Even average Stephen King is worth reading. I'd call The Colorado Kid, a short novel (almost a novella) a notch above average, maybe 3.5 stars.
It's not really a "hard-boiled" mystery, though, and I don't know why it's labeled as such. That sultry dame on the cover is pretty misleading; the story is actually an unsolved murder being related to a young reporter working on a small tourist island newspaper in Maine by two old-timers who've been living there and reporting for the paper since forever.
There are two stories here; one is the human interaction between the old-timers and their young protege as they discuss fine nuances of human behavior wrapped in small mysteries, everything from why they didn't leave a tip on the table for a hard-working waitress to why they don't tell the big city reporter working on a series for a Boston paper about any of the real mysteries they know about, and stick to old unsolved ones everyone knows about like the mysterious coast lights and the poisoned church picnic. King has always been good at inserting little bits of human mystery like this into his stories.
The second story, the one The Colorado Kid is really about, is that of a man from Colorado who was found dead on this Maine island back in 1980. As the two journalists tell the tale, more and more odd details surface, and as they try to work through answers to each one, the case becomes stranger and stranger.
The thing is, The Colorado Kid is actually a bit of a meta-story, and appreciating it requires knowing a little bit about Stephen King. Like the fact that in recent years he's been connecting all of his fiction loosely together in a self-referential manner.
Consider a supernatural thriller with inhuman creatures, magic, aliens, or whatever, operating in secret. Imagine the collateral damage these stories leave lying around: dead bodies, burned down buildings, unexplained holes in the ground. What happens when "mundanes" come across the aftermath of such incidents? They have no idea about parallel dimensions or battles between good and evil, they just know there's a dead body lying here and they have no idea how it got there or how he died. They try to piece together the clues, but there are holes in any story they come up with, because even if they are open-minded enough to consider the paranormal, they can't know the whole truth.
This story is kind of like getting a peek at a mystery like that. If you take it at face value, it's just an odd tale about an unsolved death. If you think about all the other King you've read, you say, "Damn, some shit went down here, and these people just have no clue..."
Interesting, not the typical SKing. Great folk, from New England, of course. A nice, relaxing story.
A traditional story has 4 parts, although some sources say 5; a web search will provide various definitions. For the purposes of this review, let's go with "Exposition (Introduction)", "Conflict", "Climax", and "Resolution". If you try doing the same search regarding "life", you'll see it's not so easily broken down into such defined components. Life is not as structured as a story.
This is the basic theme of Stephen King's "The Colorado Kid". Straddling the border between a novella and a short novel, "The Colorado Kid" describes the mystery - no, make that mysteries - surrounding a body found on a Maine beach. It tells how some aspects of the situation are discovered over time, and others are assumed with a well-educated guess or two that are founded in the facts. It also sets out to show that some aspects may not be readily apparant, may be open to interpretation, or simply may never be discovered.
It is a story within a story; the situation that Mr. King sets up is that two old small-town newspapermen are describing their town's biggest mystery to their relatively new colleague, a recent college graduate from "the big city". Further, the story within the story within the story is to provide a lesson in storytelling - what makes a good story, what is necessary to tell a good story, and what unknowns can kill a story.
The published opinions on "The Colorado Kid" are mixed. It appears that the biggest haters detest the thing that actually drew me into the story - its uncertainty! Mr. King makes no secret of the fact that the mystery being described is unsolved; folks who expected a miraculous change to that circumstance by the last page will be disappointed to learn that things aren't revealed and resolved. It is my opinion that a miracle ending would have been a cheat, and would have invalidated the storytelling lessons being revealed by our narrators.
Further, anyone looking for resolution on THEIR story will also be disappointed! With limited exception, glimpses into the future are not given to mortal man, and the same is true for the characters in "The Colorado Kid". However, anyone looking for lessons on how to tell a traditional story can certainly learn something from this book, not just from what the characters reveal (a glimpse into the mind of the famed author, I must assume), but by what they describe as NOT present.
I am rating this story at 5 stars. I liked it, regardless of the opinion of other readers / reviewers, and most importantly, it is one of those rare books that stayed with me after I moved on to the next item in my To Be Read pile.
Excellent story, surprisingly brief for Stephen King (4 CDs, unabridged), and surprisingly not focused on horror or the supernatural, this was a straight-up "whodunnit" -- plus the "why?" and "how?" and all the other questions journalists seek to answer.
Narrator Jeffrey DeMunn did a beautiful job of creating distinctive voices of two elderly Maine coast newspapermen, without reducing their "down East" accents to something laughable or unintelliglble. He also kept separate the voice of a grad student interning with them.
This book interested me when I learned it was the basis, or at least the initial inspiration, for the SyFy TV series "Haven," and it did not disappoint.
