Book Review : Stephen King - The Outsider (2018)
Say what you want about HBO, they’re almost never boring. They’ve been delivering awesome show over awesome show since they aired Oz in 1997 and changed the television game. The Sopranos, The Wire, True Detective, Westworld, Watchmen, you name it. These three letters are synonymous with premium quality. It’s not where I expected a Stephen King adaptation to land. The iconic (yet uneven) horror writer has suffered through terrible fucking adaptations and it… kind of became a thing with him. These days are apparently over because HBO is adapting his novel The Outsider.
It’s exciting. How exciting exactly? Enough to pick up a thick-ass novel that’s been collecting dust in my TBR pile for over a year and start preparing. Because the show starts on January 12.
The Outsider opens with the horrific murder of 11 years old boy Frank Peterson, who’s been sexually assaulted and mutilated enough that investigators don’t know if it happened before of after his death. Detective Ralph Anderson and District Attorney Bill Samuels quickly arrest Little League baseball coach Terry Maitland after a handful of people identified him covered in blood near the murder site. Except he was at a Harlan Coben conference miles away. Three people vouched for him and he’s even featured on local news footage. A terrible look for Anderson and Samuels.
What separates The Outsider from all the straightforward and forgettable boogeyman story out there is the first 100 pages. Because it’s kind of a straightforward and forgettable boogeyman story if you don’t take the narrative angle into account. More precisely, Ralph Anderson and Bill Samuels arresting Terry Maitland without due process and in a very public, humiliating manner in order to appease the locals. These guys seriously fucked up and operate out of guilt rather than the usual righteousness associated with law enforcement.
Now THAT is an original freakin’ angle.
The tension between Anderson and Samuels makes the book come alive. The former is torn between his sense of duty and his life as an active member of the community. Samuels is primarily looking to make a square peg fit a round hole and save his job. Not only this tension is a testament to the flawed nature of law enforcement, but Ralph Anderson’s struggling with his guilt is a great example of negative emotions fueling outstanding human behavior. There’s a human drama going on and the abusive cop/lawyer bad guys are starring in lead roles.
If you’ve read enough Stephen King novels, you know it comes with a litany of annoying idiosyncrasies and The Outsider is no different. There are irrelevant characters being overly chatty and telling you about their fucking weekend plans in police interrogation, ridiculous literary namedropping and cops giving you a literature class on doppelgangers right in the middle of it. They’re not much to scoff at, but they start adding up at some point. I don’t give a fuck if Stephen King has read Maupassant. I’ve read it to and I know what happens in the book.
If you’re a King fan, you know what I mean.
My main qualm with The Outsider is the actual investigation, which leads to the supernatural element of it. It’s so far fetched that three cops and two lawyers figure out exactly what they’re up against by watching an old Mexican movie. It’s ridiculously convenient to have cops transform semiologists for like… 12 pages or so? There’s also a new character introduced at that point: Holly Gibney, from the Bill Hodges novels. That irked me too, because I haven’t read those and King spends way too long recapping them…. like way, WAY too long.
The Outsider is a good Stephen King novel. It’s marred by familiar problems, but they’re never going to go away and if you read recent King novels, it’s better that you make peace with that. He still has it, though. That skill to take familiar trope and find characters to live through them in a unique and memorable way. That, he does better than most genre writers working today. HBO has something that could be special in their hands. The right writing team could skim the fat turn The Outsider into a terrifying 21st century folktale. I’ll be watching come January 12.
7.3/10
