His tastes may be highbrow (and staunchly realist), but the story he finds himself caught up in is very much - and very explicitly - a genre piece.

For much of the book, when he isn’t shooting people or writing about them, Billy is immersed in “Thérèse Raquin.” Among the authors name-checked in its spacious narrative are Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, Faulkner, Tim O’Brien, Cormac McCarthy and Robert Stone, along with Billy’s own favorites, Thomas Hardy and Émile Zola. They aren’t necessarily the ones you would expect - no mention of Poe or Lovecraft or Shirley Jackson (acknowledged influences) - but at some level “Billy Summers” is clearly the work of a writer in retrospective mood: taking stock, paying his dues. King’s fans will recognize the leafy animals from “The Shining,” and it turns out the cabin stands across the valley from the ruins of that novel’s infamous hotel, the Overlook, where, as the cabin’s owner tells Billy, “bad stuff happened.” It’s a nicely ironic piece of self-reference: Unlike that demon-haunted story about a writer-turned-killer, this tale of a killer-turned-writer is haunted only by books - King’s own, but a mass of others too. It doesn’t lead to anything: Shrugging off the pictorial shape-shifting, Billy turns the painting toward the wall of the cabin where he’s working on a memoir, and gets back to his blood-drenched memories of Falluja, where he served as a sniper in the Marines. Apart from the university courses, she also took part-time courses which included creative writing.The sole hint of supernatural activity in Stephen King’s new novel comes well over halfway through, when its protagonist, a hired killer and aspiring writer named Billy Summers, notices some weird goings-on in a painting of topiary animals. She co-founded the coeducation eating clubs and led a campus-wide campaign so that the schools all-male eating clubs would also accept the female participants and members. As early as age two, she had started displaying signs of being a smart kid.įrom 1987 to 1991 she attended Princeton University where she majored in English while her minors were in rabble-rousing. She was born on an army base that was in DeRidder, Louisiana. Jennifer Weiner was born on March 22 in 1970.

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