The Outsider

Published in 2018, The Outsider begins as a procedural crime novel: a beloved Little League coach named Terry Maitland is arrested in public for the brutal murder of a local boy. The evidence is overwhelming and irrefutable—fingerprints, DNA, eyewitnesses—but so is his alibi, which puts him in another city at the exact time of the crime. Retired detective Ralph Anderson, convinced of his guilt, watches the case collapse into impossibility.

About halfway through the novel, the investigation produces evidence that cannot be explained by normal means—a shape-shifting entity capable of assuming identities and leaving biological traces of people it has mimicked. The novel's first half operates as a tight police procedural; the second introduces Holly Gibney (from the Hodges trilogy) as a consultant who has seen this kind of thing before. The genre shift is gradual and effective.

Holly Gibney, the detective from the Bill Hodges trilogy, is a major character. The Outsider was adapted as an HBO limited series (2020), which King praised. HBO later developed a second season centered on Holly that is not based on any existing King novel.

El Cuco (also called the Outsider) is the entity at the heart of the novel—a shape-shifting being that absorbs the appearance and biological traces of its victims, then commits crimes in their form before moving on. It feeds on grief and terror. King draws on Latin American folklore around El Cuco (the boogeyman) but builds its mythology from scratch within the novel.