“The Outsider” is not generally considered to be really top-flight Stephen King. If you look up rankings of his novels, it tends to come in around the midpoint at best and often much lower. Some people are turned off by the way it segues from police procedural mystery to supernatural skirmish. Others think the villain just isn’t scary enough.

Presumably the writer Richard Price and the actor and producer Jason Bateman, two of the main forces behind the 10-episode adaptation of “The Outsider” that begins Sunday on HBO, liked the book. You have to wonder, though. Based on the first six episodes, they’ve gloomed it up and slowed it down, keeping much of the basic story but making something radically different in tone and atmosphere. It’s “The Outsider” dipped in noir sauce and coated in HBO-prestige bread crumbs.

Is it an improvement? Having just read the book, I missed King’s energy and earnestness, and most of all his sense of relentless forward motion. In HBO’s “Outsider” the camera slowly glides, or creeps, or just sits still while actors try out their hard or perplexed or grieving stares. It doubles down on a kind of blue-tinged moodiness that’s a popular mode in television mystery these days, from “The Sinner” on USA to Price’s “The Night Of” for HBO. (Bateman directed the first two episodes.) It takes King’s spooky, jokey, thinly characterized plot machine and turns it into a psychological workout.