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Stephen King asserts all of his considerable power here
Book Review
By Derryll White
King, Stephen (2005). The Colorado Kid.
“When you eliminate the impossible, whatever is left – no matter how improbable – must be the answer. – Sherlock Holmes
Stephen King slides into this story, softly. The book was first published by Hard Case Crime and by Chapter Four the reader is still exploring the magic of the Maine coast – allegoric and pleasant. Not exactly hardboiled crime fiction, but captivating nevertheless.
‘The Colorado Kid’ is a very personal story – it asks the reader to define reality, one’s personal reality. What do you believe in as you make this insidious journey called life? Do you know where you came from and where you are going?
Stephanie McCann, a fledgling journalist working at her first newspaper, The Weekly Islander, thinks she knows where she is going, to larger newspapers and to set the world on fire. But Stephanie comes face-to-face with the power of mystery as opposed to reality. Stephanie learns to bask comfortably in mystery, to take direction and power from it.
Stephen King is very crafty in assembling the pieces of this story and letting the story lead the reader to an unscripted conclusion. He asserts all of his considerable power, seizing a genre and shaking it loose from its hardboiled, crusty roots. He employs two gentle old newspaper men to take the reader into a darkness even Joseph Conrad didn’t explore, the unknown.
King asks of the reader “what is mystery?” And then “What will you explore?” Stephanie McCann commits everything to the journey.
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Excerpts from the novel:
WOMAN POWER – “Johnny told me that night at The Breakers that he never could have done what she wanted if she hadn’t been right there watching him and counting on him to do it, and you know, I believe that’s so. For a woman, a man will do many things that he’d turn his back on in an instant when alone, things he’d back away from, nine times out of ten, even when drunk and with a bunch of his friends egging him on.”
PLACE – “Life on the Maine coast is rarely like Murder, She Wrote,” Dave said in his driest tone, “and back then we were pretty much what we are now, Steffi, especially when the summer folk are gone and it’s just us chickens – all in it together. That doesn’t make it anything romantic, just a kind of – – – I dunno, call it a sunshine policy. If everyone knows what there is to know, it stops a lot of tongues from a lot of useless wagging.”
GOD – It has never surprised me that God gave the world a little tilt at the same time he set it spinning; so much that goes on here mimics that tilt.
UNIDENTIFIED – “This part’s rather creepy”, Stephanie said. She found she could see the man in there, for some reason not in a coffin (although he must surely have been provided with some sort of cheap box) but simply laid on a stone slab with a sheet over him. An unclaimed package in a post office of the dead.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
