people in the world and I think they are gray people. They will not hurt you (at least on purpose) but they won’t help you much either.”

This image of “gray people” who won’t help or hurt personifies the “gray” area between “good” and “bad.” In this passage, Billy’s simple distinctions between people who are “good” and those who are “bad” meet with a complication—a murky image of blurred boundaries between these categories.

“Billy can tell himself it could have been a lot worse (and does). He can tell himself the robbery would have gone down much as it did even if he had called 911 (and does). It doesn’t change the fact that he feels like the priest and Levite who passed by on the other side of the road before a good Samaritan came along and saved the day.”

This passage follows Billy’s thought process after he fails to report an armed robbery. He is justifying his actions to himself with morally ambiguous sophistry, arguing against his own standards of clear right and wrong. This effort at self-vindication falls apart with the biblical story of the Good Samaritan, which personifies apparent good (the priest) versus active, actual good (the Good Samaritan). This image deepens the discussion of good and evil in this novel.

“As he drives toward downtown, Billy thinks of Shan changing her flamingo’s name and feels happy because she did that and shame because the name is, after all, a lie.”

Billy struggles between authentic closeness with his neighbors and the “lie” that separates them: that he is pretending to be someone he is not. Names are important in this novel, not least because the many aliases that characters adopt create ambiguity and confusion around identity. Here this conflict underpins the simple contrast between feeling happy and feeling shame.

“The pieces are there, but no way he can put them together until this job is done. According to William Wordsworth, the best writing is about strong emotion recalled in tranquility.”

Billy is well-read, and he is a writer learning his craft as he works on his first book. Throughout Billy Summers, Billy directly quotes literary sources. Naming Wordsworth as an authority displays Billy’s learnedness and branches out beyond the confines of a single genre. Billy can learn from genre writers, realists, and Romantic poets; this patchwork creates a play between conventions and defies simple expectations of what makes a thriller.

“The idea—no, the conceit—that he only kills bad people will stretch just so far.”

The use of the word “conceit” here is telling. It suggests that Billy is beginning to see himself as a stereotyped character in a thriller and is resisting the confines of that simple idea. Notably, Billy credits his realization to beginning to write “Benjy’s” story, underscoring the connection to literature.

“Jim Albright, John Colton, and Harry Stone—The Young Lawyers, like characters in a TV show or a Grisham novel.”

Billy thinks of these minor characters in terms of a “TV show” or “Grisham novel,” signaling literary debts and conventions. Shortly afterward, he admits to himself that he is avoiding them precisely because he likes them; he knows the assassination is approaching and feels shame at having deceived his new friends. This suggests that he refers to them as stock characters to distance himself from them.

“Having time to think and act like a normal person was the biggest mistake of all. He’s not a normal person. He’s a hired assassin, and if he doesn’t think like who and what he is, he’ll never get clear.”

The novel’s premise (and the job he has been hired to do) requires Billy to fit a certain profile. However, Billy’s identity extends beyond the singular role of “hired assassin”; as a character in a novel and as a human being, he isn’t limited by that label. The plot that develops as the novel progresses is driven by the growth of Billy’s character beyond simple labels or conceits.

“She sighs. ‘This has got to be the deadest neighborhood in the whole city.’

Billy thinks of telling her that dead, like unique, is a word that cannot by its nature, be modified. He doesn’t because she’s right.”

This grammar joke is an opportunity to develop Billy’s reputation as someone who knows and cares about language. Dwelling on and joking about the word “dead” also has a dark undertone, especially in the voice of a hired killer. “Dead” has no superlative form because dead things are simply (and permanently) dead.

“Neither of them knows—no one does—that a rogue virus is going to shut down America and most of the world in half a year, but by the fourth day in the basement, Billy and Alice are getting a preview of what sheltering in place will be like”

The confined hideout scenes are a source of dramatic irony. The reader knows that a global pandemic is just around the corner and that this “lockdown” foreshadows an international shutdown, but the characters in the novel have no such knowledge.

“He’s thinking of the M151 spotter scope, and how he didn’t explain its purpose because what he was writing was only for himself. No one else would ever read it.”

Here Billy contemplates the role of the reader and wonders if he would have written differently if he had known he would have an audience. He is fixated on the idea that the M151 spotter scope will create a barrier to the reader’s understanding, but Alice doesn’t even notice it. This is one example of several in which the interaction of reader and writer is made visible, inviting the reader (including the one reading King’s novel) to feel more conscious of their own activity.

“‘Maybe it’s a bad idea.’

It might be, but Billy means to go through with it anyway, if he can. Those men owe.”

The metaphor of “owing” appears throughout Billy Summers. It is an image reminiscent of the traditional depiction of justice as blindfolded and holding a scale. Billy is frequently placed—or places himself—in the role of debt collector, balancing the books of people who are in moral debt by exacting punishment. It is telling that the novel is full of images of debt collection and gambling.

“He crooks his little finger as he sometimes did with Shan and often did with Cathy.”

Throughout the novel, characters double each other. Here Billy’s relationships with Shan, Cathy, and Alice dovetail, drawing attention to these wider echoes and resemblances. Such parallels highlight the fluidity of identity, which even slips from person to person.