Ah, Stephen King. I’ve always had a mixed relationship with his work. Some of it, I would say, makes his reputation as one of our leading fiction writers well deserved. Other examples are just bad. Unfortunately, The Outsider, a 2018 entry into the prolific author’s oeuvre, belongs squarely in the latter category.

My mother always thought King was trash. To her, he was the type of stuff you picked up in the supermarket checkout aisle. When I was old enough to make up my own mind, I picked up some of his stuff and I thought some of it was really good. I’ll give you The Shining on any day of the week (even though it resembles the excellent movie not at all). And as the years rolled on, I even enjoyed Bag of Bones quite a lot – and then there was the accident.

King famously was struck by a hit-and-run driver while on a walk in 1999. It took him a while to get back to his writing. At one point, he seriously considered retiring for good. He didn’t, and I think we’re better for it. But his output post-accident has been uneven at best.

Even King admits he doesn’t like Dreamcatcher (despite it having been adapted into an amusing gross-out movie). I was entertained by Cell, even though it was a zombie story with a premise that only your grandfather could relate to. Under the Dome, with its weird similarity to The Simpsons Movie, felt largely directionless. Same with 11/22/63, his time travel fable. King has admitted he doesn’t do extensive planning and plotting before he hits the page, and it shows. Doctor Sleep, a purported sequel to The Shining, bears no similarity to its predecessor at all.

All of which brings us back to The Outsider. And if you’ve made it this far and you think I need an editor as desperately as Stephen King does, I’ll let you off the hook: It’s bad. Don’t read it.

Maybe minor spoilers

The book begins with a Little League coach being arrested for the rape and murder of a local boy. The question that unravels through the course of the plot is whether he actually did it. Essentially, it’s a whodunit. I’m not a particular fan of the genre, but this is a particularly lousy one. I’ll explain.

First problem is the setup. Our culprit is arrested at a Little League game, in front of his entire town and community, and is hauled away in handcuffs in clear view of his neighbors, including children. This sounds like bad policing on its face. Guilty or not, the county is begging for a lawsuit. Worse, as the book goes on, it actually becomes a plot point: “I wonder if we should really have conducted the arrest that way before we ever took any statements from any witnesses.” Yeah, that’s thinkin’.

My second problem is the nature of the crime itself. A boy is found murdered, having been anally raped with an object, with semen all over him. It’s later revealed that one of the murderer’s former hangouts also has what sounds like quarts of ejaculate all over the place. What is the point of all this? The perverse and sickening sexual nature of the crime doesn’t serve the plot in any way. It kind of establishes that the killer is not your ordinary human being, but it’s not necessary. King often brings these weird sex things into his books that come at you from weird angles and I wonder where his head is at.

Third, the writing is just sloppy. I think this comes back to King patting himself on the back for not planning his novels before he writes them. In The Outsider, on one page he’s discoursing on how cell phones have changed everything, but the next page he has a character making a call from a pay phone at a strip club. (Hint: Nobody has called home from a strip club pay phone since caller ID was invented.) In another sequence, our heroes are menaced by a sniper who is repeatedly said to be using a Winchester rifle – a staple of Western fiction that has been little more than a novelty since the Kennedy assassination. It’s also an especially strange choice given the extent to which more modern weapons have entered popular culture via tragic mass shootings.

But the biggest problem with The Outsider is simply the plot itself and how it’s constructed. As mentioned, it’s essentially a whodunit. But it’s a Stephen King whodunit, which means there’s a supernatural element. Call it a science fiction element if you want, but either way you slice it, it means the reader has no idea what the rules are.

I said I’m not a particular fan of the whodunit genre, but I think I understand something about the people who are fans. I think one of the main enjoyments of the genre is being able to unravel the mystery before our heroes do, and to get the little boost when it’s revealed that you in fact did have it figured out. So if one of the questions is, “How did the killer elude the detectives” and the answer is “He turned into an alligator and levitated to the moon,” where’s the fun in that? And that’s kind of The Outsider.

What we end up with is a bunch of characters doing what feels like endless detective procedural stuff in a world that has no rules – and, I must add, not a ton of suspense or drama – and then it ends. At least it wasn’t a thousand pages long (I’m looking at you, Stephen King). My advice is to stick with either the S.E. Hinton or the Camus.