Review - 'The Outsider' by Stephen King

My first Stephen King, though by the looks of things, maybe I picked the wrong one to start with?

The premise intrigued me. A boy is assaulted and murdered in a small town. Several people saw 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 the same person. However, he has a ironclad alibi. So what is going on?

Let me start by saying I can see why so many people liked this story. The plot unfolds in an 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 was that the crime came across as too gratuitously gruesome, and not in a fun way. Sure, you can kill people in ever more grotesque ways as a means to shock and discomfit readers, but what's the point?

At 560 pages, this was also about 200 pages too long. There was so much unnecessary detail and background, and the dialogue was often rambling and filled with tangential asides. There was so much information I didn't need, and I was often bored, constantly flipping ahead to see where the action would be, then catching myself and coming back to read all the minutia I was subconsciously trying to skip.

Probably my biggest negative is that this just wasn't a pleasant read. Almost every law enforcement official in here, in particular a detective named Ralph, was written to be insufferable and incompetent buffoons. 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 was incomplete, they ignored evidence when convenient and doubled down on their conviction of this possibly innocent man.

The book was then filled with Ralph feeling sorry for himself that his case wasn't as smooth as he'd hoped, while the DA egged him on to prosecute and his wife consoled him by telling him it's not his fault he may have arrested the wrong person. Like, come on. Am I supposed to feel sorry for these imbeciles?

Even though this is the first book I've read by Stephen King, now I'm not so sure I want to check out more. I read for fun, and I just don't enjoy stories of gruesomely violent crimes and maliciously unlikable characters and meaningless detail. Every once in a while, I come across a book that should be a great story, is well plotted and well written, but I just don't connect with it. And this book fits that description exactly.

Readaroo Rating: 2 stars