The Outsider – Stephen King

When a young boy is brutally murdered, the police and the district attorney think they have an impeachable case, with DNA and fingerprint evidence matching their chief suspect.  After they arrest him, though, they find out he has an iron-clad alibi, allowing bits of doubt to creep in.  When he is killed on the way to his arraignment, more mysterious happenings start to occur, leading a group of interested parties to hire an investigator who has previous experience with the strange and unexplainable.  When the natural world does not have an explanation for what is happening, will a police officer be able to expand his thinking to include the supernatural as a possibility?  And can they stop the supernatural creature before it attacks again?

Stephen King’s The Outsider, released in 2018, first made my acquaintance in 2020, when the adaptation aired on HBO.  I watched the first episode and meant to go back for the rest, but never did.  At some point, I picked up a copy of the eBook on the Kindle app and, being the Halloween season, this seemed like a good time to dive in.  It took a while for King to get to the “Stephen King” part of the tale, but once it did, it was an enjoyable ride.  Some of the characters from this book appear in other King works, so I feel like I now have a nice springboard back into his more recent output.