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The Colorado Kid |
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The Colorado Kid |
Wanting might be better than knowing. With this sentence, located in the Afterword section of The Colorado Kid, Stephen King underlines everything that this small book has to say about the nature of mystery. It also goes a long way toward explaining one of King’s more fascinating recent motifs.
This novel (at 179 pages, it’s even shorter than Carrie), concerns the mystery of The Colorado Kid, a man discovered early one morning propped up against a garbage bin on the beach of Moose-Lookit Island, off the coast of Maine. Or, better, that mystery is at the center of the book … but it doesn’t really concern The Colorado Kid. As the characters state over and over, the story of The Colorado Kid isn’t really a story at all, in part because stories need a beginning, a middle, and an end. At the heart of this tale is an incident with no resolution, an unsolved mystery that remains unsolved, even after the turn of the last page.
King states in his Afterword that there are some readers who will be miffed by this lack of resolution. I am not one of them. Over in over in King’s oeuvre, King has stated that, “in real life, things work out ridiculously well most of the time.” I’ve always found that concept fascinating. Lately, King has been exploring another aspect of real life as it applies to fiction, namely that of loose ends that don’t get tied up. He employed this to great effect in From a Buick 8 and explored the concept a bit differently at the finale of The Dark Tower. What King seems to be saying in his more recent books is that wanting might be better than knowing; that the journey is more important than the destination.
And, boy, is the journey fun this time. Surrounding the mystery of The Colorado Kid is another, gently compelling story involving two old newspapermen – David Bowie and Lewis Teague, terrific in-jokey names – and one young newspaperwoman, named Stephanie McCann. Beginning with a clever opening that both introduces us to the characters and teases us with a duo of minor mysteries – these with explanations – to get us in the right mindset, the novel takes on a friendly, folksy quality, despite the fact of the dead body in the middle of things. Teague and Bowie are introducing Stephanie to the bafflement that is The Colorado Kid, but they’re also testing her, seeing if she’s fit to be “one of them,” even if she is from off-island. “School is in,” they tell her, and it’s to Stephanie’s credit that she’s not only willing to learn; she’s eager, somewhat to her chagrin.
What unfolds, then, is the tale of a dead body, where it was found, and an investigation into how it got there, told in a voice King knows and uses well. It’s the voice of the kindly old gent telling you a tale that might be scary and it might be hard to know … but it isn’t hard to hear. It’s the same voice you heard at the beginning of Needful Things: “You’ve been here before, sure you have.” It’s Paul Edgecomb’s voice in The Green Mile. It’s a down-home Yankee sort of storytelling, and as the plot quietly cycled into motion, I kind of wished that I could just sit back and hear these three talk some more before getting to matters. Just talk, about nothing in particular. It’s not a long book, but King obviously loves these characters, and we’re not five pages in before we love them, too. Then we have about a hundred and seventy pages to get to love them more.
I wonder what the reaction from fans will be. When From a Buick 8 came out, there were so many people up in arms over the lack of a concrete ending. They wrote the book off as one King didn't know how to finish; he then lazily chose to leave it as-is. In my experience with King, he has rarely if ever been lazy. If the story has no ending, there's a reason for it. Anyway, I suspect those critics will be fewer this time, in part because of the sheer, uncomplicated joy of just getting to know these new people, and in part because King explains himself a bit in his chatty Afterword. He not only backs up why he chose to let the mystery of The Colorado Kid go unsolved, but how he came up with the concept in the first place. In other words, even though we never know the answer to the mystery, King clears up the mystery behind the mystery, and that’s good enough for me.