King, again like always, has the magical touch to make any story compulsively readable. In a saturated sea of small-town murder mysteries with your usual sprinkle of family and neighbour drama - I truly feel that King is the first place everyone should go before they become mystery junkies, looking for the next big high after Gone Girl and [insert "Girl" in title] but unable to sift through the ocean of half-arsed trend riders. My Goodreads say that I read Gone Girl twice. I don't know why I did
... that nor do I have a lick of memory of myself doing that. I was probably desperate.
King's The Outsider starts off like any other thriller-mystery: a well-loved, law-abiding, morally upright high school baseball coach, husband and father, is accused of a horrific crime. All evidence points against him - and they have a huge mountain of it - but Terry Maitland testified that he was at a completely different place at the time the crime was committed. He was arrested in a huge spectacle anyway because there was no way it was someone else when his fingerprints and DNA was at the crime scene (no spoilers there). And King lets you stew in the chapters after chapters of innocent, non-supernatural investigation for a while, before letting loose his trump card - monster madness.
In essence, this is a 3.5 star book. Quick, fast-paced read, functional characters, too many tropes to count. And people who follow my reviews would know that these are the things that take off points from a book for me. King is a great storyteller, but this book seemed rushed, pieced together without thought on how events should flow into one another. But it satisfied my mystery craving when I've been starved for so long. I waited for 23 people before me to finish with the book at the library before I could get it.
A habit of King's as well is to ends stories by introducing the monster that has been plaguing the characters (or the alien, or the dead pets, or the possessed car) to them and have everything end in one big fight. Seriously, there's no spoilers here because it always happens. Unless it's your first time reading King, in which then I apologise. Sometimes it's epic, sometimes it's a convenient way out. I'll let you decide.
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