Notes on Old Liberals, Covid Hysteria, and the Ruin of a Good Story

How Stephen King ruined his new novel and most interesting character because of his neurotic politics

I’ll just tell you my conclusion upfront: Holly was a terrible novel. It was made all the more dreadful because I have found the character of Holly Gibney fascinating since her introduction by King’s in his novel, Mr. Mercedes. My expectations were vibrating at the thought of whole novel dedicated to the development of this character. What I got instead was a character that served as an avatar of an old, rich, liberal neurotic with an angry twitter(X) feed. It was nutty old Stephen King wearing a bad Holly Gibney mask for over 400 pages.

If you’ve not kept up with Stephen King’s public pronouncements in recent years, consider yourself lucky. King’s twitter feed is fever swamp of MSNBC type political takes, relentless Trump derangement syndrome, and during the Covid pandemic, a gusher of vitriol directed against anyone, or any idea, that questioned the official government consensus that was billed as “TheScience™️.” King tweets in a manner indicating a blissful lack of awareness that many of the things asserted under the mantle of TheScience™️ during The Great Covid Ordeal have since been walked back, even by their most ardent purveyors.

King fancies himself a leftwing Twitter pundit of great depth and insight who relentlessly retweets/reposts the tweets (now, X posts) of the cognitively challenged President Biden, every kooky online Democrat out there, and all manner of popular lefty memes. He seems to compulsively post or repost any meme or story that is deleterious to Donald Trump. His feed looks like that of your crazy unhinged weed-smoking lefty uncle-who when gets a couple of glasses of Cupcake Chardonnay in him at Thanksgiving dinner-decides to let loose!!!

Now, there’s nothing wrong with being a politically liberal, Covid hysterical shit-poster on X per se. We all have our hobbies. It’s great fun and cathartic to bloviate away on behalf of your favorite causes and your public hatreds. However, when your politics and neuroses wreck a good story, a good character, and your brand as a top-notch story-teller, you’ve got a problem. Holly should’ve been a good character and a great story.

The novel is so bad that he tells you who the culprits are, and what they’re doing, right up front. You find out right away that two elderly academics are serial killers, drugging and kidnapping people, and imprisoning them in their basement. There is little suspense-very little-in finding out why it is they kill. And when you do, the feeling is throwaway: “Oh yeah, the husband is a lunatic nutritionist and they’re serial killers who eat their victims to ward off the pains of age”….but did you notice the “gullible bitch” who wasn’t wearing her mask to protect us from Covid? You may think I’m exaggerating here, but if you choose to suffer through the novel you’ll discover that I’m not.

The novel is not at all about the elderly academic serial killer cannibals but about Stephen King’s Covid madness. King really hates people who disagree with him about all things Covid. Using his main character, Holly Gibney, he projects his Covid hysteria mercilessly. The number of references to masks, on or off; to vaccinates, unvaccinated, and boosters; and to all the various protocols that did little to stop the spread of Covid 19 are grating and relentless. He even tries to jam in the Black Lives Matter stuff, totally gratuitously and completely unsuccessfully. To the extent that such references jar the reader and interrupt the flow of the story, it evokes the strangeness of that bizarre time. It also inadvertently suggests Covid Derangement Syndrome might be the real “Long Covid.” Now that could be a good horror story….that King couldn’t tell because he’s a true believer in both his fiction and in real life. He loves his Covid. After all, literalism is the death of a good story.

I have puzzled over the strange relationship between committed liberals and Covid. Everything liberals say about The Great Covid Ordeal indicates to me they really loved the Covid—the rules, the lockdowns, the masks, the command of the narrative, the totalizing force of it all. One of my rules of thumb when people obsess and become neurotic about something is that “the thing is not about the thing, it’s about the other thing.” When it comes to rich liberals and Covid I’m not completely sure what that other thing is, but I’ll take some guesses based on what I observed.

