Billy Summers

Billy Summers is set in 2019 and is colored by the political and social contexts of that year—in particular, that Donald Trump was president of the United States and that COVID-19 was on the horizon. Like King’s other fiction, this novel ends with a note explaining when King wrote it: between June 12, 2019 and July 3, 2020, a period spanning the beginning of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

There are a small number of explicit nods to this brewing catastrophe. At one point, for example, the narrator notes that “[n]either of them knows—no one does—that a rogue virus is going to shut down America and most of the world in half a year, but by the fourth day in the basement, Billy and Alice are getting a preview of what sheltering in place will be like” (248). While brief allusions like this to the coming pandemic appear throughout the novel, the above quotation points to a general sense of claustrophobia that pervades the book and foreshadows the coming lockdowns.

Trump’s presidency is highly visible in this novel. One of Alice’s rapists has a “MAGA swagger” (270)—an allusion to Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan (“Make America Great Again”). Ken Hoff is presented as a small-time, less successful shadow of Trump—whom he supports—with plans for golf courses, real estate, and casinos. Billy calls him “a kind of Donald Trump Mini-Me” (39). Dalton Smith’s upstairs neighbor, Don Jenson, has racist anxieties about America’s future and is “totally down with that other Don, the one who sits in much grander digs at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He especially agrees with the other Don when it comes to the issue of immigration” (82).

Me Too is a movement against sexual abuse and sexual harassment. Though the phrase originated with activist Tarana Burke in 2006, it gained widespread recognition in 2017 with the hashtag #MeToo, which people used to share their experiences of sexual harassment and sexual abuse. In October 2017, following sexual abuse allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein, the movement began to spread on social media. American actress Alyssa Milano published a post on Twitter, writing: “If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.” Several high-profile responses followed, including from Ashley Judd, Gwyneth Paltrow, Uma Thurman, and Jennifer Lawrence. The scale of sexual abuse of women in the media and entertainment industries resulted in several high-profile men losing their positions. Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison for sex crimes in 2020.

This context informs Billy Summers’s plot of a media mogul, Roger Klerke, who sexually assaults women and girls with apparent impunity thanks to his wealth and social standing. Only a vigilante can administer “justice” because Klerke has manipulated due process and ruthlessly removed all threats. King directly references Harvey Weinstein when Billy thinks about what the consequences would have been for Klerke if Allen had exposed him: “[A] very rich man, initials RK, was probably going to spend the rest of his life in jail, possibly getting buggered by Harvey Weinstein” (367). The novel also references the movement directly: The “lady writer” Allen attacked is dismissed by Nick as a “Me Too chick” (7), a comment to which Billy pointedly “doesn’t reply.”

This social context is also implicit in the novel’s setting; for example, Billy sees bumper stickers reading, “OUR BODIES, OUR CHOICES” and “BELIEVE WOMEN” (79). Questions of consent and choice also inform his relationship with Alice, a young woman with whom he never has a sexual relationship and takes great care to protect. Considering whether to allow Alice to accompany him when he moves on Klerke, he realizes that it may not be for him to decide: “Then he thinks of what Alice has been through, and what Klerke has done to girls even younger than this one, and realizes it might not be his decision to make” (387). Me Too as a movement highlighted conversations about female agency and consent; this is evident in King’s handling of sexual violence and its consequences in Billy Summers.