Never Flinch: A Review

Author’s Note: Any time I review a book, I feel that the author might just come across my work in a preliminary search of “what the critics are saying”. If this is the case and Stephen King reads this article, I always like to make sure he knows that I’d read stereo instructions or biomedical information from a pharmaceutical company if he wrote them. While I might be overly critical of Never Flinch in this essay, as an unpublished writer myself, I’ve got no stones to throw. The following is an exercise in literary criticism more than anything else. 

I like reviewing Stephen King books, as it accomplishes two things. It challenges me to write criticism, and it gives me an excuse to burn through his latest novel. Both reward me, if I'm lucky. Sometimes, though, I read a book that doesn't sit right, or feels a little out of tune. Like anyone who knows the notes, can tell when something is off. Stephen King is a national treasure, and we must revere him as such. Though it hurts my heart to say it, his latest book, Never Flinch, was just very okay. As I progressed through the novel, I had the very serious feeling that our Stephen might be losing a step or two. As one of his Constant Readers, it may be that I've been spoiled by so many years of stellar production. Everything he has written for the last two decades or so has been very good. That wasn’t always the case.

In the mid-nineties, King went through a very hard time personally, and his work reflects this fact. He wrote three books (at least) in that period that were dingers. Desperation, Cell, and The Regulators were books that I came back to after a significant hiatus from reading his works, and I felt as though we had lost a genius prematurely. The Master of Horror turned it around, though, and put out some real walk-off home runs after that. The story of his decline is now well-known and extant.

I’ve read almost everything the week it comes out for years, so I read Never Flinch almost as soon as it hit the newsstands. I had high hopes, and honestly, the book wants to be as good a novel as the books that have come before. It wants to be compelling, and it even starts, as one friend put it, with an intriguing premise. By comparison with his last few books, though, it just feels like a rickety puddle jumper rather than his usual F-18. Understand, these are King characters, King ideas and plot lines, even King storytelling, which far surpass others in his field, but I never felt Never Flinch achieves its potential as I had hoped it would, and that feels like a let down.

The story, like so many of King's novels, involves a host of characters, good and bad, all doing different things in different places. At the foundation of Never Flinch, though, is the familiar and now beloved Holly Gibney. Holly is, as King has admitted, one of his favorite all-time characters, which is saying something, based on the entirety of his pantheon.

Holly first appeared in the book Mr. Mercedes, which I have touched on before. In that book, the timid and traumatized wunderkind helps Detective Bill Hodges find a psycho called Brady Hartsfield who is committing mass killings in Buckeye City, Ohio. Holly continues to grow in the two subsequent books of the trilogy, Finders Keepers and End of Watch, then shows up in The Outsider, If It Bleeds, and most recently in her eponymous title, Holly. Never Flinch is Holly's seventh book, and like King has said, she is compelling and fun to read, and unlike any crime fighter in modern fiction.

The latest book finds Holly as the head of the Finders Keepers private detective agency, with the help of Jerome Robinson, another character from the Bill Hodges novels. When a man falsely convicted of possession of material exploitative of children is stabbed to death in prison, a mysterious note appears threatening the deaths of 12 innocents and one guilty person as a means of regaining justice for the murdered man. The note is signed by Bill Wilson.

Immediately, Detective Izzy Jaynes, now a friend of Holly's, is on the case, but soon the bodies start piling up. The only hint is that the name signed on the note refers to Alcoholics Anonymous, which leads Izzy to call Holly to lend her brilliant mind and unique detection skills to the mystery. 

Then the story goes through mitosis and splits into a secondary plot line where Holly winds up on her own adventure, as a bodyguard for a firebrand feminist polemicist called Kate McKay who is on tour through the heartland of the country. McKay and her assistant are being stalked, threatened and attacked by a different but no less dangerous crazy person. Holly heads off to help McKay, while also helping Izzy to discover who Bill Wilson really is before he can murder again.

Another subplot arrives as Barbara Robinson, now a published poet, is invited to sing one of her poems with a mainstream gospel artist called Sista Bessy in Buckeye City. When McKay's venue in the city is bumped to the day before in deference to Sista Bessy, tensions rise, as once again, the city's park and auditorium complex becomes the focal point of the mad men (or women?) looking to gain vengeance with their nefarious plans.

