_The Outsider_ by Stephen King: Quick Review

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.

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Is Kip Lange Going to Have to Choke a Bitch?

Bear with me here, because I woke up on too little sleep after a weird night, thought, “God, just let me get back to sleep,” and popped a triple dose of my Clonazepam (ahh, wonderful benzodiapenes…my Valium, my Valium, my Valllll-iiiium) but couldn’t get back to sleep. So I’m in a semi lucid sort of hazy almost dream state here.

Mostly I just want to say, after three years on my own, I’m fucking tired. I cannot find a way to beat the disability trap of “You lose any and all assistance if you work at all, and you need to keep countable resources at $2,000 or below at all times.” Trying to get around that with my Special Needs Trust, but it’s moving incredibly slowly and it’s not that much money anyway after the fucking house burned down.

I desperately want to write more interesting and creative things, but here’s the thing — I’m like my dad. He used to hand out free advice to politicians as a political consultant. Which was insane. It was his job, the ideas were used, and he should have charged. The problem was, my dad just enjoyed the game too much — pulling a string here and there and so on and watching things play out in the news. He was also just a hell of a nice guy (when he wasn’t angry).

When I was younger, I suffered much the same problem. I threw out a lot of jokes and ideas here and there among creative people, they were borrowed;; I don’t really feel very angry about it, like my dad — it was fun watching them play out, and I like to keep a low profile anyway. But as I got older I began to get more and more pissed that hey, writing and ideas are my profession — if you want the good stuff (this isn’t even the good stuff, this is a random rant written on a handful of fucking benzos), you have to pay — or if you’re a known entity, you at least have to ask. So I kind of stopped writing, started putting blander stuff on the blog, and locked down a lot of the more controversial stuff and the humor.

As a result, I feel like a pressure cooker. I have a lot of stuff I want to just blurt the fuck out, but I will be damned if I will blurt out creative things and so on — for Christ’s sake, it’s my only form of capital — without some form of compensation. Plus, it’s difficult when you don’t have other people as sounding boards, and I don’t have any editors or colleagues right now.

I don’t know, what do I do at my age? Lock writing behind a paywall? I don’t know if I have the patience for the rejection slips at the moment from various places and also I do feel as if I’ve earned at least a goddamned toe in the door.

And, of course, I mightily miss my parents, and my old house, which burned down and in the process cost me a fortune and immolated every precious memory I have.

So I’m casting about. So fuck you. This world is nothing but a clusters of strip malls and televisions connected by wires and waves — who really gives a fuck, you know? I’d *like* to make more fun of it, but I’m not doing it until I’m paid or receive recognition. Which is very me. I remember an ex-gf told me once, “You withhold yourself from the world and it’s a crime.” Very flattering, yes, I know, she probably wanted a better birthday present by buttering me up, but she still said it.

Fine. It’s a crime. I just don’t have the fucking patience for a lot of you people. I’m an amiable guy, and — especially after COVID — people are just generally assholes. What to do but hold your sunshine in and try to be polite to people, right?

Ah well. That’s my post. And that’s why I don’t write that much anymore. I would very much like to blow this popcorn stand and get back into creative circles, but I’m tied down and I can’t seem to reach any of my old contacts. C’est la vie.

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A Great ’70s Song About California — “All the Gold in California” by The Gatlin Brothers

This song does a pretty good job of summing up the California experience, to this day.

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Existential Questions

This will only make sense to a few of you, but I’ve been asking myself lately, would I be happier if I was the kind of guy who employed cliff divers?

And the answer is no. Wherever you go, there you are. Except luckily I managed to avoid a salad bowl that would have killed me, I think. Again, not everyone gonna get this.

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Framingham, Monday, April 27, 2026 — Spring

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Life Ain’t Nothin’ But Bitches and Cigarettes — Matt Foley: Scaring Kids Straight in Prison

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Happy New Year 2026 (Snow Squall in Framingham, MA)

Well, happy New Year! I woke up to this, which was sort of nice:

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Patriots Clinch the AFC East

Well, that’s that. With a Bills loss to the Eagles (13-12, ouch, bad call not going for OT) and a Patriots win over the Jets (42-10, S-U-C-K SUCK SUCK SUCK), the Patriots have not only have secured a playoff spot, but have won the AFC East (the Pats used to have the tie-breaker as well before they blew it in that dramatic Bills come-from-behind victory a couple weeks ago).

See you in the playoffs. Playoffs?!?! Playoffs.

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SCROOGE: A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1951) — Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas Eve — though, sort of Merry Christmas, to me, because as I got older, my family tended to celebrate on Christmas Eve and then just have a meal on Christmas Day. Presents were Christmas Eve as well.

On Christmas Eve and Christmas there’s really only one thing to watch. IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE? No, that just got popular because it fell into public domain on over-the-air TV a long time ago. I’m talking about SCROOGE: A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1951) with Alistair Sim. That, too, has gone public domain, believe it or not, but it didn’t become popular solely because of that. There are a few other film adaptations of Dickens’  A Christmas Carol, including a sort of depressing one with George C. Scott, and one with Albert Finney, but Sim is usually considered the best film Scrooge.

So, for Christmas Eve and Christmas, I give you SCROOGE: A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1951) in its entirety.

Note: DO NOT WATCH THE COLORIZED VERSION OF THIS FILM. COLORIZATION SUCKS. THANK YOU.

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Happy Winter Solstice (and Winter)!

Celebrating the shortest day of the year, because it only gets better from here. Well, at least in this area of the world. I hope. I don’t want to head into that Asimov story “Nightfall” or anything. So, to the Druids (even though nobody knows who they was…) and so on, Merry pagan rituals.

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