The World’s Best-Selling Novelist is Back…
With an All-New Investigation into the Unkown.
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…
I read The Colorado Kid when it was first released and have not revisited it.
So why am I reviewing it now? Well, some months ago I started reviewing Hard Case Crime’s publications for the site. At that time, I had already read over twenty of their books. I may eventually review them all, which would require quite a bit of re-reading. The Colorado Kid is the only one that I can (almost) guarantee that I will never read again.
It’s great that Stephen King helped put a young publishing company on the map by giving them a paperback original–the publication of The Colorado Kid generated a lot of press for Hard Case Crime.
It’s also understandable why King went this route with the novel–his fans expect seven-hundred-page epics for their $30. Writing for Hard Case Crime allowed King to work in a different form. For Stephen King, a $5.99 two-hundred-page paperback is the equivalent of a B-side or a non-LP single.
King is nearly always a compelling read, and many readers will find themselves as engrossed in the tale of the Colorado Kid as Stephanie, the main character, does. The pages certainly flew by for me.
However, that is not enough. The Colorado Kid is an experiment, and experiments sometimes fail. The Colorado Kid is a failure. King went for ambiguous but instead got unsatisfying.
A valiant effort, though. Give it another shot, Steve?
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I agree, this is at best a very mediocre effort primarily because of its bad ending. Another problem, it doesnt give a very good representation of the HHC standard. It isn’t hard-boiled, or noir, and it isn’t excellent.
ITA Trent and Jesse. Were it not for the Stephen King name, HCC would have rejected The Colorado Kid without hesitation. It just doesn’t fit their milieu at all (despite the cover artist’s attempt to tart it up), and it isn’t very satisfying in its own right. I’ve never understood why King just didn’t write a straight-up pulp novel for them. He’s certainly capable.
Another complaint about TCC: King used to be good at using authentic pop-cultural touchstones to ground his fantastical plots in a world we all recognize. But in this one, the references are sloppy. Part of the story takes place in 1980, and yet characters visit both Starbucks and Blockbuster, neither of which existed yet.
King has actually addressed the Starbucks issue, claiming it’s a deliberate clue to something in the Dark Tower universe. But that explanation has always struck me as, well, BS.
Yep. HCC would have been very dumb not to have gone after anything written by SK. I’m glad they did because it’s helped HCC breakthrough into more publicity.