Number 65 - The Outsider - Stephen King

 

Unless I just miscounted on the Wikipedia bibliography page, this is King's 59th novel.  That's good going by any standards.  But some would argue that King is quantity over quality.

I disagree,

While there are a very small handful of King novels I don't rate as highly as others, There are none where there's not been something to enjoy about them.  Even From a Buick 8 - which is my least favourite - opens brilliantly.  

In this one, I think he's close to his top form for most of it.

It opens with the discovery of the horribly mutilated body of a young boy. At least five eye witnesses identify the local well loved junior baseball coach as the person who took him away in a van on the day of his death. One saw him walking away from the site of the murder covered in blood.  His fingerprints are found in the van in the child's blood.  His DNA is at the scene.

However, he has a cast iron alibi.  He was over 100 miles away at the time of the killing and can prove it.

Something strange is going on. The front cover seems to hint at a Stranger Things type alternate dimension body double but that's misleading.  The answer to the mystery is scarier than that.

 This was the most unpredictable thing I've read from King in some time.  The big bad is genuinely creepy and dangerous and I totally failed in my game of "guess who'll still be alive at the end". At least one character death was completely from left field and unexpected.  After that, all bets were off. He admits in the course of the story exactly where the source of the idea came from, but has put his own spin on it.     

 It's written in King's usual easily readable style and builds the characters with the usual efficency. For fans of the Bill Hodges trilogy, there's a guest appearance by one of the Finders Keepers cast.

It's not his best book.  There are a couple of chapters loaded down with exposition which slow the narrative down a touch in the second half of the book. However these are necessary as the monster isn't anything instantly recognisable.

He also spends a lot of time persuading the central charcaters that the big bad is real and supernatural in nature.  Again, this is necessary as I think most readers would have complained if they'd just accepted the more outlandish plot details without question.

 I've raced through this book in under 5 days, which for a 550 page book is fast paced.  It's a tense and frightening addition to King's canon.  It might not challenge Cujo or the Shining for the top spot but it's well up to his usual standards.  The steady reaveal of what was actually going on was brilliantly done.  The opening chapters in particular, with the build up of evidence mounting, only to be smashed to pieces, were masterful.

Easy 8/10 - It contains spoilers for the Hodges trilogy, so probably best to read that first if you haven't already.