I lucked up and found a copy of Stephen King’s The Colorado Kid in an indy bookstore last summer, and I finally got around to reading it this month because between work, family, and writing, my time for recreational activities is pretty limited. What time I do have is divided between reading, knitting, and gaming, so my reading list is pretty backlogged. But! I do hope to make some inroads this summer, and I started things off with this slim volume.

The brief, non-spoilery version is that I liked it a lot. I’ve been a Stephen King fan for decades, although I don’t love everything he’s written. Sometimes, he can get a little too… vulgar for my tastes. Dreamcatcher is a notable example, although reading it when I was suffering from a stomach virus was probably not the best life choice I’ve ever made. But when he’s on, he is on, and I consider him to be an amazing storyteller. Maybe he’s not a “literary” writer — although I think some of his works come very close — but he’s a brilliant storyteller.

The Colorado Kid is not a horror story. It appears to be marketed as a mystery/crime story, but… it isn’t really that either. For readers who are familiar with King’s work, I’d say forget trying to categorize it in a particular genre and think of it as a story that’s close in style and tone to works like Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. This one is about people and about storytelling, and it’s got some really interesting things to say. And now I’m about to get more specific and spoilery, so I’ll put the rest behind a Read More.

Continue reading “The Colorado Kid, by Stephen King”