After a month-long book, it was time for a quickie. Lucky me, Stephen King has just dropped off a pulpy crime drama that may not even be a crime. Although I’m going to have to leave that question open, I’ll say that The Colorado Kid delivers in a lot of other ways. It’s a story about telling a story: in the latter sense, it ranges across the country and twenty-five years, while in the former it never leaves a tiny, island newspaper office, except to go out on the deck and watch the ocean rolling in.

Weighing in at a slim-for-the-size 163 pages, it revisits a lot of the tropes that made King famous. Small-town Maine and its closely held secrets; that delicious accent that is so perfect for spinning a yarn; mysterious, incomprehensible events. It’s the first book since he finished the Dark Tower series and stopped writing books (well, obviously that’s not so, and I’m glad he’s still doing it; there’s another one in January, whee!), and I think perhaps he’s trying to revisit his earliest days, maybe get back on a new horse in the same saddle. I know I’m playing it close to the vest, but the nature of the story demands that I do. I can say that, as usual, it works.