Description
Title – The Outsider
Author – Stephen King
Publication – May 22nd, 2018 by Scribner
Genre – Thriller, Horror, Supernatural
Pages – 561
Rating – ★★☆/5
Links – Goodreads | Amazon
Blurb
An unspeakable crime. A confounding investigation. At a time when the King brand has never been stronger, he has delivered one of his most unsettling and compulsively readable stories.
An eleven-year-old boy’s violated corpse is found in a town park. Eyewitnesses and fingerprints point unmistakably to one of Flint City’s most popular citizens. He is Terry Maitland, Little League coach, English teacher, husband, and father of two girls. Detective Ralph Anderson, whose son Maitland once coached, orders a quick and very public arrest. Maitland has an alibi, but Anderson and the district attorney soon add DNA evidence to go with the fingerprints and witnesses. Their case seems ironclad.
As the investigation expands and horrifying answers begin to emerge, King’s propulsive story kicks into high gear, generating strong tension and almost unbearable suspense. Terry Maitland seems like a nice guy, but is he wearing another face? When the answer comes, it will shock you as only Stephen King can.
Note: This blurb has been taken from Goodreads
Review
“It was no dream she said. Dreams fade. Reality doesn’t.”
The Outsider, Stephen King
My experience with Stephen King never seems to match up to my expectations. Maybe I always pick the wrong books to read, or maybe my personal preferences don’t gel well with King’s style. Whatever may be the reason, this particular book was not a very rewarding read for me.
This seems to be a highly unpopular opinion, but for me, the second half of the book was as disappointing as the first half was gripping. Why am I breaking this book into two parts like this, you ask? That’s because I honestly felt like I was reading two different books. It was like one of those films that keep building up your expectations in the first half, but everything goes totally downhill after the interval.
The book starts as a chilling, bite-your-nails, pull-your-hair, stay-up-til-4 am kind of thriller. A horrific sexual abuse & murder of a child takes place. All the evidence found points to Terry Maitland, local teacher, and football coach, a devoted husband, and father – a man no one could have ever imagined would do something like this.
After much deliberation on the part of Ralph Anderson, our lead detective, Terry is arrested. Only, he has an ironclad alibi that the police never bothered to check, and for every piece of evidence that incriminates him, there seems to be another that proves his innocence. It’s the holy grail of murder-mystery thrillers. A seemingly impossible murder. After all, how can a person be in two places at the same time!!
”There was one rock-hard fact, as unassailable as gravity: a man could not be in two places at the same time.”
The Outsider, Stephen King
This first half of the book kept me horrified and yet enthralled, puzzling over all the possibilities and I kept waiting for some bombastic twist to drop and shock the living h*ll out of me. And then came the answer, which I can only describe as a lazy cop-out, for the lack of better phrasing.
Paranormal thrillers can be immensely intriguing when done well, and King is the master of that particular subgenre. However, this book was a let-down for me because it was marketed as a suspense thriller, not a supernatural horror, and the first half made absolutely no reference to anything supernatural, no foreshadowing, no clues, nada!
King builds up the tension with an intriguing mix of clues and witnesses that both absolutely prove that Terry must be the culprit while also making it utterly impossible for him to have done it. It plays out like a realist thriller where all the seemingly impossible mysteries will eventually be found to have some ingenious tricks and masterful planning behind them, only to have King tell me, “welp, it’s basically a shapeshifting monster that can also clone fingerprints and DNA with its evil superpowers and stuff. That’s it.”
The idea of the existence of such a creature that can commit such horrible acts and ruin lives without ever leaving behind a trace is truly terrifying. But if that is the case, I would rather have the Winchester brothers solve the case. At least we would get to experience their special brand of witticism alongside a successful and satisfying hunt for the monster.
At one point in the book, King manages to work in the famous Sherlockian quote: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” Except in the Holmes Mysteries, the solutions, however mindboggling, are always rooted in reality. Here, it’s a supernatural creature that can commit murders and fake pieces of evidence without working up a sweat. It might make for a terrifying monster, but it doesn’t make for an interesting enough villain.
This book could have been three things:- 1) a police investigation grounded in reality 2) a paranormal thriller 3) a whacky mix of investigation and the supernatural. But this book was none of these. The first half teases the existence of some Agatha-Christie-esque solution to this puzzle, only to have the supernatural stuff explain it all away.
It might sound presumptuous, but I felt that the author had worked himself in a bind that he couldn’t find a way out of, this perfect crime that he cooked up but couldn’t find any way to resolve it realistically, so BAM! He dropped in a random paranormal creature to tie all the itty-bitty loose ends together and save himself the pain of having to actually work out the logistics of this “perfect crime”.
Verdict
In conclusion, I would like to give this book 2.5 dim stars & the phone number of Dean Winchester cause god knows they need it.
