While the show mercifully spares the audience of the gory details of the inciting crime at its center, The Outsider is still plenty dark, both metaphorically and literally. Someone has brutally assaulted and murdered preteen Frankie Peterson. CSI: Georgia Jason Bateman in ‘The Outsider.’ The Outsider, at least in its first two episodes, is one of the better King adaptations of the last few years. Those who haven’t read the novel might wonder when the show is going to pick up, but those experiencing King Fatigue need not worry. So far, the show leans heavily on the procedural elements.

King’s novel is part police procedural and part supernatural horror. In the HBO adaptation of The Outsider, that great good hasn’t showed up yet, at least not in the first two episodes. In his 2018 novel The Outsider, King doubles down on that theme until he blows it wide open, creating a world where supernatural bad commingles with a great good. Horrific creatures are nothing compared with the banality of pure human evil. But equally convincing details back up his solid alibi that he was 70 miles away at the time.Stephen King’s work has long been concerned with the concept that the worst horrors in the world are the everyday atrocities we commit against one another. Eyewitness, forensic and video evidence place him at the scene. Bateman’s affable everyman charm makes the dilemma of Terry Maitland even more disturbing when he is arrested, very publicly, for the horrific murder of a young boy.

Sunday’s two-hour opener, directed by and starring Jason Bateman ( Ozark), is an instantly riveting exercise in emotional suspense, trapping a nice-guy small-town coach in a Hitchcockian “wrong man” nightmare. This is because the 2018 novel, and writer Richard Price’s excellent adaptation for HBO, follow one of the horror master’s cardinal rules: Make you care first, the better to scare you later. I’m a sucker for a good Stephen King story, and The Outsider is one of his better recent efforts. Ask Matt: ‘Outsider,’ ‘Conners,’ Tom Bergeron and ‘Jeopardy!,’ ‘Chicago Med’ and Pandemic TV & More.

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Stephen king the outsider review