Stephen King
The Outsider

LA RECENSIONE

United States. Oklahoma. Flint City. July of an unknown year.

Frank Peterson, 12 years old, is raped with a tree branch and killed. The authorities easily identify the brutal murderer, but the law of men - rational and therefore fallible - stumbles, where 2 + 2 doesn't always make 4: it cannot be and yet it is, let logic go screw itself.

After all, King introduces it this way "the thought merely gives the world an appearance of order for anyone weak enough to convince himself that there really is an order" (C. Wilson, The Country of the Blind).

A electrifying beginning, with the first 200 pages shaking the guts, the continuation is adequate. From another point of view, straightforward writing, but it hits the mark; in short, it's not jazz, we're more in the realm of rock.

In these pages, the topos of the irreducibility of reality to rationality - that is, the unknown that tears apart ordinary American suburbs (the ancestral unease generated by this opposition is the hallmark of the King) - mixes with the mechanisms that drive criminal law, the extreme bulwark erected by the state against the evils that corrode society. It seems clear to King what criminal law ought to be: it's the most intolerant legal tool in the hands of the state and its use requires limits; however, criminal daily life - dealing with its demons - tosses the pamphlets of four old and senile Enlightenment philosophers down the toilet. Now, in the hunt for the monster, is the head of some innocent person expendable, or do we accept the risk of letting the guilty go free? Tertium non datur, welcome to Flint City, Oklahoma, United States.

As for me, "let's pose the famous question: what would we give if we learned that for the health of the people [...] there was somewhere a man, an innocent man, who is condemned to eternal torture? We might consent to it on condition that a magic potion made us forget it, provided we knew nothing more about it: but if we must know it [...] tell us that this man is subjected to atrocious tortures so that we might exist, that this is a condition of existence in general, oh no, better to accept that nothing exists anymore, better to let the planet blow up [...]" (S. Satta, The mystery of the trial, in Riv. dir. proc. pen., 1949, I, p. 288).