Let King Snipe Your Mind

STEPHEN KING — BILLY SUMMERS — 2021

You will of course recognize some of the references to or recollections of other works by Stephen King. The most important one is probably The Shining since in the mountain-refuge the story comes to Bill and Alice can go on a short walk and come to a bluff overlooking a valley and on the other side they can see the place where The Overlook hotel used to be, a hotel that burned down to the ground in the old novel, or at least we can assume it did, and a painting of some the hedge or garden animals carved in some evergreens are represented in that refuge, in the outer summer-lodge, as a framed picture, and this painting seems of course haunted with a lion that seems to be advancing. That’s the only surreal or supernatural element in this novel that is, in fact, a story that wants to be extremely realistic.

The second element is the fact that Billy Summers is a veteran of the war in Iraq where he was a sniper. And this veteran is cast into the character of a writer in order to be, in due time, the shooter who will kill some other hitman for a serious amount of money. The novel here contains a detailed description of his mission or missions in Iraq and what came afterward, how he became a hitman for some criminals. He pretends he only shoots bad people, but that does not change the fact he is a hitman and as such has no ethical dimension at all. He has no reason to take justice in his own hands, even if in Iraq he just did that in his uniform, with many others as if it were teamwork — though it is purely colonial imperialism — under the US flag and the authority of the Commander in Chief.

The war in Iraq was a mistake and a catastrophe and a complete defeat. The book was written in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, and before the escape from Afghanistan in 2021, a debacle, a complete defeat since those they ousted came back into power even before the US troops and other personnel were out. The story about Iraq is that of a brutal, totally unjustified and unjustifiable invasion, with daily actions that were resented as imperialistic and traumatic systematic mass killings. It is summarized in one word, lalafallujah, from the Fallujah neighborhood in Baghdad the Americans literally destroyed, and this lalafallujah is set in parallel with LA-LA-Los Angeles, and thus, is just…