The Outsider Book Review

Hello everyone and welcome to the blog! Today, I am back with another Stephen King book review. I've been loving this work and plan to read a lot more of his catalog, so let's get into it!

The Outsider by Stephen King follows a very confounding investigation. A little boy’s body is found completely mutilated in a park. DNA and eye-witness testimonies point directly to Terry Maitland, the little league Coach. One of Flint City’s most popular and well-liked citizens. But police are startled to find Terry has a rock-solid alibi. How is it possible for someone to be in two places at once? What will happen to the investigation when both sides have iron-clad evidence?

This is my second Stephen King novel, and King has yet to disappoint. The synopsis of this book is really what pulled me in. A man arrested for murder but has a solid alibi, how is that even possible? I truly had no idea what direction King was going to take. If you are a fan of the book/move It, then you’ll like this. There are a few similarities between the two. I’ve never read the book (yet), but just from watching the movies I can see overlap.

There are a lot of characters in this book, and we jump from a lot of different points of view. I’m not going to lie it was kind of confusing at first, just trying to keep everyone straight. As I stated, I had no idea how King was going to tell this story. There were a lot of surprising things that happened especially very early on in the book.

This is a long read. About 560ish pages. I thought the overall pacing was really nice though. Things did slow for me as the Detectives went to Texas to do some investigating. I thought there was a lot of chit chat that slowed things down.

I do want to say that there should be a trigger warning because the way the little boy was murdered in the beginning…it’s truly to vile and vicious. It made me queasy reading about the details. Too much detail. It was heartbreaking.

Overall, I do believe this is some of King’s best. He keeps you enthralled, engaged. There are so many threads being woven from the very beginning that as a reader it makes you want to invest the time in reading the entire book.

I thought it was well done. I’m beginning to really like King’s writing, and I can see why people call him the king of horror. Was this book super scary? No. Was it haunting? Yes, I would say so.

I gave this 3.5/5 stars. I would recommend Pet Sematary over The Outsider, but this one was really good.

Alright folks, that is all I have for this week! Come back next Wednesday for another blog post. As always, thank you for reading :)