Review: "The Outsider," by Stephen King
NO END TO THE UNIVERSE. The King returns with a bang. I felt like I was left wanting more with King's previous publication, Sleeping Beauties. The Outsider is redemption. Ultimately, The Outsider is just plain-old fun reading, a feat of storytelling in true Stephen King fashion. 561 pages can be exhausting if written in the wrong hand, but the pages of The Outsider just turned and turned and turned and suddenly I was closing the book. King masterfully crafted a story in those nearly six hundred pages which kept me chomping at the bit for more. At it's heart, this book is a mystery. But, as is so common with King, we are served up a decent dose of horror and fantasy as well. This is a difficult review to write without giving away too much. But, suffice it to say only King could pull off what he did with the last third of the novel and still make it believable. I feel like this novel could have spun off the rails pretty quickly when he decided to go the direction he did, but it didn't. I half expected King to take this route, but was still surprised when he did, and it worked. Confused? Read the book and you'll see what I mean. ;-) Stephen King has often said he doesn't plot his books, which I happen to like. It gives his novels suspense. How couldn't it? After all, if the writer doesn't know where the story is going, how can the reader? It makes for a roller coaster of a novel, as this one was. Let's talk about the characters for a bit. The story revolves mainly around Terry Maitland, even when Terry isn't really there. Terry Maitland is a great character to have the novel revolve around. He is the picture of middle class, upstanding American citizen, yet he is also oddly mysterious. You want to trust him, but you also want to stand back from him so he can't bite. This is just good ol' character development by a talented writer. Then, we have the two other main characters, Ralph Anderson, our main detective, and Holly Gibney, a character many King readers will know well (myself excluded because I haven't read the Bill Hodges trilogy yet). Ralph is also a great character because he is so flawed. It starts in the very first pages of the book, when Ralph makes a decision to arrest Terry Maitland very publicly and without having done his due diligence in the investigation. Holly is also great, because she is so relateable. I don't know Holly well (this is my first Holly experience) but I liked her so much that the Bill Hodges trilogy has bumped its way up my list of books-to-read all the way to the top. Stories are really only effective if the characters are complex, in my opinion. The Outsider is filled with complex characters. I enjoyed that this book, at it's core, is an exploration of the theme of Belief or Paradigm. Each character is forced to grapple with what we can see with our eyes versus what we can't see and must make a decision on believing or not believing. Although this book isn't an examination of religion per-say, it is a take on religion in the sense that the characters (not to mention the reader) must ask themselves how much they're willing to believe in something that has never been proven to exist and have therefore never seen with their own eyes. I think this is why The Outsider is so powerful. Although we delve into a world of semi-fantasy, it taps into something familiar in us all. There is that question always in the back of every human experience: must we see something with our eyes for it to be real? Then there is that fear which King so expertly taps into: the fear of being accused of something you haven't done. When you use this idea up against a murder investigation, it really highlights just how there is still a degree of uncertainty in all criminal investigations. Scary stuff. Which leads to the one line that sums up this novel. "No end to the universe." What a great line. What a deep and troubling concept. Fantastic and recommended read. Up next: the Bill Hodges trilogy. Onward.