First, it must be acknowledged that rich liberals, and even non-affluent liberals, think not being liberal like them equals dumb. There’s a certain sense in which liberalism largely only still exists as a kind of etiquette of self-regard among those with cultural power. Leftist liberalism, along with its meth-headed progeny, “progressivism” is as prone to conspiracy theories, magical thinking, and massive policy failures as any found in the right-wing fever swamps. For example, Naomi Klein, the epitome of a progressive elite public intellectual, is currently plugging her new book “Doppelgänger” wherein she repeats the story of mass graves of indigenous children at residential schools run by the Catholic Church in Canada. That story has been thoroughly debunked. But she clings to it. Why? Because she likes that story. It suits her narrative of the world. A narrative she has successfully monetized.

Second, I think unhinged Lefties like King need certain stories to be true-at least morally true in their minds-to allay their insecurities about their place in the world. Lefties fancy themselves as the natural denizens of the “smart set.” Because of this self-regard, Covid posed a threat to them. It posed a threat in the sense that a virus which may have have been engineered by a fellow member of the smart set could damage the image of “progress.” Progress in the lefty mind is only supposed to deliver good things-not bad things-and certainly not death. Scientific progress that proves particularly deadly to the senior members of the smart set is bound to hurt someone’s feelings. It posed a threat to their standing because if the “smart set” unleashed, even accidentally, such ruin on the world, how smart could they really be? This very public conundrum broke the brains of many lefties and such a question must be suppressed.

Therefore, a two-fold maneuver was necessary. The first was to delegitimize any story that indicated that the virus might have been engineered and its release the product of a lab leak. For lefties TheScience™️ is the very essence of progress. Very quickly, all obvious evidence for a lab leak was covered in a great radiant arc of bullshit designed to make any questions about it sound like the plot of….an old Stephen King novel! Only crazy people and Trumpers (one and the same, of course) would suggest that a virus might have been engineered and leaked from a lab in China. Did I mention you were also a racist for even thinking that?

Unhinged Lefty progressives never want you to consider the horrors that “progress”, especially in its scientific form, often brings to the world. When you think about the live danger of the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, bioweapons, the cultural dysfunction and political polarization wrought by the internet and digital technologies, the permanent mutilation of children via “trans-affirming care”, to name only a few examples, it’s pretty clear that “progress” isn’t always progress.

The second maneuver was to double down on progress as embodied in rule by technocracy. Rule by the self-regarded “smart set.” The technocratic worldview places a high priority on credentials. It works very hard to distract you from noticing how the technocratic credentials regime is really a power grab. The assertions of the credentialed, backed up by immense government, corporate, financial, and cultural power, become “expertise” even when they are plainly wrong and obviously lying. This is what I call the “gnosis of power” laundered through the banality of credentials, titles, and institutions. Simply because the “experts” can make things happen and command the narrative what they do is assumed to be “true enough” by most people.

Since Lefty progressives view themselves as members of the smart set meant to rule over the dumb, the rural, the religious, and Trumpers, etc, they had to regularly take positions and impose rules that were far from certain and pound them into people. For instance, take the Covid vaccines, which are featured relentlessly in King’s novel. Despite the experience of getting one’s initial vaccination, followed by the necessity for multiple boosters, even to suggest the vaccines were obviously not as efficacious as advertised will get you denounced as a rube and a murderer in potentia by Lefties such as King. If you mentioned the actual efficacy rate as now advertised by the pharmaceutical companies themselves, you will be denounced as “anti-vaxxer” even if you were vaccinated. Of course, “anti-vaxxer” became a not so subtle euphemistic epithet for a "TOTALLY STUPID PERSON.”

And that is what Stephen King’s novel, Holly is really about: THE TOTALLY STUPID PEOPLE that threaten Stephen King’s sense of self and of the world. Old, rich, boomer liberal progressives see things slipping away from them as the self-regarding and self-enriching narratives they imposed on the world lose their grip. So, rather than trying to understand the world they created, all they know how to do is denounce all THE TOTALLY STUPID PEOPLE who doubt them. From their anxious perspective, they don’t see this as a reason for introspection, but an occasion one final attempt at imposition before they depart. It won’t work for the simple reason that old, rich, boomer liberals are mad. And when you’re mad you’re incapable of telling a good story.

Holly is a story of Stephen King and his cohort’s madness.