Maggots in the Cantaloupe: A review of Outsider
Stephen King, Scribner books copyright 2018, 560 pages.
Terry Maitland, a teacher and little league coach in Oklahoma, is accused of raping, mutilating and killing an eleven year old boy. There are eyewitnesses, there are fingerprints, there is DNA evidence. The local cops are so sure he did it they arrest him in public, at one of the baseball games he coaches. It’s an open-and-shut case.
Terry Maitland was, at the time of the murder, 250 miles away at a seminar. There are eyewitnesses—people who have worked with him for years. There is fingerprint evidence. There is video of him at the seminar, asking questions from the audience. There’s no disputing that he was there. Suddenly, the police have a headache.
A lot of pre-teen wannabe writers come up with a plot conundrum like this one, reasoning that along about fifty pages in, they’ll have a brilliant idea to resolve it and write the great American novel. Most of them don’t.
Stephen King, on the other hand, has a pretty formidable set of tools, and benefits from the fact the his audience trusts him to work it out with few, if any “Oh, come ON!” moments.
About halfway through the book, Holly Gibney shows up, and Constant Readers who are familiar with the Bill Hodges/Mr. Mercedes trilogy know this is not going to remain a standard police procedural. Holly, after all, was instrumental—indeed, central—to stopping the depredations of one Brady Hartsfield, sociopath and serial killer who was capable of controlling the minds and bodies of others. Holly has experience that helps solve the fact that a sadistic murderous pedophile was calmly attending a writers’ conference and asking polite and informed questions at the same time of the gruesome murder. It leads to a very satisfactory story with a great ending.
It’s clear that King is grooming Holly to be his own version of the Great Detective. She fits the trope—socially awkward, compulsive, curious and obsessive—while managing to be an original variation on a somewhat well-trodden fictional character type. Her personality is well designed for her to present an interesting storyline in whatever dark Kingdom she is placed in.
In the Mercedes trilogy, she was somewhat overshadowed by the strong personalities of Bill Hodges and Brady Hartsfield. In Outsider (the title doesn’t refer to her, but it could) she takes front-and-center, and proves quite capable for the role.