Food for thought

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/10/2023 (733 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Have you ever suspected that old people are secretly evil?

Like, really evil? Eat people evil?

If so, you’d best keep your suspicions to yourself or you’ll be targeted for silence and a whole slew of icebox dinners portioned for two by a pair of the most learned cannibals you’d ever want to not meet.

Stephen King’s latest opus Holly addresses the subject matter pretty early on — it’s a pretty important icky factor for readers.

The villains (pause for suspense) eat certain parts of young healthy humans in certain total-grossout ways.

We’ll wait while you decide whether to continue.

Repugnant professors at a smaller Ohio college somewhere near Cleveland, Rodney and Emma Harris — he in science, she in American lit — believe they’ve reversed a few years’ worth of the aging process, which has given Emma sciatica and has Rodney hovering on dementia, among many other aches and pains and gripes.

How old are they? So old that a female professor took her husband’s last name. So old that they remember exactly why America needs Richard Nixon now.

They’d been getting three years of varying regression for every victim, but now the effects are wearing off way too fast. Time to step up, which involves ever-riskier kidnapping, and a DIY dungeon, and — no, if you want to know, read the book.

The Holly of the title is Holly Gibney, a 55-year-old autistic woman who’s become a private eye after featuring in three previous King novels, Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers and End of Watch.

Really sharp, backed by loyal friends from those three books, Holly gets hired to find a missing young woman who disappeared on her way home from the university library without a trace, leaving behind only her bicycle.

Holly sleuths out a hint here, a tiny clue there, that other young women and men may have disappeared over the past decade, maybe just runaways, maybe victims. But of whom? Or what?

Missing people who aren’t going to be missed all that much, or whose loved ones don’t register on the scale of folks about whom anyone much cares in contemporary America, thinks Holly.

It’s difficult to conclude precisely where King is going with Holly the book, and that’s its weakness.

There are parts which are darkly humourous. There are parts in which King decries the lunacy of Trump supporters, especially the self-destructiveness of their anti-vax campaigns and open racism. King lampoons the competitiveness and jealousy within tight-budget university faculties, the professorial arrogance and even hatred toward those who are quietly better.

There is genuine horror when some of the innocent young victims realize they’re not getting out alive, and suddenly fully understand what will happen to them — though King pulls his punches and doesn’t go where someone intent on completely disgusting his horrified readers would have gone.

No supernatural critters this time, no aliens, no creepy-crawlies slithering between dimensions. King has occasionally used human monsters throughout his dozens of books, including some of the best in Misery and Dolores Claiborne.

He always uses his stories to surreptitiously point readers to lesser-known authors he thinks they should be reading. Herein, poetry is a major plot device — try not to look up the poetry of one of the poets whose works become a smooth King segue. The poem about a tail gunner. It’s quite good.

It’s not going to be in King’s top 10, but Holly gets darned exciting, and Holly Gibney the sleuth is one of the enduring and endearing characters in King’s universe.

Go into Holly warned of what awaits.

And that old couple down the street, the pair that sometimes seem just a tad sprier than you recently remember — beware.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin says he’s been feeling better than his 75 years since he’s been eating liver and other non-traditional organs. Beef, he insists, all beef. Organically raised, but beef. Seriously, beef.