Book Review: The Outsider

I like Stephen King… or, I like a lot of Stephen King books. Not all of them, but some. I love “It”, it’s my favorite. In a way, The Outsider is a ripoff of It. Maybe the idea came to him because the movie It had just come out? I don’t know.

The book is written in the quality Stephen King style, all with the good and the bad. I often don’t like Stephen King’s writing because I think he gives a lot of background. A LOT of background. In the end I understand why he does it, but I’m not happy to be ready all this background while in my head I need solutions to the problems the main story is about.

But, oh, well, that’s what he does.

This book started out great! A few of the last books by him I wasn’t too happy with, but this one? I thought this one was back to the basics for him. It was a mystery, there was a murder, there was the unexplained…

But then… it became predictable. And I think mostly it became predictable because it was so much like It.

***Spoilers ahead***

Just like It, the antagonist is a monster who shapeshifts and eats fear or an emotion of the sort. He hides, and since it’s supernatural, normal people refuse to believe he even exists.

Just like It, we have a human antagonist that is seduced by this monster based on envy and hate.

Just like It, they go under a cave/sewer to defeat the bad guy.

Then there’s the way the human antagonist is defeated… he is bitten by a snake. Yep, the good guys do nothing. The bad guy kills a few and then… dies of snake poison. Yep, just like that.

And then the bad guy dies because he’s too weak and nothing is ever really explained… and it may have been a good thing because the explanation of how It came to Earth and how they found out this truth is a little farfetched, too. But, I’m still ok with it.

In summary, it was a very good book. It kept me hooked even when I began to see how similar it was to It and how predictable everything became at the end. It was still good. It also made me want to reread It (the movie had that effect on me, too).

I give it five stars, Mr. King deserves them.

cheers!