The Colorado Kid by Stephen King

 

No purchase links, I am forcing you to go to your library.

The Colorado Kid

By Stephen King

184 pages published on October 4, 2005

Published by Hard Case Crime

Adaptation - Haven (2010)

Audio, approximately 3 and a half hours

Genre; mystery and crime fiction.

 

At the end of this very short novel, really it reads like a novella at best a short story at worst Stephen King tells the reader that this is one of those books which will be either loved or hated.

Turns out I loved it and I absolutely hate it when an author leaves it up to me to discover what really happens at the end of a book so my love for this story lies in exactly that fact, the fact that as a reader I need to do the following;

1 – Accept that life is messy and if art resembles life then we need to fact the fact that everything will not always be presented to us with a nice little bow on it.

2 – That I use my imagination the entire time while I am reading and asking me to use it a bit more is not a cop out, it is a challenge.

3 – That as a reader, a book comes to resemble life the moment I can place myself in a set setting, feeling the fog, smelling the tea for the Tiller man. 

4 – That as a reader I can use the available facts, remove them from the assumptions made by others about them and create a reality all my own.

Ok, so I loved this book, it tells you from the get go that YOU are not going to get a story from this.  In its stead King acts exactly like Teague, he guides you, wait for you to ask the correct question and then tells you only enough to mentally move onto the next question. 

This is no story it is a lesson.