362. The Colorado Kid

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Stephen King

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller, Novella

205 pages, published October 4, 2005

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Colorado Kid is a novella by master storyteller Stephen King that centers around an unsolved mystery.  On an island off the coast of Maine, a man is found dead. There’s no identification on the body.  It’s more than a year before the man is identified and the more that is learned about the man and the bizarre circumstances of his death, the less that is understandable.  It seems like an impossible crime.

Quotes 

“Sometimes loving eyes don’t see what they don’t want to see.”

 

“Forty seemed about right, and it occurred to me that it’s too bad for a fella to die at forty, a real shame. It’s a man’s most anonymous age.”

 

“Here I am, ninety years old and ready for the cooling board, using a brand new Macintosh computer, and there you sit, twenty-two and gorgeous, fresh as a new peach, yet scrawling on a yellow legal pad like an old maid in a Victorian romance.”

 

“Well then, I’m going to tell you a secret almost every newspaper man and woman who’s been at it awhile knows: in real life, the number of actual stories – those with beginnings, middles, and ends – are slim and none. But if you can give your readers just one unknown thing (two at the very outside) and then kick in what Dave Bowie there calls a musta-been, your reader will tell himself a story.”

 

“We poor humans are wired up to always think the worst is gonna happen because it so rarely does.”

 

“You go back to that old business the way a kid who’s lost a tooth goes back to the hole with the tip of his tongue.”

 

“It was that kind of story. The kind that’s like a sneeze which threatens but never quite arrives.”

 

“I like a woman who hasn’t decided the kitchen’s a place of slavery just because she works for a livin.” “I feel absolutely the same way about a man,” 

My Take

While I’m a big fan of Stephen King, I really didn’t enjoy The Colorado Kid that much.  Not enough story, character development and an unsatisfying ending.