As usual, King's bad guys are fantastically well drawn. Trig, the murderer using Bill Wilson as a pseudonym, is slowly understanding his descent into madness, even though his carefully maintained professional exterior fools everyone for far too long. His internal dialogue, replete with A.A. aphorisms, adds depth to an otherwise one-dimensional baddie who understands at last that murdering people is equally addictive as drugs or alcohol.

Meanwhile, the other bad guy, a child of the militant religious anti-abortion ideology, has been promising worse harm to McKay and her assistant, Corrie. As the plot advances, the main park in Buckeye City, Ohio, the fictional “Second Mistake on the Lake” becomes the setting for a double-edged climax, as the unknowing citizens, lining up for a strife-filled charity softball game between the city police and firefighters, are moments from a nightmare calamity spurred on by unbridled madness and hatred.

King definitely manages the cast of characters well and adds some of his storytelling magic to liven up the terror. The book is not supernatural (although Holly has certainly faced those kinds of monsters before), but there is an aspect of spine-tingling to it that makes it enjoyable. Like in most of his strictly crime novels, though, King cannot help but reference both the previous real monsters, or hints at his larger universe.

Another writer friend made the point to me that, in the same way that some famous actors want to be rock stars so badly they can taste it, King wants to be a crime novelist, despite his main superpower being the King of Horror. After reading Never Flinch, it has never been more clear how much King admires Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, maybe Elmore Leonard.

Where the book falters is its lack of real oomph. By the middle of the story, as the two plots are converging, the pressure doesn't seem to be adequate to provide the seething tension typical of his usual crime thrillers. Even the characters seem half-hearted, hesitant, doubtful, ambivalent, unnecessarily reflective. Trig acknowledges to himself in a tepid way that he is a serial killer and the bifurcated religious maniac went from compelling to bland. King has some of the most terrifyingly scary bad guys in modern literature, several of whom, like Chet Ondowski, The Outsider, Holly has faced and defeated. By the time everything's coming together at the end of the novel, the story feels wobbly, half-hearted. It never loses its readability, it just seems to fall flat—which for a King novel is saying something. 

After the main events of the novel reach their understated climax, King does a quick hot wash, rounding off and tying up the remaining loose ends, with a hint for another novel coming. Mostly, though, I felt like Never Flinch didn't know what it wanted to do and it left enough of the story unresolved to feel incomplete, sort of truncated.

After the audio version of the book (which was incredibly well-performed by Jessie Mueller) a self-recorded message from Steve to his Constant Readers gives some background notes to what even he acknowledges was a rough one.

After giving his wife, novelist Tabitha King, a draft of the manuscript, she handed it back and told King, “You can do better”. That gave him a smart lash, he admits. But it didn't help that as he was putting down the framework of the story, he was undergoing hip surgery. The surgery and the recuperation process took it out of him and the book suffers as a result. We cannot blame him, mortal that he is, even though his normal output is usually divine.

It is nevertheless a good read and miles better than the next-in-line crime authors one can find scrawling fiction today. King is still a master, he just didn't quite get all of this one. I hope he will keep swinging for the fences in coming years.

One thing that I feel redeems this book and makes me hopeful for the future is Holly Gibney. Holly has finally come into her own. From the small, terrified, bullied, and brow-beaten woman that Bill Hodges first takes under his wing, Holly has spent the interim novels figuring out who she is. Well, she has now arrived. After facing the “It baby” in The Outsider, battling a lesser “It baby” in If It Bleeds, and finally learning how to be fearless as she fights cannibalistic oldsters killing and eating young people in Holly, she is now at her full power and is more formidable than anyone reading Mr. Mercedes could have dreamed.

This most recent book proves that she is now one of King's most considerable characters, up there with Roland Deschain, Danny Torrence, and Andy Dufresne, full of untapped skill and potential. The way she fearlessly faces a bat-swinging would-be attacker in defense of Kate McKay proves that she is now really ready to face something truly terrifying that only King could think of in his next book featuring Holly. I sure can’t wait for that.

If nothing else, Never Flinch makes a good beach read, especially if you don't want to deal with supernatural monsters but are okay with the natural ones. If there is one thing that King's novels prove time and again, he has a unique perspective and a keen ability to make sure we never forget that the real monsters are really within us. That skill remains undimmed. 

I highly recommend Never Flinch because even his less-than-perfect work is fantastic compared to other writers, and if, like me, you're invested in Holly Gibney, then you have to make sure you've read the entire Holly series.