The Colorado Kid
Ratings78
Average rating3.3
15
Ratings78
Average rating3.3
On an island off the coast of Maine, a man is found dead. There's no identification on the body. Only the dogged work of a pair of local newspapermen and a graduate student in forensics turns up any clues, and it's more than a year before the man is identified.
And that's just the beginning of the mystery. Because the more they learn about the man and the baffling circumstances of his death, the less they understand. Was it an impossible crime? Or something stranger still...?
No one but Stephen King could tell this story about the darkness at the heart of the unknown and our compulsion to investigate the unexplained. With echoes of Dashiell Hammett's THE MALTESE FALCON and the work of Graham Greene, one of the world's great storytellers presents a moving and surprising tale whose subject is nothing less than the nature of mystery itself.
--back cover
Reviews with the most likes.
Coastal Maine beef crimes
young journalist learns the ropes
old yankees cackle.
Based on the series this is part of and the misleading cover art, I thought this was going to be a hardboiled, trenchcoats-and-dark-alleyways sort of mystery novel. What I got was something completely, wonderfully different from that: Stephen King writing post-modern metafiction.
Two old newspapermen sit down with an intern at their small-town Maine paper and tell her the story of The Colorado Kid, whose dead body was discovered on the beach some 25 years previous. They lead her through the mystery, with the whens and wheres of his disappearance and discovery, and along the way teach her the difference between Stories, which have a clearly defined beginning, middle and ending, and Life, which rarely does. That's why, these newspapermen theorize, people like stories - they're cleaner and safer than life, and better fit our preconceptions of things. Life, in comparison, is messy and thematically incoherent (and, I believe, more beautiful for those reasons), and that's why it's the job of the storyteller to tell their stories well. To prove this point, the mystery of The Colorado Kid is just that - it's a mystery, one that has no solution provided and now easy explanation of how or why it happened. It just ends, and leaves us as the audience to try to make sense of it - to make the life of these characters fit our idea of what story should be. That twist at the end - that the mystery is just a mystery, and has no explanation - wouldn't have worked if the characters were any less realized, and it wouldn't have worked in a longer story, but here? Damn, it works.
The ending's a little on-the-nose but that's appreciated; given the amount of mystery surrounding the entire story, leaving it at all ambiguous would have been horrible.
It's easy to see why this is such a polarising book. I, personally, loved the ending. I found the characters and story compelling and really enjoyed my little sojourn with The Colorado Kid.
