All Your Base Are Belong To Us — The Kip Lange Homepage

The Outsider was released in 2018, but given COVID, writer’s strikes, Trump freakiness, and all that, like the rest of current culture, it’s sort of delayed — I picked it up in 2023, for instance (still a delayed review).

Wish I could give this book better than an 8/10 (and a 5/10 for a Stephen King novel), but I can’t. It’s bland, it’s tasteless, and you can feel King giving up on the creative branches for alternate, more complex endings at the end. It’s a decent read, a story about a seemingly impossible murder that balloons into a chase for a supernatural killer, but it is, at heart, boilerplate King — light. It has the King tropes, but — light. Like the asshole character who is sort of “in” with the protagonists but loses his mind for some reason and sells out for evil. That’s there.

There are plenty of King tropes there, and that’s not the problem. Neither is the writing, which is a 10/10 on style, but — whoa, are we lacking on substance since the days of The Stand and so on. It’s almost like the outlines of a King novel, where he does give up at the end, thinking, “I can sell this to streaming with a somewhat ambigous ending and then I can buy another island.” (actually he’s supposed to be a very nice fellow, I know a woman who lived in Bangor with him — although I could do without people constantly comparing my looks to his)

The last, best King novel I read was Doctor Sleep, and it seemed that he might be slipping already, though it’s hard to publish a sequel to The Shining. Still, it was far better than what I consider his “downslide” — when the Mr. Mercedes novels began. King has seemed to shifted to crime a bit more as a focus or side focus, and unfortunately he is no great procedural writer — and many of the newer novels are sort of hybrid procedurals.

Well, there you go. 8/10 for The Outsider, I’m being generous; as always, iminently readable due to the pacing and style, however; 5/10 for a King novel.