53 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen KingBilly Summers
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Billy Summers
Content Warning: This section references child abuse and sexual violence.
Billy Summers is a 44-year-old hired killer and veteran of the Iraq War, in which he was a Marine sniper. He is in Red Bluff, a southern town, to do “one last job” for Nick Majarian, a man he has worked for in the past. Billy is an avid reader and an autodidact, but he hides his intelligence behind his professional persona—his “dumb self.” In this novel, he goes by the aliases David Lockridge (a writer) and Dalton Smith (an IT worker). He has many other identities including “Thomas Hardy,” in whose name he holds credit cards because Hardy is his favorite writer.
Billy grew up in a trailer park with a single mother who had a series of boyfriends, one of whom was violent and beat her and her children. Eventually, provoked by some burned cookies, he murdered Billy’s younger sister. Billy shot him dead in self-defense, and this event became a turning point in his life. He ended up in foster care when his mother descended into alcohol addiction, and he stayed there when she became dependent on meth. He joined the marines and later became an assassin, but he has a strict moral code; he only kills “bad guys” like the man who killed his sister. His final kill, with the help of Alice Maxwell, is Roger Klerke, a pedophile media mogul. Immediately after this kill, he is fatally wounded by the mother of Frankie, an employee of Nick Majarian’s who was left with severe brain damage after Billy’s attack on Nick’s mansion.
Alice Maxwell
Alice Maxwell is a young woman who is gang raped and then dumped outside Billy Summer’s apartment. Billy takes her in to protect himself from discovery by police investigating her attack. She is a 21-year-old business student at a local college and works part-time as a barista, which is how she met one of her attackers. She and Billy grow close and she becomes a double for his lost sister: “He doesn’t need a psychiatrist to tell him what she means to him; she’s a version of Cathy only grown up” (286). Alice helps Billy track down the man who ordered the murder of Joel Allen and Billy himself: Roger Klerke. When they confront Klerke regarding his child abuse, it is Alice who pulls the trigger and kills him.
Alice ends the novel having completed Billy’s story following his death and resolved to become a writer in her own right; this suggests a determination to write her own “story” going forward, seizing back control after her experience of victimization. She has adopted the identity of Elizabeth Anderson, which Bucky Hanson arranged for her. The last lines of the novel center on Alice’s journey: “Billy gave her that chance. She is here. She is found.” This echoes the book’s epigraph from “Amazing Grace”: “I once was lost, but now am found.” That the book begins and ends with Alice’s story suggests that she functions as a shadow protagonist.
Bucky Hanson
Bucky Hanson—real name Elmer Randolph Hanson—is a New York-based broker who arranges Billy Summers’s jobs as a hired killer and manages his financial affairs. He is good with computers and can create new identities for his clients; he helped Billy to create the “clean” persona of Dalton Smith, which Billy intends to use in his retirement. They have worked together for many years, but while their relationship is trusting, it has not been intimate. Billy only learns that Bucky is twice divorced when he asks Bucky if he has any fears for relatives being questioned about his whereabouts. Bucky leaves New York for Sidewinder, Colorado, where Alice and Billy join him. Here he goes by a version of his real name, Elmer Randolph, and claims to prefer the lifestyle that, in Billy’s view, makes him his “better self.”
Nick Majarian
Nick Majarian is a wealthy criminal and casino owner based in Las Vegas. He is a middleman who hired Billy on behalf of Roger Klerke, ultimately double-crossing Billy at Klerke’s request and ordering his murder. Nick “likes to live it large” (4), and Billy finds him charming despite his questionable morals. Nick is hospitable and throws a dinner in his expensive rented home in Red Bluff to which Billy is invited. When Billy arrives at the Promontory Point estate, Nick attempts to defuse the situation with “his old lord of the manor bonhomie” (347). Once Billy has confronted Nick, he agrees to do the “honorable” thing, call off the manhunt, and pay Billy what he is owed. With his righthand man Georgie, he helps Billy reach Klerke.
Roger Klerke
Roger Klerke is a rich and powerful media mogul who orders the assassination of Joel Allen. Allen was a hired killer who Klerke had paid to kill his son Patrick, who was blackmailing Klerke with evidence that he had raped a little girl in Mexico. Allen discovered this information and was attempting to use it in a plea deal in a first-degree murder case. Klerke appears in person only once in the novel, when he is shot and killed by Alice. Throughout the novel he is a shadowy figure who is represented by agents who, like Nick Majarian, are less unambiguously evil than Klerke. His absence allows him to embody the role of “badness” in the book, which can then be defeated at the end.
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