OPINION:
THE OUTSIDER
By Stephen King
Scribner, $30, 561 pages
If you want complex characters drawn with the insight of a psychiatrist, you go to John Updike or Saul Bellow. If you want intricately detailed plots you go to Scott Turow, Philip Roth or back to Updike. And if you want spot-on, totally authentic dialogue, Elmore Leonard is your man. But you go straight to Stephen King if you want your pants scared off.
Inside his capacious chamber of horrors are: An unhappy teenager who makes her senior prom a night no one will forget (“Carrie”); a homicidal 1958 Plymouth Fury with a jealous streak (“Christine”); an overly devoted fan who kidnaps an author and makes him write a book that brings her favorite character back to life (“Misery”); a boy with precognitive powers who is coveted by a group most evil (“The Shining”); and a St. Bernard that turns most unsaintly after being bitten by a rabid bat (“Cujo”).
One would think that after 56 novels, Mr. King would run out of scary plot lines. But, as “The Outsider” so definitely proves, one would be, pun intended, dead wrong.
Many of Mr. King’s books are set in Maine, where he lives, but in “The Outsider” he takes us to two fictional towns in Oklahoma. A young boy has been brutally murdered after being sexually abused. It’s the kind of crime that quite rightly enrages a community. Based on eyewitness accounts, the (circumstantial) evidence and DNA point to Terry Maitland, one of the city’s most beloved figures, a father and Little League coach known to hundreds of kids and their parents as Coach T.
Spurred on by a young and overly ambitious district attorney up for re-election, and convinced by the seemingly overwhelming evidence, an otherwise careful detective decides to make a very public arrest. In full view of hundreds of parents and their children, including Maitland’s wife and two young daughters, he arrests — and handcuffs — his prisoner on the baseball field in the middle of a game.
The coach hires his friend, Howard Gold, who happens to be the best criminal defense lawyer in town, and Gold puts Alec Pelley, his best Paul Drake-like investigator on the case. The defense team soon learns that at the time of the murder Coach T. was out of town attending a lecture, and they luck onto a video clip that shows Maitland asking a question. So that should be that, right? Wrong. The police dig in their heels, discount the video and arraign and jail the coach. But how can this be?
Mr. King does a fine job of showing (not telling) the emotions — and motivations — of the various players, as well as the mechanics and machinations of the prosecution and defense. But all this takes place with hundreds of pages left in a good-sized book, and it could get tedious if all the rest deals with the same set of facts.
Never fear, Stephen King is here: Stephen King, who never saw a plot he couldn’t twist like a pretzel, and we soon find ourselves on the trail of a madman who has super-human powers because, well, he isn’t human.
If leaving the realm of the real bothers you, you may decide to stop reading at this point. But I sincerely doubt you will.
One of the reasons you won’t is that halfway through the book Mr. King introduces a character who becomes central to the resolution of the case and the story. Her name is Holly Gibney, a private investigator. From her looks and manner she seems ill-suited to the job, but her late partner, a former cop, once said of her, “She’s eccentric, a little obsessive-compulsive, and she’s not big on personal contact, but she never misses a trick. Holly would have made one hell of a police detective.”
It would be a shame to provide even more details and chance spoiling any of the many surprises that lay in wait for the intrepid reader, but here’s one that won’t do that: Despite her natural reluctance to shun the limelight, Holly joins forces with Ralph Anderson, the cop who made the oh-so-public arrest of Terry Maitland but who has since had serious second thoughts about its accuracy. They make quite a team.
I suspect we have not seen the last of Holly Gibney. And, if, like so many of its predecessors, this Stephen King book becomes a movie, the role of Ms. Gibney will be an actor’s dream job.
Speaking of movies, it’s not hard to find a parallel between the popularity of Clint Eastwood films and Stephen King books. Despite all the bodies strewn about the landscape, they’re both about good triumphing over evil. And though you may cringe from time to time, you wouldn’t stop reading or watching if the house were on fire.
• John Greenya, a Washington writer and critic, is the author of “Gorsuch: The Judge Who Speaks For Himself” (Simon and Schuster, 2018).
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