The Outsider by Stephen King (Review)

‘An unspeakable crime. A confounding investigation. At a time when the King brand has never been stronger, he has delivered one of his most unsettling and compulsively readable stories.

An eleven-year-old boy’s violated corpse is found in a town park. Eyewitnesses and fingerprints point unmistakably to one of Flint City’s most popular citizens. He is Terry Maitland, Little League coach, English teacher, husband, and father of two girls. Detective Ralph Anderson, whose son Maitland once coached, orders a quick and very public arrest. Maitland has an alibi, but Anderson and the district attorney soon add DNA evidence to go with the fingerprints and witnesses. Their case seems ironclad.’

This book grew on me.

As a massive Stephen King fan, I went into this book with high hopes. Unfortunately it took me quite a while to get into the story.

I cant complain about Stephen King’s writing at all. His is the master at creating tension and building suspense. The writing in this book was everything I have come to expect from a Stephen King novel.

The characters in this story were interesting but didn’t really become fully developed until the second half of the story. This late character development made it difficult to care about the characters at the start of the book.

I think my real issue with this book was that it wasn’t creepy enough for me. Don’t get me wrong; it was creepy, and it got a lot creepier towards the end of the story. The darker and weirder the story got, the more I enjoyed it.

I go into a Stephen King novel with certain expectations and while this story eventually delivered on what I wanted, all of the crime and police stuff at the start of the story held no appeal to me. I want freaky, creep, and weird. While I did end up getting all of these things, it just took too get there.

The Outsider by Stephen King will take you on a journey that is more like a house of horrors than a roller coaster.