The Mad Islands - Louis MacNeice

 The Mad Islands is a radio play from 1962.   It is a fantasy derived from tropes of Irish mythoogy, with echoes of St Brendan and Hy-Brazil (spiced with a healthy borrowing from Hamlet).   Muldoon is off on a quest to find and kill the man, the Lord of Eskers, who killed his father.   His crew is a motley group led by the professional seafarer Ursach but including a jester and Muldoon's foster-brother.   They are soon joined and assisted by a being half-woman, half-seal and absolutely perfect for radio, called Skerrie.  Skerrie acts as their guide around the various islands, all of which are inhabited or ruled by people who are mad one way or another.   The hermit on his rock is religiously mad.  Sisters Branwen and Olwen are mad about their cats and even madder about the possibility of men.   The Miller of Hell is omnipresent.   It's all light and fantastical until the twist at the end, which is eminently satisfying.   Not up there with MacNeice's finest - The Dark Tower and Person From Porlock - but close enough.

Billy Summers - Stephen King

 

The latest King novel, Billy Summers is the story of a former US army sniper turned high-price, high-principle hitman.  Billy only kills bad men.  In this instance, he is promised a huge amount of money - enough to retire on - to terminate a lowlife killer who kills a man who beat him at poker and attacks a woman who brushes off his advances.  It seems a lot of money for a lowlife who's likely to get the needle anyway, but a lot of the cash is to cover Billy going undercover in the hick town, potentially for months, whilst the victim's lawyers argue against his extradition to a death-penalty state.

Billy always figures that these waters are deeper than they seem.  Billy likes to seem dumber than he really is.  It's part of his self-preservation routine.  He takes precautions, which get compromised when he settles into his fake life a little too well.  So he carries out the hit and disappears.  The promised payment doesn't arrive.  Billy has been stiffed.  That is unacceptable.

The rest of the novel is Billy's quest for settlement.  He has a young woman, Alice, alongside, whom he rescued from the street after she had been gang-raped.  Gang rape is also unacceptable and a price has to be paid.  All through the book we get Billy's back story: how he became a killer, then a sniper.  We also get a powerful reprise of The Shining when Billy and Alice are in Colorado, preparing the final act, but that is the only hint of the supernatural in Billy Summers.  In that sense it follows Mr Mercedes and the Bill Hodges trilogy.  In a sense we also get the gunslinger of The Dark Tower.  A lot of King tropes, then, which only enrich the story.  It is a beautiful book, as good as anything King has written, not a single bum note that I could see.  A consummate treat from a living, thriving master.