A review by kingofspain93
The Outsider by Stephen King

1.5

I love Doppelgänger stories, and this was not a good one. King has high points, and a couple of genuinely scary moments, but it ends up being his usual monster-of-the-week plot. I'll say this: as soon as it became clear that a shapeshifter was responsible for the murder I lost a great deal of interest. it would have made for a more compelling and challenging story if it had actually been Terry, if he had actually been in two places at once (consciously or unconsciously), or at least if it had been ambiguous. Americans love the serial killer mythos because it means they don't have to grapple with how evil every man is. the rapist and killer is never some drifting bogeyman; it is in fact always the model father and husband, the dude who is loved by the community, etc. I hadn't seen the Doppelgänger used to explore this before and unfortunately I still haven't. King just doesn't know how to capitalize on the frightening scenarios he can devise and instead always falls back on the typical universal good v. universal evil story he has been telling his whole career.

I think bullet pointed reviews are the sign of someone looking to react rather than synthesize and I usually avoid writing them. this time there are a bunch of consistent terrible issues with King's writing and I just wanted to exorcise myself of them so here goes:

  • Horrendous handling of race. You'll know exactly who the BIPOC characters are because they will explicitly state their race in dialogue (“my wide Indian ass”) or otherwise be aggressively identified by the narration in reductive ways. because King is so bad at writing he uses non-white race as a quick way to give characters “personality.” the race of the white characters is never commented on. repeated casual use of racist epithets throughout.

  • King has recycled the same two dozen or so characters in every book across his career. if you've read It, for example, you can draw a chart connecting everyone in that novel to their counterpart in The Outsider. and none of them were interesting to begin with.

  • worse, one of his recycled character types is “woman.” every major female character in The Outsider exists and acts in dependent relation to a primary man in their lives. psychologically they are all helpless teen girls in women's bodies. you better be sure all their tit sizes and BMIs get a shout-out.

  • adult characters use words like “frack,” “poopy,” “bull-pucky,” and so on. King’s vocabulary is stunted, sure, but even more off-putting is that it seems to have stopped growing in a 1950s locker room. King writes like a 70+ year old man who hasn't developed internally (or listened to other people) since adolescence.

  • references to contemporary media and technology feel as instantly dated as everything else in King's personal universe. you get the sense that he is naming things from different eras at random. he must be the only person on earth for whom the Huffington Post was still relevant in 2018.

  • King can't write interesting characters, and his good guys are universally boring. every character talks and sound about the same. all use the same regional sayings from half a century ago and all are obsessed with referencing movies, brand names, and how cool iPads are.

  • King's bad guys are all inevitably disappointments because they end up talking and thinking just like his good guys. the monster isn't scary anymore when it starts talking like the bully from Back to the Future.

  • King conflates being a pedophile with being a violent sexual criminal. like, jesus, read a book.