The End of the World As We Know It, also recently announced.

In recent years, however, King moved to writing non-horror books, turning his attention to the crime thriller, with some of his books in the genre being pure crime, skimming the surface of hardboiled noir, while others have incorporated more of the supernatural element that King is associated with. While he's continued to write horror and dark fantasy, the Never Flinch announcement confirms he's not yet written all the crime stories he has in his head out of his system. Here's what we know about the Stephen King release.

Stephen King's Never Flinch Has A May 2025 Release Date

The Book Comes Out A Year After His Last

Currently, Never Flinch is slated to be released on May 27, 2025. That puts it just a year after his previous book, the short story collection You Like It Darker, was released; that book hit shelves on May 21 of this year. That tracks for King, whose books tend to be released in late spring or early fall, at least going back the last handful of years. That's not a hard and fast rule, but his publications do tend to follow a rough calendar, save for the pandemic years, where it shifted a bit.

For a man who has stated a few times in the past that he's retiring, or at least slowing down, King certainly seems to be doing the opposite. He has released eight books in the past five years, and his "slow" years consist of him still releasing at least one book. Clearly, as long as Stephen King keeps finding new ideas to intrigue him, he will never run out of stories.

Never Flinch's Story: What We Know About The Book's Plot So Far

It Will Be Another Crime Thriller

At the moment, it appears Never Flinch will be another book planted firmly in the crime thriller genre, which King has regularly returned to in the past decade, wanting to flex his muscles in a new genre that offered an opportunity for the prolific writer to experiment with a new genre while still being able to tell stories about good and evil. EW released an exclusive excerpt from the forthcoming book. King's longtime publisher, Scribner, also released the official, if lengthy, synopsis for Never Flinch:

"When the Buckeye City Police Department receives a disturbing letter from a person threatening to 'kill thirteen innocents and one guilty' in 'an act of atonement for the needless death of an innocent man,' Detective Izzy Jaynes has no idea what to think. Are fourteen citizens about to be slaughtered in an unhinged act of retribution? As the investigation unfolds, Izzy realizes that the letter writer is deadly serious, and she turns to her friend Holly Gibney for help.

Meanwhile, controversial and outspoken women’s rights activist Kate McKay is embarking on a multi-state lecture tour, drawing packed venues of both fans and detractors. Someone who vehemently opposes Kate’s message of female empowerment is targeting her and disrupting her events. At first, no one is hurt, but the stalker is growing bolder, and Holly is hired to be Kate’s bodyguard — a challenging task with a headstrong employer and a determined adversary driven by wrath and his belief in his own righteousness."

As the synopsis indicates, those two seemingly disparate narratives will eventually twine together into the climax. The story, as is usual of King, will be told in the third-person, but it appears set to show a few different perspectives, including the one from the teased excerpt, which is told from the perspective of Trig, a man with an obsessive nature who is slowly becoming consumed with vengeance. King always writes unstable characters well, whether they start that way or slowly descend into madness, so Trig seems primed to become the main antagonistic focus of the story.

Stephen King's 2025 Book Will See The Return Of A Familiar Face

Holly Gibney Returns

As with so many Stephen King books, Never Flinch will see a few familiar faces return in the new story. A key player will be Holly Gibney, with whom Constant Readers will be well familiar. The detective with obsessive-compulsive disorder has become a regular character in the past decade, and her return is always welcome. Not only has she appeared in a few books, but she's also appeared in two TV adaptations, with Justine Lupe portraying her in the Mr. Mercedes series, while Cynthia Erivo portrayed Holly Gibney in The Outsider miniseries.

Holly Gibney first appeared in the 2014 book Mr. Mercedes, and since then, King has said she's grown dear to him as a character and is one he has wanted to further flesh out and explore. In a 2020 interview with NPR, King spoke of his character and how much he'd grown to love writing her: "I just love Holly, and I wish she were a real person and that she were my friend, because I’m so crazy about her," he said. "The first book that she was in was Mr. Mercedes, and she more or less stole the book and she stole my heart."

Never Flinch Is Part Of Stephen King's Holly Gibney Metaverse

She's Appeared In More Novels Than Any Other Character Outside The Dark Tower

As noted above, Holly Gibney is a major recurring character in King's works. Outside of characters in The Dark Tower, including ultimate Stephen King villain Randall Flagg, Holly has appeared in more works than any other character. It's not coincidental that her first appearance coincided with the first pure crime thriller King ever wrote, Mr. Mercedes, and she went on to have a prominent or leading role in even more books during King's crime thriller era. Her timeline has been consistent in the past decade, with Holly appearing in a new book or novella every year to few years:

• 2014: Mr. Mercedes (Bill Hodges Trilogy #1)
• 2015: Finders Keepers (Bill Hodges Trilogy #2)
• 2016: End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3)
• 2018: The Outsider
• 2020: If It Bleeds (short story collection)
• 2023: Holly

Holly's first appearance in Mr. Mercedes was the start of a fictional love affair for Stephen King, and it's easy to see why. The detective is complicated and insecure, riddled with the anxieties we all have about ourselves. Over the course of her character development, she's grown more confident in her abilities as a private investigator, not to mention her discomfort with interacting with the outside world. Plus, it's always fun to see a writer's take on a genuine savant, as Holly is with her uncanny memory and knife-sharp skills of observation and pattern recognition. From the sounds of it, Holly will need to bring all her prodigious skills to track down the killer in Never Flinch. It will certainly be interesting to see if it's the first time an antagonist bests her.

Sources: EW, NPR