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Stephen King doesn’t hold his audience in contempt and if he thinks he’s smarter than you, he doesn’t let his work suffer for it.
But he respects a good story, and he respects his readers enough to present it to them.
In an era of reshoots, recuts and the increasingly feedback-obsessed nature that being a fan of media entails, it can be somewhat refreshing to read a book and absorb it.
So in the year 2019, we get a reissue of a half-forgotten Stephen King book written for Hard Case Crime.
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Hard Case Crime is a publisher dedicated to reviving the idea of the old pulp paperbacks.
Whether it’s a new release or a reprinting of a lost classic or anything in between, Hard Case Crime supplies entertaining books evocative of a simpler time of dime-stores and penny arcades. Every volume is gifted with a hand-painted cover of a scantily-clad woman and a yellow label seal of quality, most of these volumes are exclusively available in paperback.
Hard Case Crime promised short sharp books that one could breeze through in an hour or two whether it’s a novelisation of an abandoned James Bond screenplay by Donald Westlake or an out of print Michael Crichton thriller. So you can see how Stephen King with his roots in pulp* would be an ideal fit. Sure enough The Colorado Kid’s publication gave a good publicity boost to the imprint.
But his first book for the label was weird.
It was short.
And the mystery wasn’t even solved at the end.
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Quick summary.
Two newspapermen test their intern’s power of deduction by showing how not tipping a waitress can wind up getting her more money by way of sympathy and state tax laws.
Then they tell her about an unsolvable mystery. Although there are some clues, they paint an impossible picture. Everyone moves on.
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In 2005, a bystander could be forgiven for thinking Stephen King was retiring.
Ridiculous now, but less so then.
For one thing his near fatal accident in 1999 had slowed his output to a crawl and new damage would continue to be discovered throughout the following years, necessitating further surgery.
His first post-crash release, On Writing reads much like a stock take of King’s life at the turn of the century, hitting artist adulthood. Reading it, you wonder where King has to go from here.
Maybe he’d retire to the south of France to become a painter and let the movie royalties roll in.
2002’s From A Buick 8 looked like another warning sign.
King said in publicity material that Buick “so far as I know [is] the last Stephen King novel, per se, in terms of it just being a novel-novel.”
Indeed, Buick positioned itself as a kind of anti-narrative where King appeared to be questioning the point of putting a story together at times.
Furthermore, his biggest hitter was winding down after over thirty years.
The career-spanning Dark Tower series drew to a close with three gargantuan volumes published back to back during 2003-4, after spending much of the previous decade bleeding into almost everything else King had written.
Thematically, The Colorado Kid is of a piece with King’s early 2000s body of work.
It and From A Buick 8 are practically novelised thesis’s on how life and stories can sometimes just run at parallel with one another.
Mind you, it’s like King looked and Buick and went “you thought that fucked with your expectations? Watch this!” before writing Colorado Kid.
As the new millennium dawned, so did King turn inwards upon questioning the idea of the story itself.
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Who is the Colorado Kid? How did he choke to death on a piece of red meat after eating a fish supper? Why did he have a russian coin in his pocket? Why does his cigarette packet have the tax stamp from another state on it?
Every question opens another dead-end of theories. Nothing quite adds up in life, there’s no third act reveal telling you who did it.
You can superimpose a beginning, middle and end over a life and maybe it’d work, but The Colorado Kid shows that King can appreciate that sometimes it won’t, and hopes you can too.
The Dark Tower’s ending features a disclaimer that you might not like how it goes before those fateful pages.
The Colorado Kid warns you in-story of this and invites you to enjoy the mystery and characters in knowledge of this fact.
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Now this was all in 2005, fan and critic culture weren’t quite so intertwined but well on their way. Is the idea that sometimes the best ending isn’t the ‘right’ ending perhaps no longer relevant?
Well, take a look at the current state of major franchises such as Star Wars and Game Of Thrones and decide for yourself.
You won’t unravel the mystery, but sometimes that’s not what the story is necessarily about and in a time where we seem ever more obsessed with spoilers, foreshadowing and creators trying to outsmart their audiences, The Colorado Kid is more relevant than ever.
Sit and read it in an hour.
Maybe you’ll like it, maybe you won’t.
One thing it doesn’t feel like is compromise.
* Thinking about it now, King’s Mr. Mercedes saga wouldn’t have been a bad fit for the imprint either.
I realise this is fast-becoming a King-centric blog.
Next post will be non-King related.
I realise this is fast-becoming a King-centric blog.
Next post will be non-King related.
