Stephen King will never be done with Holly Gibney

The character, who's appeared in 11 King stories, represents one of the most unusual developments in his work.

By Zack Handlen | October 31, 2025 | 9:00am

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Stephen King will never be done with Holly Gibney

Last May, Stephen King released Never Flinch, a crime thriller featuring private investigator Holly Gibney. Holly first appeared as a secondary character in Mr. Mercedes; since her introduction, she’s become a clear favorite of the novelist’s, appearing in 11 different novels and novellas. Much of the last decade or so of King’s career has been unusual, as the writer has focused more and more on crime thrillers over his usual supernatural fare (while not forgetting the latter entirely), but Holly is the strangest development of all. In a bibliography that largely eschews both sequels and recurring protagonists, Ms. Gibney is an exception to the rule whose existence suggests something more than just a fondness for clever ladies with bad nerves.

To understand Holly’s importance, it’s useful to go all the way back to the beginning with Carrie, King’s long-form debut. By now, the story of an abused teen who gets violent revenge on her peers one fateful prom night is a familiar one, thanks to multiple film and television adaptations. But the original novel remains strong, if a little stiff, thanks in no small part to the empathy readers’ feel for Carrie’s plight. She is, in her small way, emblematic of millions of small town girls whose shyness and struggles with socialization made her an easy target for teens eager to prove themselves part of the herd.

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What’s odd, then, is King’s revelation in On Writing that, while he pitied Carrie White, he believes he never truly understood her. On revisiting the novel, it’s possible to see what he means; while Carrie is portrayed sympathetically, there’s a distance between her and the third-person omniscient narrator, a kind of kid glove approach that’s not present with the other characters. Take Carrie’s mother, Margaret: a towering, abusive monster, a religious zealot whose excesses would border on camp were she not such a direct physical threat. When King writes through her eyes, the gloves are gone—there’s no sympathy for Margaret’s excess, but the writer clearly enjoys the over-the-top intensity of her vision.

Going forward, this distinction would become more clear. King’s “normal” women protagonists (think Sue Snell in Carrie; Susan Norton in ‘Salem’s Lot; Wendy Torrance in The Shining, etc) all tend to be normal in a very narrow, specific way—Sue’s big concern in Carrie is whether or not her boyfriend got her pregnant, and while Wendy Torrance has the distinction of being abused, there’s not a whole lot about her beyond that.

Maybe the best example of this is Donna Trent in Cujo, a housewife whose frustration and boredom at finding herself stuck in a small town leads to an affair. Donna is sympathetic and well-drawn throughout, but it sometimes feels like every female protagonist King wrote in this period is just iterating on what King imagines the struggles of “being female” to be. He’s an empathic writer, so those struggles don’t come across as shallow, but they can be a little distant, someone in a strange land doing their best to describe the geography for the fellas back home.

If you want to find the female characters that King truly enjoys sinking his, uh, typewriter into, you need to focus on the antagonists. Margaret White was the first, but hardly the last, of this particular brand of monster; the best example is likely Annie Wilkes from Misery. Wilkes, the self-professed “Number One Fan” of the novel’s hero-writer Paul Sheldon, is a manic depressive psychopath, a serial killer who despises naughty language and rants about “Do bees” and various other childlike obsessions.

Misery is one of King’s best novels, and Annie is a force to be reckoned with throughout. She’s terrifying thanks to King’s understanding of the dynamics of abuse (irrational demands, sudden mood shifts, excessive punishment, and victim blaming), but as bleak as Paul’s situation often is, there’s a vitality to Annie that makes her impossible to look away from even when she isn’t brandishing an axe. Again in On Writing, King talks about how much fun he had writing scenes from Annie’s perspective, getting to wallow in her idiosyncrasies and play with her fixations before shifting back to poor, suffering Paul.

This engagement is evident whenever King writes villainous, or just deeply disturbed, characters, but the change is most marked when comparing the aforementioned “normal” women in his books to the crazies. A deep dive into King’s bibliography reveals a persistent theme of mothers who are troubled at best, outright abusive at worst; there are plenty of bad parents, to be sure, but for whatever reason, the moms have a certain distinctive specificity to them, a specificity that’s often absent from the more overtly heroic female characters, but one that’s always present in outright threats like Annie.

It would be unwise, and maybe even rude, to try and speculate what this means for King personally, if it means anything at all. Better to focus on what a longtime reader of King like myself takes away from all of this: a sense that some idea is being worked through over decades of writing, with each iteration appearing slightly different from the last. An evolution, you could say, but only in the loosest, messiest sense of the term, a line that leads from Margaret White to the mad prophet of The Mist to Annie Wilkes, to the more grounded but still disturbing behavior of Liz Garfield in Low Men In Yellow Coats, all the way to Holly Gibney.

The comparison might seem strange at first—Holly is very much not a mother, and there’s nothing whatsoever villainous or cruel about her. She is, in fact, a victim of abuse herself, from domineering parental figures who tried to force her to behave up to society’s expectations of what a young woman should be. One of the pleasures of reading King’s Hodges trilogy (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End Of Watch) is following Holly’s growth from a shy, self-loathing nobody into a determined investigator and deeply empathetic human being. That sounds considerably different from, say, Margaret White ranting about dirty pillows.

Yet the connection is there. Holly is, according to King, “an obsessive compulsive with a huge inferiority complex,” and much of her dialogue—her fixation on certain cutesy terms, her primness–could easily have come out of Annie Wilkes’s mouth, albeit if the latter had been properly medicated and received decades of therapy. And while Holly herself is not a mother, her relationship with some of the other ancillary characters in the Hodges-verse shows a concern and care that is often absent from King’s actual maternal figures. She’s more than willing to sacrifice herself to save those around her, and her determination to do the right thing even if it puts herself (or her mental well-being) at risk is laudatory.

Again, this isn’t an attempt to apply Freudian analysis or anything like it to Stephen King the human being. It’s more a lens by which to view Holly’s persistence in this period of King’s work, a way to understand, and even appreciate, why the author would become so enamored of his own fictional creation. There’s no element of sexual infatuation when it comes to King’s writing about Holly (whose own sexuality is rarely if ever mentioned). It’s more the work of a writer who has finally found a better answer to a question he’s been asking for most of his career. There have been textured, well-crafted women in King’s work before Holly, but with Gibney, there’s a kind of delight in realizing, even after everything he’s written, there are still new concepts to discover. The character may not appeal to everyone, but her author’s enthusiasm for her, and the way that enthusiasm feels almost like an exorcism, is hard to resist.