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The Outsider: Two Styles of Stephen King in One Book
Stephen King is well into his fourth decade of being so successful—not to mention preternaturally skilled—that he can write pretty much whatever book he wants to and pull it off. For artists, this is known as the “Imperial Phase“—the period of a career during which their powers are at their creative peak.
You can nitpick over when King entered his own Imperial Phase (I’d put it sometime around the release of The Stand), but matter how you measure it, his seemingly never-ending Imperial Phase is one of the most impressive in literary history. Where some writers would coast along, happy to write the same book again and again, King has used his freedom from commercial concerns to push his boundaries, try different genres, and tell different kinds of stories. While some of these experiments have succeeded more than others, they have made it impossible to classify King in terms of genre—while his name is still synonymous with a certain brand of American Gothic horror, that’s hardly all he can do, and do well.
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King’s more recent work has explore and largely succeed in other genres, especially crime fiction and police procedurals like the Bill Hodges trilogy, which began with Mr. Mercedes, but horror is still in his bones. Perhaps that’s why his most recent novel, 2018’s The Outsider, was so satisfying: it offers a perfect blend of his early horror style and his more recent procedural work.
King plays a trick on readers who gotten used to the rhythms of his recent procedurals: The Outsider begins with the solving of a crime, seeming of a piece with his recent books. Detective Ralph Anderson of Flint City, Oklahoma, arrives at a Little League game fixing to arrest the beloved coach, Terry Maitland, for the sickening abuse and murder of a child. Anderson makes the arrest in public, and instructs the officers to cuff Maitland’s hands in front of him against protocol, because he’s angry—he liked Terry Maitland, and more importantly, the town trusted him with their children. But despite Maitland’s protests of innocence, the evidence against him is iron-clad.
King dives into the investigation and work that goes into the building the case against Maitland, and its a pleasure to watch a writer of his skill make what could be an off-brand Law and Order riff into an engrossing look at the nuts and bolts of police work. It’s strong material, and if King had decided to stay in the realm of the crime genre exclusively, The Outsider would still be a great book. But it’s no spoiler to say that he doesn’t; he pulls the rug out from under his detective when Maitland reveals a perfect alibi—he’s been captured on video at a faraway location during the time of the murder. This maddening problem drives the bulk of the narrative—what’s a cop to do if the suspect’s alibi is as airtight as the evidence against him?
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If the first section of the book is in line with the top-notch King crime writing King has been dabbling in for the last half-decade or so, the rest harkens back to the grand horror of his blood-drenched 1980s heyday. As Anderson teams up with investigator Holly Gibney (on loan from the Bill Hodges novels) and begins to dig deeper into Maitland’s crime, the true nature of the evil they’re dealing with begins to take terrifying shape. The results are something akin to a mature take on It, another story about an evil that preys on children and masquerades as something else entirely. The difference this time around—in keeping with the procedural roots of the story—is that the heroes that must take a stand against it are adults, not children.
Another callback to 1980s King? The book is off-the-charts terrifying. King has always had a knack for creating monsters that feel primal and eternal: always lurking in the shadows right over your shoulder, barely glimpsed and never understood until it’s too late. The malevolent evil at work here is no exception.
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If there’s a thread running through all of King’s books, it’s the straightforward realism he favors as he builds his worlds and characters, and which makes it all the more disturbing when things begin to go supernaturally sideways. He blends pop-culture, brand names, and current politics with ageless class concerns, brewing up tactile fictional universes that feel real enough to touch, even if they are infested with monsters and dark magical forces. It’s a trick he polishes to a high shine in The Outsider. For some writers, incorporating of-the-minute movements like Black Lives Matter or contemporary presidential politics into a story about the small-town concerns of regular people would feel like the author hopping onto his soapbox. For King, it feels like the bones and sinew of the story, as much now as it did when all of his books seemed to be set in middle-class towns in Maine.
If the buzz over the September release of The Institute is any indication, King’s Imperial Phase shows no signs of ending. Certainly with The Outsider, it seems to have allowed him to coin a new genre. Call it Procedural Horror.
The Outsider is now available in paperback.