{"id":65,"date":"2018-08-03T15:10:17","date_gmt":"2018-08-03T13:10:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/readerwitch.com\/?p=65"},"modified":"2018-08-03T15:10:17","modified_gmt":"2018-08-03T13:10:17","slug":"the-outsider","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/2018\/08\/03\/the-outsider\/","title":{"rendered":"The Outsider by Stephen King"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mr. King you made a frankenstein, and I don\u2019t mean it as a complement.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Genre: horror
\n\u2b50\ufe0f Stars from Goodreads: 4.2
\n\u2b50\ufe0f Stars from me: 3<\/p>\n

Dear Mr.King,<\/p>\n

Who can I suggest your book<\/a> to? Shall I say it\u2019s for those who love detective stories and for those who love horrors, but these two groups should read different parts of the book, then meet in the middle, hug each other and have dinner?<\/p>\n

I understand it is my fault that I expected Miss Marple from a book that said \u201cStephen King\u201d on its cover. Only, the book danced along the classic lines of a nicely knit detective story, for the most part of it. Like a naive idiot I was piling up evidence, reading between lines and suspecting all characters at once. Then, suddenly, Miss Marple started growing horns, a scaly tail and whatever other attributes that are usually ascribed to creatures from the netherworld. Just for the record, it\u2019s a metaphor.<\/p>\n

For the remaining part of the book I was sent on the unbelievable trip of star watching. That is, I was watching stars falling from the rating I was initially ready to give to The Outsider<\/em><\/a>. There were originally four solid stars, then three and a half, then I had to battle with myself to keep at least three. I have no problems with horrors, but I object to being ambushed by a scaly Miss Marple while I was unsuspectingly picking up clues to solve a crime with her. Do you see what I mean? It would be the same if I gave you a bowl of ice-cream scoops with a spoonful of aspic hidden beneath. Why would I do such a thing? I would have to be either a prankster, or a sadist or a chef with two unmatchable dishes and with an urgent need to get rid of them. Is that what happened to your book?<\/p>\n

What I enjoyed was the swarm of characters interacting. They just can\u2019t shut up, can they? I don\u2019t know what black magic you use to keep the creatures locked within the pages, but on those pages they definitely acquire minds of their own. I\u2019m sure those are living beings, I cannot imagine a person being able to create such intricate dialogues, even if the person is Stephen King. There was absolutely no use in those characters explaining the story lines to each other, but I couldn\u2019t stop watching them do this. They gave zero interest to the fact that I just learned what had happened, they needed to recite the story to each other again! Completely unnecessary for the plot line, but what an art of a dialogue!<\/p>\n

Mr. King, it\u2019s a bit awkward that one of your characters is trying to remember if John Lennon was already dead when she was younger. It\u2019s not even important how many years younger. She\u2019s somewhat my age, and I saw John Lennon only in black-and-white as he was long dead before I was born.<\/p>\n

The desynchronization between what the main character Ralph does and what you say about him is quite uncomfortable. He behaves like a narrow-minded bully, who doesn\u2019t let in any other version of events but his, no matter the amount of evidence that he might be wrong, and yet you call him \u201ca person of two minds\u201d who at one moment even \u201cwants to believe, but can\u2019t\u201d. Nothing in Ralph\u2019s behavior or words suggests he wants to believe any other opinion but his own! On the contrary, whenever Ralph gets the microphone back he restates that to him there\u2019s still no other truth but his. This kind of literary gaslighting<\/a> is disturbing.<\/p>\n

I found another moment quite unexpected. It\u2019s a very old trick to use a clich\u00e9d scene and then to refer to it as clich\u00e9d in the attempt to rinse the clich\u00e9 off the scene. When people hold hands and run from bullets \u201clike a group of friends in some romantic movie\u201d<\/em>, when a person helps his abuser back to his feet, \u201clike in a Bible story\u201d<\/em>, those are clich\u00e9s and the attempts to cover them up. When clich\u00e9 is played around as a conscious move, it can sound forgivable to many. It is still a clich\u00e9, though, and the move is a cosmetic repair to the scene.<\/p>\n

I also have a question to Will Patton<\/a>, the narrator of the audiobook<\/a>. That\u2019s the question I started googling even before I finished the book. What the HECK is wrong with Holly? I now discovered that she\u2019s a character from other series, so is there something that happened to her that made her sound like that? Honestly, part of the time I was sure the plot twist would be that she\u2019s a robot. Why does she speak with a voice of an old Apple computer? \u201cI\u2026might! have? sooome neeeeew information? for! you\u2026\u201d<\/em>\u00a0I got so exhausted hearing these schizophrenic jumps in timbre, I nearly dropped the book. Holly\u2019s deformity is even more surprising taking into account that other voices are made so perfectly, the performance felt like a radio play! I loved knowing who the following action would be about because the voice would already change into the character\u2019s accent and mannerisms even before the character himself went on stage.\u00a0I wasn’t surprised to find out that Will Patton<\/a> was once called a Narrator of the Year.<\/p>\n

Overall, after finishing the book, I felt like those fans of Lost TV show<\/a> who patiently waited for the finale to get all answers only to find out that nobody cared enough to give them any, and the main purpose of the series, all along, was just to keep the audience glued to the story while it lasted. The Outsider<\/em><\/a> is not that dissatisfying, but it came close.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"