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the complete review - fiction

The Colorado Kid

by
Stephen King

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : rambling little tale, more character study than traditional mystery

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "The Colorado Kid is a curious little production -- part talky drama, part Down East travelogue replete with linguistics lessons, and, if you can believe it, part philosophical inquiry, however unsophisticated. (...) It's hard to imagine crime-fiction devotees cottoning to this narratively spineless, sentimental yarn. In the end, with its canned laughter, virtuous and good-natured old gents, and pastel-colored language, it feels like nothing quite so much as a 1950s sitcom." - John Koch, Boston Globe
  
  
• "(A) taut tale filled with engaging characters and old-school suspense. It eschews trademark gore in favor of enchanting meditations on unsolved crimes and unresolved stories." - Erik Spanberg, Christian Science Monitor
  
  
• "(A) delightful homage to the golden age of mystery (.....) With a wonderful and deliberately inappropriate cover, this book will divide crime readers -- I loved it." - Maxim Jakubowski, The Guardian
  
  
• "If it were reduced to a fifth of its already slim size, The Colorado Kid would make an engaging lifestyle feature for Condé Nast Traveler magazine about the peculiarities of Maine's small islands. But a whodunit it isn't. (...) What this means, I think, is that The Colorado Kid is Stephen King's existential despair, his Nausea or Waiting for Godot, in which he equates the structural straitjackets of genre fiction with greedy fundamentalism." - Adam Parfrey, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "The Colorado Kid skims the surface pleasingly. It's a measure of how good King's storytelling is -- no news there -- that he's given us a mystery without a solution and not made us feel as if we've been cheated." - Charles Taylor, New York Newsday
  
  
• "I have to be honest and tell you it's a bit of a fraud. It is not a hard-boiled, noir thriller (.....) It is actually a rather sweet story" - Otto Penzler, The New York Sun
  
  
• "(I)t's a mystery that isn't a mystery so much as a book that comments on mysteries, designed to look like a midcentury pulp novel. And you thought Misery was postmodern." - Chelsea Cain, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Whether feeling cheated or angry, readers won't be shortchanged. The characters and dialogue in Kid are wry and lively. The recounting of the man's last days as well as the investigation into his death are artfully detailed." - Carol Memmott, USA Today
  
  
• "Sound modest ? It is, but it's also a small masterpiece, a powerful metafiction by a natural storyteller exploring the limits of his art. (...) (T)hese small weaknesses don't detract from the novel's great pleasure: its persistent and slyly self-aware subversion of the expectations all readers -- including the characters themselves -- bring to a detective story." - Jenny Davidson, Voice Literary Supplement
  
  
• "King has thus given us not only his novel but his review of it, and unsurprisingly he finds it a quite satisfactory, even fascinating piece of work. Well, ayuh, I beg to differ. King has perhaps earned the right to be perverse, and perhaps has loyal fans will love his "story-that- was-not-a-story," as he calls it, but I found The Colorado Kid agonizing." - Patrick Anderson, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The Colorado Kid is a story within a story, and in the end it is the telling that counts more than the mystery.
       Set on the Maine island of Moose-Lookit one day at the end of summer, the central characters are the trio that run the local paper, The Weekly Islander. Vince Teague and Dave Bowie are by now ancient men, and they've run the paper for decades; Stephanie McCann is the young intern barely out of college.
       A Boston Globe reporter was fishing for some good old stories -- unsolved mysteries and the like -- that he could use in a series, and the old folks served him up the familiar ones -- but it turns out they have one more story up their sleeves. It's not right for the Boston Globe, but they are willing to share it with Stephanie, and that's what the book mainly is: the two men spending the rest of the day recounting the story of the Colorado Kid.
       They warn Stephanie (and hence also the reader) what's in store:

    "Ayuh, the story of the Colorado Kid is a confusing tale, all right," Vince said, "which is why it wouldn't do for the Boston Globe, don'tcha know. Too many unknowns, to begin with. Not a single musta-been for another"

       Note: there is what appears to be a glaring error in the book, as Vince describes the last known actions of the murder victim in Colorado: he told a co-worker "he was goin around the corner to grab what he called 'a real coffee' at Starbucks". Since the setting is Colorado in 1980 this isn't possible -- the Starbucks-chain was a local Seattle-only phenomenon well into the 1980s (and even there only opened the first variation on the now ubiquitous coffee shops in 1984) and there were certainly no Starbucks in Colorado at the time.
       Possibly Vince is using 'Starbucks' as a generic coffee-house name, but given the attention he pays to detail otherwise this seems extremely unlikely. The more obvious reading is that this wrong fact is the central clue to where the crux of the mystery can be found: here is a person who gave inaccurate information, calling into question the other information he provided, helping to solve the puzzle. But since King doesn't follow this avenue this also appears unlikely. (The Starbucks is mentioned again -- "The Starbucks and the sandwich shop were side by side, and they really were right around the corner" -- suggesting someone had checked (or were they again relying on an unreliable witness (though it's not clear who vouched for this particular fact) ?).)
       Or maybe it really just is a mistake .....
       (It is particularly striking -- and enervating -- because King uses his old characters to wax somewhat nostalgic and show how times have changed -- the backward days of even 1980 (regarding everything from fingerprinting to tracking planes) are repeatedly harped on. Which is why it is so hard to believe this was simply a mistake on King's part.)

       Update: The official Stephen King site offers a Continuity Clarification from Stephen (scroll down to 7 October entry):

The review of The Colorado Kid in today’s issue of today's USA Today mentions that there was no Starbucks in Denver in 1980. Don’t assume that’s a mistake on my part. The constant readers of the Dark Tower series may realize that that is not necessarily a continuity error, but a clue.

       If it is a clue, we still can't figure out for what.

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Links:

• Hard Case Crime publicity page

• Bookreporter
• Boston Globe
• Charnel House
• Christian Science Monitor
• ColuMn
• Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind
• Crime Fiction Lover
• Ellsworth American
• Escape Pod
• Scott William Foley
• The Guardian
• Houston Chronicle
• The Los Angeles Times
• Lost in Books
• The OLD Luke Reviews
• The Onion
• Onyx reviews
• Pornokitsch
• Rambles
• Steel White Tubas
• Strange Horizons
• USA Today
• Voice Literary Supplement
• The Washington Post

• Official site

• Joyland

• See Index of Mysteries and Thrillers
• Other books from Hard Case Crime

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About the Author:

       American author Stephen King is among the world's most popular writers.

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© 2005-2013 the complete review

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