King's 'Outsider': B+
This particular King novel was a big deal, considering it had been two years since he had come out with an individual work. Not that I'm making a lament, nor will I diminish the significance of the collaborations with Richard Chizmar and his son Owen. Especially since I've read neither.
I also won't do that to The Outsider.
I will however start with a disclaimer for anyone who cares about this kind of stuff. The Outsider spoils the Bill Hodges trilogy. A lot. Holly Gibney's contributions to the book are necessary, yet come with a price. For me, revelations which connect this book to End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes make it so that sometimes I felt like I was reading sections of all four books at the same time.
With that aside, the plot is otherwise very disconnected from other realms of the Stephen King universe. With the unlikely backdrop of the southwest (mainly Oklahoma and Texas) we're forced to visualize for ourselves not the isolated hilly Maine towns shrouded in dark trees but plains of middle-America.
There is an arrest in the middle of a little league game in Flint City, Oklahoma. Local teacher and youth sports coach Terry Maitland is charged with the rape and murder of an eleven-year-old boy, an allegation which sends his community into a state of outrage.
Police Detective Ralph Anderson stages the arrest in the town park, where thousands of residents watch as Coach Maitland gets derailed from a little league game and marched off to jail. Even with a slew of interviews and DNA samples pointing in the clear direction of Maitland as the accused, the detective quickly becomes privy to an overlap in events just as liable to prove the man's innocence.
The first half of King's book is dealt with case building; several pages are interrogations with local Flint City residents who claimed to have conversed with Terry Maitland around the time of the murder, not to mention Maitland himself. This investigation leading up to the day of his arraignment is tense storytelling difficult to put on hold for more than a few hours at a time. There's three-hundred pages of this, and they go quick, leaving the remaining two-hundred or so to pale in comparison.
Once the outsider has been identified as the real force at work, there are several meetings between detectives, lawyers, and specialists, most of them not nearly as grabbing as part one. The outsider's antics in the latter section are so few and far between that when I wasn't reading about them, I found myself getting a bit bored.
It's Holly Gibney who figures as the big reprieve in part two, the obsessive-compulsive crime specialist whose previous experiences with Mercedes criminal Brady Hartsfield give her the appropriate credentials to take on the outsider. With the efforts of her and the investigative team in Flint City, we are taken down to Texas, where an abandoned tourist attraction serves as the place for the unsettling denouement.
King demonstrates he's still got it in many ways. The scenes with the outsider are deliciously unnerving; you can tell he had a lot of fun making them. Ralph Anderson is a well-wrought protagonist whose deep-rooted conventions of morality are tested in all the rightly sensitive places. The suspension-of-belief button is a tool King manipulates well, yet one wonders sometimes if he knows it as much as we do.
Even well within the throes of Outsider mayhem in the last half, there are times which King draws back, going to unnecessary lengths to test his own credibility, times which I wanted to say, 'It's okay, Steve. We believe it now. Just let it happen.'
But if you're a lifelong fan like me, it's one of the more forgivable properties of the man's work. For every lag, there's another gem or trick around the corner. And it's these treats which keep King fans into it. This is a solid read by an excellent author, well worth the wait.
