Serial killer

Stephen King, 77, is a writer of towering brilliance whose fiction appeals to a reading public both popular and serious. His 60th novel, Never Flinch, unfolds in Buckeye City, Ohio, where a serial murderer is on the loose under the alias of Bill Wilson – the name of the man who co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous. Wilson has sworn to kill 14 people in revenge for the death of a friend and former alcoholic who was framed and convicted for child pornography offences. The plot is steeped in AA lore (‘Honesty in all our affairs’) and an awareness of the deleterious effects of drinking to excess. It’s no secret that King is

Susan Barker’s Old Soul opens with pages from a diary: ‘T’ records a late-night conversation with a woman known as ‘E’ as they watch Venus rise. While they talk, we learn that Venus ‘spins slowly, at the pace of a walking man’, so one day is longer than a year. E imagines she is there, walking towards a sun that never sets. When T says that sounds lonely, E is adamant it wouldn’t be. This strange fragment sets the tone for a sinister horror story in which one woman – who goes by many names but is often simply ‘the woman’ – has an unnaturally prolonged life, serving an entity