by Jay Wilburn
The plan is to reread all of Stephen King’s works in the order that they were published. Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance had the vision. I’m doing it because I am a writer and I want to improve my fiction. And I love Stephen King’s stories. I think there is something to be learned through this process.
You can also go back to the beginning and read Before Carrie or any of my other posts up through this one and beyond by checking out this link to the Master List of all my #StephenKingRevisited posts.
I’m reading a worn-out discolored thrift store copy of the The Colorado Kid. The pages are fragile at their binding, so I turn them and hold the book with care. It feels weird to be dealing with a Stephen King story this small in my hands. Would have been longer if he had included an ending. There are a ton of blurbs in the front, a ton of book ads in the back, and a cardboard order card that got torn out in the middle.
In a short book, he spent a lot of time telling us how tips work in this Maine island restaurant as he introduces our characters for a story within the story that the old grizzled newspapermen are telling their beloved intern. There’s a bit of a passing of the torch going on here. The story within a story framework is reminiscent of From a Buick 8.
We have a 2005 reference to American Idol. A character from 1981 is quoted as mentioning Blockbuster Video which wasn’t around until 1985 and then only locally in a city in Texas. It’s possible the old guy telling the story was just interjecting his own asides into the tale, but the three people talking are newspaper people, so seems one of them would point out the anachronistic detail. Starbucks is mentioned too in relation to Boulder, Colorado which it doesn’t look like it expanded into until later. I think these detail misses are on the author and not the characters this time.
Dying at 40 is a shame, one character laments. It’s the most anonymous year.
People only want one unknown per story. Too many and there is no ease. They also want a “it must have been” so they can impose their own solution. Feature stories are the feelgood stories with a beginning, middle, and end. They feel good because they are over. Life doesn’t work that way typically, and King tells us here that he is more interested in the mystery instead of the solution.
The travel time in the story doesn’t check out and that is part of the mystery that baffles the characters for 25 years along with several other small details that don’t check out. I wonder if some of the “couldn’t possibly be” aspects of this story were some of the seeds for the storyline of The Outsider that would come later.
Over and over, the characters recounting the tale of the body, the framers of the story, warn us that there isn’t a story. I thought it was an interesting technique by King, but now I think he was preparing readers for where he intended to leave them.
My next post in this series will be Before Cell which will be linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.
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