The Outsider
Stephen King, Penguin
Stephen King is not the first novelist to write a book called The Outsider. His most famous predecessor is Albert Camus, if you accept that something in the original French title L'Etranger has been lost in translation: Wikipedia says "The Stranger"; Penguin publishing house says "The Outsider".
Camus was an inspiration for many authors, not least England's Colin Wilson whose own book The Outsider is a deeply personal critical appreciation of the alienated hero in literature. Wilson was thinking about Camus, Dostoevsky and Sartre, but also about himself: he worked by day in the British Library; by night he was sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath, separated from his family, his girlfriend and a sense of creative purpose. What began as a diary became a fragmented attempt to discover why Wilson "[felt] totally cut off from the rest of society," – and why "an inner compulsion had forced me into this position of isolation".
It is Wilson's The Outsider that King quotes in the epigraph of his new novel of the same name, although he doesn't name it explicitly, preferring instead to attribute the opening chapter, The Country of the Blind: "Thought only gives the world an appearance of order to anyone weak enough to be convinced by its show."
Wilson could be aiming an arrow at the heart of King’s writing, which over the course of 60 novels and countless stories has convinced us that the quotidian surface of the world (brand names, cars, school, work, relationships) conceals wild demons that want to devour us, body and soul.
The Outsider, one of King's growing number of crime novels, shuffles this pack of cards in new ways. Terry Maitland is the prime suspect in the torture, rape and murder of 11-year-old Frederick Peterson. His DNA and rare-ish blood are all over the crime scene and also in a white van that both victim and perpetrator were seen entering on the day of the killing.
The police, in the person of Detective Ralph Anderson, is so convinced they have the right man they arrest him in full view of spectators at a baseball match. Any qualms Anderson feels are overcome by sheer rage at the callousness of the crime. What really matters is that no one bothers to talk to the suspect or inquire about trifles like alibis.
Which is a shame, at least for Anderson and District Attorney Bill Samuels: because at the moment that Peterson was being killed, Maitland was many miles away in Cap City. Reliable witnesses will attest to this fact, which is also verified by film – Maitland was recorded at a book reading by Harlan Coben. At one point he even asks a question.
Later, the same unbreakable forensic evidence that convicts Maitland of murder in one location exonerates him in another: his fingerprint is found on a book. "How weird can this get?" Maitland will ask himself. "Weirder," he is told by Holly Gibney, who should know from her work in earlier King horror-crime hybrids like Mr Mercedes.
The premise feels like a hangover from the Golden Age of Crime Writing, when authors like Agatha Christie got their kicks from navigating their way out of impossible scenarios.
King does it brilliantly, albeit in his own inimitable style. When Jonathan Ritz describes the horror of finding Peterson's body, he ratchets up the tension by digressions into his marriage and memories of his high school nickname (Ritz Cracker). Here is King's modus operandi in a few pages. Lull us into a false of security with gentle ramblings about the everyday, then stab us in the back with nastiness that surpasses understanding.
What imbues The Outsider's puzzle with emotional depth is not the murder but the murderer. Maitland is a cornerstone of a tight-knit community, not only a teacher but a baseball coach to generations of boys. The brutality of the crime is only the start of Maitland's apparent transgression; he has betrayed the trust of everyone he knew and who trusted him. Or has he?
While this friction between the ordinary and extraordinary introduces the novel's strength, the same tension comprises its central problem. Having crafted his "impossible" crime with such painstaking attention to detail, King whets one's appetite for a suitably satisfying explanation. It is worth recalling Ronald Knox's 10 rules for a Golden Age crime.
While the list is marred by the racist anachronism of "No Chinaman must figure in the story" – in reality a clumsy assault on cliched villains – Knox essentially outlines fair rules of engagement between author and reader: "The detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover," and "No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
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Number two of Knox's calls to logic is: "All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course." Here is where King stumbles, not just in the face of outmoded critical mores but the intelligence of modern-day readers. For the second-half of The Outsider drifts inexorably towards a soup of police procedure and supernatural.
What made King’s premise so unnerving was an agreed set of fundamentally realistic possibilities and characters. The subsequent introduction of a shapeshifting bogeyman (the outsider) seemed less a matter of philosophy (although that Wilson epigraph strains towards one) than a last resort. Unable to untie his own knotty premise, King simply severs it with an incredible, if metaphorical monster.
What The Outsider tramples on is King's fine sense of the commonplace and unexpected. His best work (The Shining, Carrie, Christine), prepared you for the incredible with hints and nudges. Here you feel like a pile of mind-boggling objects has fallen onto your head from the top of an otherwise boringly usual wardrobe. This is a shame as The Outsider is one of King's best novels in a while.
Sadly, all this meticulous work was deflated by a video nasty intended to "haunt [our] dreams for years to come," but whose unmasking suggests a bad impersonation of Michael Jackson's video for Black or White. Sometimes, a book's bite is worse than its bark.
