The Basic Book Bitches

Review by Emily

I went into this book knowing little about it other than it was the latest Stephen King book and it featured Holly Gibney. The last King book I read was “Fairytale” and it was an amazing book and one of the better of his more recent releases.

I won’t beat a dead horse here. Either you thought this book was amazing or you hated it. I personally do not read Stephen King to hear about his political opinions, regardless of whether I agree or disagree with them. If you’re interested in hearing about that check out some other reviews!

That being said there were a few things I did not like with this book. King’s writing of African American characters feels outdated and awkward to me. Likewise, the younger people in his novels are pretty unbelievable as well. Sometimes I feel like he’s locked himself in his home with his wife and hasn’t had contact with anyone outside of his family in a long while.

This book follows Holly as she struggles through the grief of losing her mom and simultaneously picks up a missing persons case at her PI firm against the advice of her friends and colleague. The case is that of a local woman, Bonnie, who works at the community college library as an assistant librarian. Holly eventually discovers that Bonnie isn’t the only missing person and fears she has a serial killer on her hands.
Emily and Rodney Harris are elderly retired college professors who developed a taste for human flesh. They believe eating a freshly murdered person will help prevent their aging and keep them healthy. Eventually, the Harris’s realize Holly is onto them and that’s when things get interesting.

Meanwhile, Holly’s helpful friend and occasional assistant Barbara, has befriended a local poet, Olivia, who is mentoring her and helping her work on her own poetry. This was one of my favorite relationships/plots in the book and the character of Olivia was amazingly well written.

Overall the mystery of this novel was there for me, but some of the other aspects fell flat. It was not the novel I expected from King. This won’t keep me from reading his future releases, but this one was not my cup of tea.