Never Flinch

Stephen King

Reading a Stephen King book the past few years is like seeing an aging music legend in concert. Some nights, they play all your favorite songs and hit every note perfectly. Other nights, they play strange album cuts only they like while missing the high notes and playing the chords wrong. Never Flinch falls into the second category. It’s just bad and disappointing and not worth the price of entry. 

The book has three story lines it wants to weave together. One is about a religious extremist stalking a feminist speaker on her national speaking tour. A second is about a man becoming a serial killer to, in some way, avenge a miscarriage of justice. The final one is a returning character falling under the wing of an older soul singer staging a comeback tour. These all meet at the end of the book, but it takes some real acts of contortion to get them there.

Moving back and forth across all the plot lines is King’s returning sleuth, Holly Gibney. I’m a fan of the character and was really looking forward to seeing her in action again. After this outing, I think I’d prefer to see her retired from his work. While King can write Gibney with some skill, he has grown woefully terrible at writing any character under the age of forty. The dialogue literally made me cringe in places, and it shows that he isn’t getting seriously edited anymore, or that the work is being done by a person with the same tin ear.

The end result here is less thrills and chills and more awkward cozy mystery. For a King novel, it surprisingly lacks any teeth. In recent years he has released some good books, so there’s always hope for whatever he decides to drop next year. Two outta five stars.