Going into this, I was super excited for The Outsider. Not only had I heard great things about it, but as I've never read a Stephen King book, this would be my first one. And now, coming out of it, I have mixed feelings, so let me try to make sense of it all.
First, the premise is very intriguing. In a small town, a boy is brutally assaulted and murdered. Several people in town saw Terry Maitland, one of the town's most well-known citizens, in the area of the body at the time of the crime covered in blood. There is also fingerprint and DNA evidence, all seemingly pointing to Terry. However, he has a ironclad alibi; he was in a different town that whole day with multiple colleagues and there is even a video attesting to this. So what is going on?
Let me just say that I can see why so many people liked this story. The plot unfolds in a interesting and compelling way, and knowing beforehand the sort of author Stephen King is, I was prepared for the direction of this story. But for me, one of the things that didn't work is that the crime came across as too gratuitously gruesome, and not in a fun way. Sure, you can kill people in more and more grotesque ways as a means to shock and discomfit readers, but what's the point?
At 560 pages, this book is also about 200 pages too long for me. There is so much unnecessary detail and background, and the dialog is often rambling and filled with tangential asides. There is so much information I don't need, and I was often bored, constantly flipping ahead to see where the action will be, then catching myself and coming back to read all the minutia I was subconsciously trying to skip.
Probably the biggest negative is that I utterly hated one of the main characters, a detective named Ralph. Almost every law enforcement person in here, though Ralph in particular, is written as an insufferable and incompetent buffoon. They had evidence suggesting Terry may be the killer, but they also had irrefutable evidence that he wasn't. Instead of taking that to mean that their investigation is incomplete, they ignored evidence that didn't agree with their theory and instead doubled-down on their conviction of this possibly innocent man. Sorry, but this is a subject that I'm particularly sensitive to after reading Just Mercy and The Sun Does Shine, both true stories about people who were put on death row even though there were witnesses swearing to them being somewhere else at the time of the crimes. The book is then filled with Ralph feeling sorry for himself that his case against a possibly innocent man wasn't as smooth as he'd hoped, while the DA eggs him on to prosecute and his wife consoles him by telling him it's not his fault he may have arrested the wrong person. Come on! Am I supposed to feel sorry for these imbeciles?
From what I understand, this is a pretty typical Stephen King. Even though this is the first book I've read by him, I'm not sure I would read another. I honestly don't want to read any more stories like this, of gruesomely violent crimes just to make readers uncomfortable and filled with maliciously unlikable characters and meaningless details. Every once in a while, I come across a book that should be a great story, is well-plotted and decently well-written, but I just don't like it, and this book fits that mold exactly.
Readaroo Rating: 2 stars
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