Why is that? No other writer, except perhaps James Michener, has had a writing career that was so long, popular, and prolific, as Stephen King. You might have been able to dismiss him as a popular hack back in the 1980s, but now that King is in his seventies, he is still producing novels that are astounding in terms of the quality of his language, the vividness of his characters, and the compulsive addictiveness of his stories. King's books are binge-worthy, and "just a few more pages" turns into an all-night read-a-thon with little effort.
This brings us to his latest effort, in which he continues to blend the mystery/crime genre with his patented supernatural territory in The Outsider. Set in a small town in Oklahoma, the local little league coach and popular high school English teacher Terry Maitland is arrested for the brutal rape and murder of a young boy. Multiple eyewitnesses seem to leave no doubt of his guilt. The problem is that he has an airtight alibi with an equal number of his own eyewitnesses. Unraveling the mystery of how the same person can be in two places at once takes us down a dark path into a legendary fear that becomes all too real for the characters involved.
Although King is vocally averse to the idea of plotting a novel, this book's plot is as intricate and as well thought-out as any Agatha Christie novel, and the mystery, once it is revealed, leads the group of characters to an inevitable and terrifying confrontation. What's amazing is how King is able to keep raising the bar on his own writing; he is, evidently, incapable of running out of ideas for new stories, and we are all the beneficiaries of his literary largesse.
One of the most wonderful things he has done as a writer is to have created his own fictional universe where characters from different stories cross over and take part. This is nothing new for him, as the villainous Randall Flagg shows up in multiple stories throughout the years. But his most recent set of stories has fully inhabited this world in ways that seem much more real, and when a character from books past appears to take part in the mystery, King fans will shout with glee upon the discovery. (No, I'm not spoiling any of it for you!)
Writers typically don't get better as they get older, but we need to embrace the idea that King is a once-in-a-century kind of genius, like Mozart or Einstein or Steve Jobs. Maybe you don't fancy a popular storyteller in the same atmosphere as other artistic or scientific geniuses, but consider the span of his career, the number of books and stories he's written, and the fact that after all of this, he's still creating novels that are just as good or better than the books he wrote at the height of his skills and popularity. Let's also not forget that in his own day, Shakespeare was considered a "popular" playwright. History often takes a good deal of time to render a fair and proper judgment.
Compare King to probably the other most popular living writer today, J.K. Rowling. She's written seven Harry Potter novels and four non-magical books in 21 years, but even I had to look up the titles and dates of her Muggle books. Since 1997, when the first Harry Potter book was published, Stephen King has published 39 different works, including 24 original novels. Among these include 11/22/63, Doctor Sleep, the Mr. Mercedes trilogy, and Sleeping Beauties, a collaboration with his son Owen, all of which should be considered in the same breath as The Stand, The Shining, or IT.
