The Colorado Kid

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.