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ICC Women's T20 World Cup Asia Qualifier 2025, Thailand
UAE fixtures
May 9, v Malaysia
May 10, v Qatar
May 13, v Malaysia
May 15, v Qatar
May 18 and 19, semi-finals
May 20, final
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Price, base / as tested Dh99,000 / Dh132,000
Engine 3.6L V6
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Power 275hp @ 6,000rpm
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Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson
Director: Todd Phillips
Rating: 2/5
Indoor cricket World Cup:
Insportz, Dubai, September 16-23
UAE fixtures:
Men
Saturday, September 16 – 1.45pm, v New Zealand
Sunday, September 17 – 10.30am, v Australia; 3.45pm, v South Africa
Monday, September 18 – 2pm, v England; 7.15pm, v India
Tuesday, September 19 – 12.15pm, v Singapore; 5.30pm, v Sri Lanka
Thursday, September 21 – 2pm v Malaysia
Friday, September 22 – 3.30pm, semi-final
Saturday, September 23 – 3pm, grand final
Women
Saturday, September 16 – 5.15pm, v Australia
Sunday, September 17 – 2pm, v South Africa; 7.15pm, v New Zealand
Monday, September 18 – 5.30pm, v England
Tuesday, September 19 – 10.30am, v New Zealand; 3.45pm, v South Africa
Thursday, September 21 – 12.15pm, v Australia
Friday, September 22 – 1.30pm, semi-final
Saturday, September 23 – 1pm, grand final
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Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
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Micro-retirement is not a recognised concept or employment status under Federal Decree Law No. 33 of 2021 on the Regulation of Labour Relations (as amended) (UAE Labour Law). As such, it reflects a voluntary work-life balance practice, rather than a recognised legal employment category, according to Dilini Loku, senior associate for law firm Gateley Middle East.
“Some companies may offer formal sabbatical policies or career break programmes; however, beyond such arrangements, there is no automatic right or statutory entitlement to extended breaks,” she explains.
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If an employee resigns to pursue micro-retirement, the employment contract is terminated, and the employer is under no legal obligation to rehire the employee in the future unless specific contractual agreements are in place (such as return-to-work arrangements), which are generally uncommon, Ms Loku adds.
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The National's picks
4.35pm: Tilal Al Khalediah
5.10pm: Continous
5.45pm: Raging Torrent
6.20pm: West Acre
7pm: Flood Zone
7.40pm: Straight No Chaser
8.15pm: Romantic Warrior
8.50pm: Calandogan
9.30pm: Forever Young
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Starring: Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Javier Bardem
Director: Joseph Kosinski
Rating: 4/5
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Name: Thndr
Started: 2019
Co-founders: Ahmad Hammouda and Seif Amr
Sector: FinTech
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What can victims do?
Always use only regulated platforms
Stop all transactions and communication on suspicion
Save all evidence (screenshots, chat logs, transaction IDs)
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Courtesy: Crystal Intelligence
Day 1, Abu Dhabi Test: At a glance
Moment of the day Dimuth Karunaratne had batted with plenty of pluck, and no little skill, in getting to within seven runs of a first-day century. Then, while he ran what he thought was a comfortable single to mid-on, his batting partner Dinesh Chandimal opted to stay at home. The opener was run out by the length of the pitch.
Stat of the day – 1 One six was hit on Day 1. The boundary was only breached 18 times in total over the course of the 90 overs. When it did arrive, the lone six was a thing of beauty, as Niroshan Dickwella effortlessly clipped Mohammed Amir over the square-leg boundary.
The verdict Three wickets down at lunch, on a featherbed wicket having won the toss, and Sri Lanka’s fragile confidence must have been waning. Then Karunaratne and Chandimal's alliance of precisely 100 gave them a foothold in the match. Dickwella’s free-spirited strokeplay meant the Sri Lankans were handily placed at 227-4 at the close.
A timeline of the Historical Dictionary of the Arabic Language
- 2018: Formal work begins
- November 2021: First 17 volumes launched
- November 2022: Additional 19 volumes released
- October 2023: Another 31 volumes released
- November 2024: All 127 volumes completed
Mohammed bin Zayed Majlis
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
THE CLOWN OF GAZA
Director: Abdulrahman Sabbah
Starring: Alaa Meqdad
Rating: 4/5
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Tips to stay safe during hot weather
- Stay hydrated: Drink plenty of fluids, especially water. Avoid alcohol and caffeine, which can increase dehydration.
- Seek cool environments: Use air conditioning, fans, or visit community spaces with climate control.
- Limit outdoor activities: Avoid strenuous activity during peak heat. If outside, seek shade and wear a wide-brimmed hat.
- Dress appropriately: Wear lightweight, loose and light-coloured clothing to facilitate heat loss.
- Check on vulnerable people: Regularly check in on elderly neighbours, young children and those with health conditions.
- Home adaptations: Use blinds or curtains to block sunlight, avoid using ovens or stoves, and ventilate living spaces during cooler hours.
- Recognise heat illness: Learn the signs of heat exhaustion and heat stroke (dizziness, confusion, rapid pulse, nausea), and seek medical attention if symptoms occur.
The Outsider
Stephen King, Penguin
