The Outsider by Stephen King

The Outsider by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Outsider is excellent work by Stephen King - his best in quite a while. I read  this son of a bitch until my eyes dropped out of their sockets and plopped into my lap, and my brain was fried. Of course my brain was already fried, and has been for years, but that's not the point here.

My only complaint is that two of the characters have names which are too similar: Frank Peterson and Ralph Anderson. I kept getting them confused, requiring the creation, yet again, of a table of characters. It would have been better to give one of them a more ethnic name, like Wicznoski.

Come to think of it, I have another complaint. King uses the peculiar term "lookie-loos" to describe gawkers, as he did in at least one previous book.

In his afterword, King reveals that he has an "able research assistant" named Russ Dorr. How do I get into that line of work, and get paid for it? I could also position myself as a "name consultant,"  helping authors avoid problems like that noted above. I could do it all from home, without any coronavirus risk.

N.B. And another thing: as long as I'm complaining, I want to mention a new and distressing physical ailment that's plaguing me. I am suffering from what I believe to be "MacBook Thumb," a repetitive stress injury brought on by intensive use of the touchpad on my new MacBook. Of course there's nothing more boring than people whinging on about their maladies, so I'll stifle myself now.