book (ry)view: The Colorado Kid by Stephen King

Newsmen Vince Teague and Dave Bowie are the sole news providers for a small Maine newspaper, The Daily Islander. They've recently hired an ambitious intern named Stephanie McCann, who quizzes the newsmen on whether or not they have ever, in 50 years, encountered a truly unsolved mystery. That is when they tell her a story - and challenge her to put the pieces they do have together - about a body they found on the beach in 1980. This is the mystery, of course, of The Colorado Kid.
I love Stephen King. I think I've been pretty open about that. However, as with any writer, some stories are going to resonate with readers and some stories, simply put, are not. I've read a good chunk of King's work and, on the whole, have not encountered many I wouldn't be willing to (enthusiastically) return to in the future. Some exceptions, as there are always exceptions, include The Talisman, The Stand, and now The Colorado Kid.

I really enjoyed King's other novel under the Hard Case Crime imprint, Joyland. It was noir in its presentation, and set at a creepy old amusement park in North Carolina. It was full of the traditional callbacks to classic mystery stories, but with a classic King feel. Now, I wouldn't consider Joyland among his best, but I also wouldn't put it into the same pile as The Colorado Kid.

I went into The Colorado Kid thinking it would be a classic noir story - instead, what is presented is a story, as told by the characters, about an event that's already happened. Not only had it already happened - it happened over twenty years before the events(?) of the novel. And, to top it off, I felt a bit robbed after the last page was over. 

I read the novel in three hours, mostly because I wanted to get through it quickly and not make it a multi-day read. No need to stretch it out - it basically amounted to sitting down to coffee with grandpa and having him tell you a story. You don't need multiple days for that. You barely need two cups of coffee for it.

I had a difficult time imagining that this was the novel that led to the creation of Haven, which was a television series that aired on SyFy for five seasons. A little wikipedia-ing reveals that the series is loosely based on the novel and, subsequent reading of the television series synopsis leads me to think it actually has nothing to do with and nothing in common with the source material. Having never watched it, I can't say for certain either way (and am not super likely to check it out, to be honest). 

King acknowledges in the afterword that readers will either love it or hate it, with no one in between. I challenge the statement - as I neither loved it nor hated it. The Colorado Kid would have been more interesting had it been told when the The Colorado Kid first popped up on the shore and before the majority of the key players - of which there are three - have had time to come to their own conclusions based on twenty years of of mulling it over. A lot of the mystery was lost, or uninteresting, to me because of this, and so it didn't seem particularly motivating to continue reading. I hate to be critical of my modern literary idol - true, it would have been a far different story had he approached it differently - but until I have the body of work published that he does, I may as well keep my mouth shut.

The Colorado Kid was not a bad novel. For me, suffered from being English Breakfast when I wanted an Earl Grey - gross, how did I extend an already dated metaphor? Anyway, I will leave it at that.