The Outsider

The Outsider – Stephen King

After I finished this book, I dreamed of finding Stephen King and giving him a great big hug and kiss.  I didn’t want to do this because this book was great or anything (although it WAS very good), but because King seems to have finally cleaned up the “gross” factor that is prevalent in so many of his books.  Lately, my biggest gripe about Stephen King novels is that he doesn’t seem to have a good grasp of how adults talk to each other.  It seems like the majority of his characters have a vocabulary littered with swear words and converse like adolescent 12-year old boys with a fetish for bodily fluids.  No matter how much I might like some of his stories, I’m simply too grossed out by the end to enjoy many of them.  ‘Horror’ and ‘being grossed-out’ (by snot, spit, and/or semen) are not the same things as far as I’m concerned.

Overall, I thought this was a very good book.  It didn’t seem to have a lot of action, but King kept my interest throughout the 550 or so pages.  It starts out as a somewhat straightforward police story. A well-respected citizen is arrested for the murder of a young boy.  The evidence is overwhelmingly stacked against him.  However, a strange predicament happens.  There’s also overwhelming evidence that exonerates the accused killer as well.  How can this be?  (cue the eerie music)

Well, about 1/3 into the story, the simple police story suddenly encounters a supernatural turn.  Yes, there’s definitely something ‘strange’ going on that complicates things for the investigators.  How are these level-headed people supposed to believe in such paranormal mumbo-jumbo?  Again, though, King does a great job walking us through the story that shows us how such believable people can eventually grasp unbelievable events.

Because of the nature of the story, we get a break from the familiar setting of Castle Rock and/or Derry, Maine, and this book actually takes place in Oklahoma and Texas.  Again, King deserves a walloping amount of credit for not making his characters into moronic obliviots.  I mean, Oklahoma and Texas are RED states for goodness sakes!  Maybe King did some research and discovered that normal, smart people live in the South as well?   He does break down a few times to take a stab at Donald Trump; but at least he seems to be REALLY trying to reign in his malignant vitriol.

At some point, the detectives reach out to Holly Gibney. Holly is a character from King’s “Bill Hodges” trilogy.  If you haven’t read the trilogy, you might be a bit lost since King makes tons of references to the characters and cases from these books.  (I’ve read two of the three, and **I** was lost. I simply can’t remember meticulous details from former books.)  This was a bit of a distraction.  I felt King could have toned down this part and not used so many ‘past’ references.  Still, though, Gibney is a great character, and she manages to actually be the ‘center’ of this story even though she isn’t introduced until about halfway through. It wouldn’t surprise me if King gives Holly her ‘own’ book someday.  I would welcome it.  I really enjoyed her obsessive-compulsive tendencies. King manages to elaborate these inclinations without it seeming forced.

Although I really enjoyed this book, it’s a far cry from being a ‘masterpiece’ or anything resembling King’s best. Like many books, I will have forgotten the plot in a year’s time and the final climax/confrontation with the adversary in the book was VERY weak and lame. Still, I enjoyed the book overall and hope to see more of Stephen King being a bit more ‘clean’ as he tells his stories.  His talent is simply too great to have to always have his characters and their language infested by the sewers and stench of what makes life so particularly unpleasant.