If It Bleeds
Holly Gibney • Book 2
by Stephen King
Narrated by Will Patton, Danny Burstein, Steven Weber
Why Listen to This Audiobook?
Will Patton narrating Stephen King is a pairing so right it feels inevitable — and the Holly Gibney novella here is the best argument for it.
- Great if you want: King in concentrated form — four distinct tones, no filler
- Listening experience: shifts from melancholy to eerie to tense across the novellas
- Narration: Patton owns Holly Gibney; Burstein and Weber handle their novellas well
- Skip if: you're fatigued by King anthologies or want a single sustained story
About This Audiobook
Four novellas inhabit this Stephen King collection, each working a different register of unease. The title story follows Holly Gibney of Finders Keepers as she notices something deeply wrong with a reporter covering a school bombing — a stand-alone sequel to The Outsider. The remaining three — Mr. Harrigan's Phone, The Life of Chuck, and Rat — range from rural gothic to a structurally adventurous meditation on mortality. King uses the novella form to pursue ideas that would strain at short story length and lose propulsion in a novel.
Will Patton, Danny Burstein, and Steven Weber divide the material according to the story's individual needs, a curatorial choice that gives each piece its own voice. Patton's reading of the Holly Gibney story carries the right level of procedural intensity; Weber and Burstein bring different qualities to their respective pieces. Goodreads Choice Award winner for Horror in 2020, this is King working with considerable formal freedom.
