Stephen King's 'The Outsider': Thriller is a witchy brew of crime, horror

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

There’s plenty of shadowy, wormy supernatural goings-on in Stephen King’s new novel The Outsider. Yet the most unsettling stuff — that which will leave you uncomfortable when you sit and devour this first-rate read — probes the monstrous side of human nature.

Like his recent Mr. Mercedes trilogy, King continues to walk the line between police procedural and complete horror show in the timely Outsider (Scribner, 560 pp., ★★★½ out of four). The thriller touches on gender dynamics, sexual abuse, pedophilia and the dangers of mob mentality, though the book's sociopolitical aspects won’t leave you as shaken as its characters’ desperate existences.

Little League coach and teacher Terry Maitland is arguably the most popular man in the small Oklahoma town of Flint City, which means it hurts everybody to their core when he’s arrested for the murder of 11-year-old Frank Peterson. The boy’s body is found in a local park — throat ripped out, corpse sexually defiled — and Det. Ralph Anderson, whose own kid was coached by Maitland, makes a public show of bringing the accused to justice.

But with much evidence pointing to Maitland's guilt — from a positive DNA match to eyewitnesses placing him with the boy the day of his murder — there’s equal indication that he clearly didn’t do it, since Maitland was out of town with colleagues when the crime occurred. While Anderson and other law-enforcement types wrack their brains to figure out how one person could be in two places at the same time, everybody’s lives get wrecked in this town that combusts at just the wrong time.

This is a King tome, so stuff does get very weird, and The Outsider becomes a Midwestern race against time to close the case before another child becomes a victim. The novel has a connection to the writer’s earlier work that would be too spoiler-y to reveal, but it's a rousing addition that’s key to King's hard-charging second half.

The climax is solid and intriguing but, in a way, anticlimactic to the gut-wrenching drama of The Outsider’s meatier chapters. “Like measles, mumps or rubella, tragedy was contagious,” King writes, and indeed it’s a nefarious virus that infects the population of Flint City.

How does a place deal when the very best of them does the very worst thing imaginable? How does that man’s family and the family of the deceased boy go on living? And what of the cops who are faced with what seems like an impossible situation? The author plumbs to the gloomy depths with his cast before letting off the gas and giving them — and the reader — some needed hope.

There are shades of It in the unspeakable evil that presents itself over the course of The Outsider. As one character says, “The world is full of strange nooks and crannies.”

In King’s hands, real darkness is just as pervasive as the supernatural.