The Outsider

The latest supernatural crime thriller by Stephen King, The Outsider, has a great start, pushing its characters to their limits, making them face questions regarding the limits of reason and, paradoxically, the terrible consequences of acting based on emotions alone. Its second half, however, brings the pacing to a halt, with the introduction of an uninteresting supernatural creature that does more harm than good to the story.

The novel begins with a boy, Frank Peterson, being found dead in the woods of a small town, where everyone knows everyone, with his throat shredded to pieces, his body violated by a dead branch and covered in semen. An eyewitness confirms that she saw Frank entering the van of a man early that day: the town’s popular Baseball coach, Terrence Maitland, also known as Coach T. or Terry. Detective Ralph Anderson, then, angered by the crime’s brutality, arrests Maitland during a game to make a public spectacle out of the situation and make Terry pay for what he has done.

“He must have been a maniac,” a witness ponders about the criminal during an interview. Terry, however, doesn’t act like a violent, frenzied killer. In a touch of dramatic irony, the first time we see him, he’s being falsely optimistic: “Let’s see what happens. I’ve got a good feeling about this,” he says. Terry Maitland is a man who keeps his cool at all times. As he is being arrested, despite being bewildered by the whole thing, Terry doesn’t lose his focus and keeps giving instructions to his team. When he is being driven to the station, he gets angry when he realizes that the cops don’t believe him, but he doesn’t yell at them. When he realizes the police are his enemy, he remains silent and just waits for his lawyer. Is he crazy? A psychopath? Or just innocent?

During the novel’s first pages, the suspense is all about a simple question: did he do it? Interviews with eyewitnesses are scattered throughout the first chapters. People claim to have seen Terry covered in blood and acting suspiciously. But, at the same time, there are some small hints that something may be off. From the four initial interviews, two are from elderly people; one with bad eyesight. The third comes from a little girl. The fourth comes from some people who were drinking. One gets Terry’s name wrong. They all, however, are adamant over one thing: his appearance. The person they saw really looked like Terry.

During its first chapters, The Outsider shows that people, in a flash, can go from liking an individual to desire them a heinous death. It shows how public outrage feeds on the idea of retribution, and how people are quick to mistake violence for justice: “The needle’s too good for him. They ought to hang him with a slow rope,” a man says to Ralph. A cruel crime should be paid with cruel punishment, they think. The narrator, however, is not kind to these people, frequently calling them “hyenas” and “coyotes” to reinforce how they are acting animalistic, desiring only blood.

Detective Anderson is no better than them, consumed by rage. When he starts to act rationally, and even feel a bit of empathy towards Terry, he quickly lets himself go back to the dark images that fueled his anger: “Then he thought of the crime scene pictures, photos so ugly you almost wished you were blind. He thought of the branch sticking out of the little boy’s rectum.” Ralph is all emotion, letting himself be led by the horrors that surround the crime. In the novel’s first pages, King doesn’t want the reader to sympathize with the detective, and he even cuts from his wife offering him a back massage to the family of the victim having to deal with yet another tragedy, making sure to mark the contrast: “As Jeanette Anderson was rubbing her husband’s back, Fred Peterson and his older son (now, with Frankie gone, his only son), were picking up dishes.”

Terry, on the other hand, is supposed to gain our sympathy as soon as we start to follow his point of view. After all, he actually acts and, more importantly, thinks like an innocent person, and one that was terribly wronged by the police. As the narrator marks: “he was never going to be completely innocent again. (…) He would always be the man of whom people would say, No smoke without fire.”

However, Detective Anderson is not completely wrong. The Outsider is built on a paradox, showing Ralph struggle with reason when he finds conclusive evidence pointing to two different conclusions: there is irrevocable proof that Terry is the culprit, but there’s also irrevocable proof that he’s innocent. The book depicts a police force so heavily dependent on forensic evidence that when DNA tests and fingerprints point at two different answers, they don’t know what to do. Logic fails them, and they become lost. The Outsider is all about the moment when reason fails. What to do when the world doesn’t function as expected and stops making sense? The characters, facing the two options available to them regarding Terry, quickly choose the safest and most convenient of them: arresting him. And everyone pays the price for this decision.

The supernatural creature of the novel, the so-called Outsider, is a monster that thrives on these kinds of choices. It exists because, when faced with two different and opposite answers, people simply choose one – usually the more convenient – instead of keeping investigating and digging for more information. They don’t try to figure out the inconsistencies that contradict their choice, but brush them off as irrelevant details. As one of the characters puts it: “We’re trained to follow the facts, and sometimes we scent him when the facts are conflicting, but we refuse to follow that scent. He knows it. He uses it.” The creature, however, starts to lose a bit of its appeal and uniqueness when the narrative starts to build it around simple myths and legends, using the sad cliché of calling its name in a foreign language to make it “stranger”, and other generic tropes, such as stating that it “eats sadness”, for example.

The book’s second half is its worst by far. Characters start talking in exposition-mode about the supernatural creature, while details about the investigation start to be repeated too much and become tiresome. A character from King’s previous books (the Mr Mercedes trilogy) suddenly appears and steals the spotlight: it’s Holly, and not Ralph, who basically does everything during the last half of the novel. Ralph suddenly becomes a supporting character, which is a grave structural problem that makes the book’s two halves feel disjointed together. The characters also start to become shallow, speaking only to serve the plot. Some of them even stop making sense: there’s a human antagonist that goes from “I’ll kill Ralph first, because I hate him with the power of a thousand suns” to “You need to leave, Ralph. Both of you need to leave. Or else he’ll poison you like he poisoned me,” in the course of a few lines without any explanation.

* Spoiler Warning *

And then we come to The Outsider’s main problem: is the answer to Ralph’s paradox a cheap one? That’s a tricky question. On the one hand, the focus turning to a supernatural creature renders the whole investigation irrelevant. If Ralph is torn apart by doubts raised by conflicting evidence, the fact that they’re dealing with a monster makes the whole problem easy to solve. The thing is: the metaphor that the creature represents is the moment when logic fails and people stop investigating, accepting half-baked explanations to keep their world in order. This is a dangerous stance to take, and so there’s a monster representing it.

However, the way the story is structured works against this message: the outsider makes Ralph’s investigation actually make sense. All the issues raised by the investigators and attorneys during the first part of the book are all, one by one, explained by the creature’s random abilities and traits. So, in a sense, the outsider does the opposite of what was intended for him: it brings order back to Ralph’s world. What appeared to be an unsolved paradox actually makes sense – Ralph just didn’t know that a creature that fit all those parameters existed.

Finally, we also have the problem that, being a Stephen King book called The Outsider, with a man with red eyes on the cover, there is little chance that the reader will believe that Terry has really murdered Frank Peterson, and not know from the outset that the characters are dealing with a supernatural monster. One could argue that accepting the existence of the creature is what the book is all about: to expand your horizons and accept that “there is no end to the universe”. Nonetheless, all that is required is a leap of faith, which means the story offers a very simplistic answer to a very complicated problem, which is a bit anticlimactic.

* End of Spoilers *

Speaking of anticlimaxes, the book suffers from that too. Ralph’s group, thanks to Holly, solves the problem of the creature too easily, and, if there are some deaths, they all come from characters that never had a chance to really come alive: they are clearly there as the Star Trek’s Red Shirts, serving only as cannon fodder.

In the end, The Outsider fails to live up to its great start, gradually losing steam while offering problematic and anticlimactic answers to its most daring questions.

February 03, 2020.