The Colorado Kid is definitely not your typical Stephen King novel. For a start, it’s not scary, there’s no sci-fi or dystopian element, and there’s nothing supernatural here. It’s pulp fiction and an interesting crime noir.
It opens in 2005, when a young female newspaper intern on a small island in Maine is chatting to her two colleagues, who have lived on the island their whole lives, discussing the subject of local unsolved mysteries. They tell her the story of the man they nicknamed the Colorado Kid, a young man who was found dead on the beach one early morning in 1980. The story revolves not only around identifying the man and finding out how he died, but also what he was doing there in the first place.
Due to the fact that the story is being told 25 years after it happened, there is no sense of urgency or danger, it’s just an interesting story. Although it’s not typical Stephen King fare, you can feel his writing come through – mainly in the description of the small town characters with their quirks and idiosyncrasies, and of course the fact that, like so many of his stories it is set in Maine.
It’s short – coming in at 180 pages, but in reality not even that, as my copy had a long introduction from the publisher, so the story itself actually started around 30 pages in, and there are several full-page illustrations of events throughout the book.
It’s not classic crime and it’s not one of King’s best, but as his books always do, it pulled me in and held my interest throughout. I also really liked the typically pulpy cover picture! Recommended to Stephen King fans as well as those who might not always enjoy his books, but like crime fiction.
Between the Pages 