I mean, you quoted yourself in there, too, right? Billy hears an interview with a writer where he talks about writing one draft for himself and one for the public. It’s a doorway into your own feelings and your own view of the world. You don’t have to be a professional writer to know that that’s the case sometimes. There are books that I’ve written where writing is seen as sort of a toxic thing, and there are only a couple, Misery is one, and Billy Summers is another, where it talks about writing as salvation. I didn’t really know that there was going to be so much about writing in this book. John Le Carre wrote about spies all the time because he knew that world. If you read Dick Francis, every book that he wrote was about horses and jockeys, because that’s what he knew he was a jockey. I’m wondering how you’re feeling about writing these days - and how that’s changed over the years? From Jack Torrance to Paul Sheldon in Misery to this book, with Billy and Alice. You have so many writer characters in your books. Constant readers will appreciate that - spoiler - Summers finishes his book posted up in Colorado across from the ruins of the Overlook Hotel, of The Shining fame, where protagonist/antagonist Jack Torrance wrote himself into madness. After pretending to be a writer for a few days while casing the courthouse, Summers begins penning the story of his tumultuous background, his time as a Marine during the Iraq war, and how he got into his line of work.Įven after the job inevitably goes wrong - and he teams up with a college student he saved after she’s raped and left in the street - Summers continues to write, eventually passing the mantle on to the student, Alice. The bosses set him up in a modest high-rise across from the court where his fellow hired gun will be making an appearance after being extradited on a murder charge. We find him accepting his final job at the start of the book, killing another hitman, entering deep-cover as a novelist looking for a bit of quiet in a small city. The titular character, a hitman who only kills “bad people,” is an avid reader who often plays dumb to lull his bosses into a false sense of security. King has a long history of writing books with plots about writing or starring writers, and, despite being essentially a rip-roaring heist novel, Billy Summers is no different. And little by little, the story started to spin out from that.” “I started to ask myself, ‘How is he going to do that?’ And I put myself to sleep, many a night, thinking about different possibilities, different ways that that might work.

“I started to think about this problem, of a who had to take a shot and get away from the fifth floor, or the high floor, of a building,” he tells Rolling Stone. Stephen King lit upon the idea for his new book, Billy Summers, while telling himself bedtime stories.

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