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LOVE YOUR OUTSIDER TO DEATH
STEPHEN KING — THE OUTSIDER — 2018
This is the fourth volume of a trilogy that we all know, the trilogy of Bill Hodges, the private investigator. Bill Hodges is now dead (pancreatic cancer), and it is his associate Holly Gibney who assumes this new episode, though she only gets into the picture in the second half of the novel. The tone then is rather relaxed, and it is essentially a murder case, an odious murder case. That was true when this novel came out in 2018. But now Holly Gibney has reappeared in a fifth volume entitled Holly, and nothing else, in 2023. But in the meantime, between this The Outsider and Holly, we have to mention the short TV series produced in 2020 by HBO that changed the main character to the point that she was made black for this series, and that was not to be continued since the latest novel on her, Holly, brought her back to being a white woman, at least in the novel.
I will not enter too many details in order not to destroy your pleasure and discovery. I will only insist on some aspects of this novel, aspects that make it original, maybe unique in a way, and yet in perfect continuation with many other novels by Stephen King. It is also quite obvious Stephen King is strongly under the influence of the TV series Supernatural and the brothers, Sam and Dean Winchester, who fight against all kinds of supernatural beings mostly coming from folklore and old traditional stories and myths, not to speak of all types of gods, including the Christian one who is on vacation and has been for a long time, leaving the world in the hands of Lucifer and the King of Hell, along with a couple of angels who do not necessarily do much good.
The very first trait of this novel is a massive police miscarriage of justice, decency, protocol, and procedure. No matter how strong the evidence they have, the police are not supposed to arrest someone without questioning him or her first, without checking the basics of this person. What’s more, they have to be discreet about this arrest and not do it as some kind of public show as if the police were a carnival organizer or a showbiz enterprise. Good police work is supposed to respect the…
