Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
It is perhaps one of our more realistic and understandably damaging fears, to lose our identity, to be accused of a crime that we know we didn’t commit but to have all the evidence, our D.N.A., witness statements and testimony from every conceivable source of police profiling and psychiatric testing, to have our identity wiped out, to have someone else wear your face, act like you, have your friends believe you have become evil, insane or just plain foolish, that is the basic premise of many nightmares and some great cinematic moments captured for eternity.
The Outsider, Stephen King’s latest novel, is that moment of recognition that a master of literature and suspense still maintains his grip on the pulse of his readers and the psyche of what scares the reader most, and whilst the previous encounters with detective fiction were decried by some. The Outsider manages to combine the investigation of crime, albeit in a way that uses elements of the supernatural and paranormal, and the horror to which the American writer has surpassed all others in the last 50 years, the fear of the elemental and the everyday.
The new novel also manages to combine that other primal fear to which this legendary harbourer of nightmares and demons has become accustomed, the savagery of the child murder and the desecration of the human soul, the most fiendish of crimes, that of betraying the future of an individual by the foulest means. In many ways the book is a powerful reminder of one of Stephen King’s greatest novels, the terrifying It, a book so grounded in its meticulous and dread that it was only inevitable that the figures of the incubus and succubus draining the reader’s mind, would come forth again and multiply like some demonic seraphim who has found the way to clone himself and the object of fear.
By drawing on the suggestion that someone else is able to destroy your name whilst wearing your face, Stephen King taps directly into the individual dread, the apprehension of being unable to clear your name because everybody knows it was you; and yet like some further evolved creature to whom body snatching is child’s play, we are at its mercy, a direct allusion perhaps to the way identity fraud is palpable and alarming but one in which there is no recovery of debt owed.
The Outsider again proves that Time has not done with Stephen King’s magnificent imagination yet, that somewhere in the recess of the reader’s mind, the horror continues because the truth of it is that it belongs in the everyday, that the hoped for sincerity of our daily living is forever being stalked by the shadow in the corner, by our own worst nightmares, our face on the killer of humanity.
A book that demands to be read as much as possible in one sitting, to let the revulsion and hope take the journey together in full movement.
Ian D. Hall