Holly: A Review

 

Steve paced the halls of his mansion, hands bunched behind his back.

That’s how you could tell he was giving this new book a lot of thought. Pacing back and forth. It’s the sort of mannerism that really makes a character, and by happenstance he had a character on his mind.

Had Steve intended Holly Gibney to be his most popular character ever? He had not. Was he going to give the fans what they wanted? He was.

Holly, though, Steve thought as he paced pacingly. He cracked open a diet RC Cola and a packet of Smokehouse Almonds. Boy, I might have pooped the bed on that one. When Joe texted me what a ‘Karen’ was, I thought I might be fracked. But Jack and Jill Six-Pack just love her. What’s a woke millionaire to do? Fan service would be risky business this time around. The danger zone. Threading the needle. Other cliches.

Step one, Steve decided, pacing to his Arne Jacobsen writing desk, should be to demonstrate what he cared about. For the purposes of this book, that would be progressive Democratic politics. The President Drumpf type, you know? Just dumb as a sack of shit. Woke but not too woke. A smile spread across Steve’s strangely Grinch-like features.

Steve had an idea. An awful idea. Steve had a wonderful, awful idea. COVID-19! Donald Trump! Now that’s the way to separate the heroes from the villains, he realized. Black hats and white hats were sort of his thing, after all: none of that poopy ambiguity stuff. This whole ‘fuck the police’ thing, for example? He didn’t get it.

“In fact,” Steve wrote later that day in his secret journal (which is where bad people write secret, bad things), “I can’t seem to stop equivocating on the cops. I built the character of Holly Gibney around police tropes, and suddenly the boys in blue gunning down the bad guys is a problem? Boy, do times change fast! Good thing I’m so fracking nimble!”

Steve paced back to his desk. There, he fictionally murdered an innocent Black man in an off-POV traffic stop. This provides one of the good, now ex-cops surrounding Holly the opportunity to make the remarkable statement that "policing has changed for the worse and I'm glad I'm not in it any more." That's it - the cops had never been aggressive, poopy frack-heads before, right? Like, say, throughout history? Good.

If poking at the trauma of killer cops provided a prop, well, it was for a good cause! And in the end, justice was served in the narrative; albeit a bit imperfectly. The cop who shot the innocent Black man doesn’t face charges, Steve wrote, but the killer cop does lose his job. "Oh," Steve wrote to himself on a Post-It brand note stuck to his corkboard, "and don't worry. The whole affair doesn't have to be germane to the plot in the least; mention it, if at all, in passing." 

He stroked his chin and squinted. That's how you knew that Steve was really grokking this, hepcats. Like how he learned the superfetch backfliptrip slang of Gen Brie (did he have that right?), and all. The chin-stroking was another mannerism. Steve looked at his efforts on the page so far. Preachy? Yessir. Full of weird, judgey-even-for-AA moralizing and outdated attitudes regarding drugs? You bet. Godblown with the hot 'n holy spirit of The Go(o)d? Checkaroonie. Full of virtue signals, hip, but still essentially conservative? Hmm, how to get that attitude to jibe with Twitter Steve. Maybe Holly wasn't quite workin'-man enough. After pacing at his Arhaus Malone pacing desk for a while, Steve was struck by inspiration.

Image courtesy DreadCentral

“My Faithful Readers love Netflix and Hulu!” Steve exclaimed aloud. “I love Netflix and Hulu (and the checks they send me)! That’s it!” He performed a small, peculiar dance of joy at his Bodil Kjaer dancing desk and got to work. Steve had found his link to common folk again; the brand names and TV shows that the rich and bored can sometimes mistake for real points of commonality (but not him, no siree Bill)! 

Burger King! Ozark! His fingers flitted like fluttering, febrile flies. A monster, maybe? Those It movies sure had him sweating to make Holly a little more horror. But what villain would serve? Steve went back to the same wellspring that so many horror writers plumb: “what am I afraid of?” Steve looked in his Baccarat looking mirror and realized the answer was as plain as his face – literally.

Old people, Steve wrote with chills coursing through his blood, are old and gross. They have failing bodies and they look different from young people and they’re often conservative (but not me)! Ha! FUCK the olds! The kids will love this, right? Tippity-tap, went Steve’s digits. Still, the characters felt wooden and the plot too simple, too sparse, and too chronologically widespread (to the point where, after publication, he would have to acknowledge a continuity error in his newly released book). Something was still absent. Holly’s Holly didn’t seem relatable at all to Steve. What was she missing?

The answer hit Steve’s brain like a dead walleye pike dropped from the roof of a four-story parking garage. For quite a while (at least since 2004’s The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah, if not before) Steve suspected that he was a god. Not a God like the one from AA that Steve (and Holly) incessantly pray to. Rather, a little-g god of his fictional universes. What was Holly Gibney missing – what would make her more relatable? And how to make that happen?

Easy! Steve reached into the narrative, a deus ex libro, if you will, and showered Holly with between six and nine million dollars! Readers **L-O-V-E** to see virtue rewarded and vice punished Plus, now he could relate to Holly. But what to do about Holly’s supporting cast of lovable, uncomplicated Black characters? The God of Derry and Castle Rock manifested his will again. You get half a million, he thought regarding one such character! And you get twenty-five grand and a publishing contract, he whispered to another! And you get…

Steve’s book sucked.

THE END