What You Have Heard Is True

The Outsider, COVID-19 & a new spin on Lit Pics

Well, my friends, we’ve come to the end. Or have we? 

I’m talking about the season finale of HBO’s The Outsider, which aired on Sunday night, wrapping up the mini-series and leaving viewers with a satisfying conclusion and lots of questions. 

Each week horror aficionado Ryan Bradford and I discuss the latest episode, alternating between Message from the Underworld and Ryan’s newsletter, Awkward SD, which you should subscribe to immediately. 

Episode 9 ended with a cliffhanger: Jack, a trained sniper, opens fire on the crew of concerned citizens of Cherokee City who have come to Cecil to flush the outsider from the caves. 

Alec Pelley was killed in the previous episode and Seale Bolton, Howard Salomon, and Andy Katcavage all get taken out (Yunis Sablo is wounded) during the shoot out at the beginning of Episode 10. Their response to Jack’s attack is panicky and disorganized. In other words: realistic. Not even the seasoned law enforcement officers in the group can mount much of a defense.

Jacks puts Holly in his crosshairs, but can’t pull the trigger. Is there some vestige of humanity left in Jack or does Holly have some kind of inexplicable influence here? If Jack knows the answer, it dies with him. After being bit by a rattlesnake he comes down from his sharpshooter’s perch and blows himself away. 

Ralph and Holly go into the cave to confront the outsider once and for all. Although they’re armed, they can’t shoot the creature, now completely resembling Claude Bolton, without bringing the cave down on top of them. Holly tries to learn more about the outsider when Claude, grief stricken over his brother’s death, walks in with a shotgun and blows the outsider away. Both Claude and the outsider are injured during the ensuing rock fall. Claude will survive. But what about the outsider?

Not taking any chances, Holly uses Ralph’s knife to stab the creature in the heart, killing the creature for good. Or does she? After seeing a pair of ghosts (what I like to call a message from the underworld) Ralph goes back inside the cave system and smashes the outsider’s head with a rock. 

This kicks off a long series of scenes where the concerned citizens get their stories straight, cover up the creature’s true identity, and try to get on with their lives. In the last scene, we see Holly at home where the camera lingers on a long scratch on her arm, suggesting the story is far from over…

Jim Ruland: So let's start with the shoot out and it's very high body count. Did things play out the way you expected?

Ryan Bradford: More or less. I was kind of holding out hope that the show would spare at least one of the characters that the book didn’t, but instead we got a higher body count than what was in the book. And that made me sad because I cared about all those characters. 

But damn. What an insanely tense sequence. I was literally on the edge of my seat the whole time. This show will go down as having some of my favorite sequences in TV, and watching that shootout— the violence, the scramble, the drooling-drunk Jack—is up there. What about you? 

JR: Not a lot of surprises but still somewhat unexpected. I’m surprised the cops didn’t have a more coordinated response, but they all kind of did their own thing and most of them were killed. So much for the good guy with a gun theory.

One thing I didn’t like was Holly walking into the crossfire and facing off with Jack. What was that about? And how did she “know” that Jack was done? One of my friends I watched the episode with said afterwards, “So Holly’s a mystic now?”

RB: Yeah, that was weak, as was her whole "GODDAMN YOU!" that made Jack stop firing, as was Jack's sudden change of heart. Definitely some Hollywood melodramatic schmaltz in all of that. Besides that, I liked the chaotic response on the cops' part, and I found the way that scene was shot/cut very disorienting (in a good way). 

JR: I was expecting them to make more of the rattlesnake but that’s neither here nor there.

RB: I feel throughout this whole conversation, we've probably disagreed the most about Jack. How did you feel about his ending? How do you feel about his character as a whole now that it's over? 

JR: I think we agree a lot about the character: he's definitely an improvement over the version we encounter in the novel and ultimately he's a victim of the outsider just like everybody else. There were episodes that you enjoyed more than others and vice versa but that's to be expected. 

My chief complaint is that we never really had a clear sense of how the outsider was controlling him and why he could never bring himself to carry out his orders with respect to Holly. We can infer that he isn't all bad if his best friend is fellow police officer Tamika Collins and he has some kind of mommy issue or else the outsider wouldn't have staged that fight scene with his mother. So maybe that's why he couldn't bring himself to hurt Holly? Perhaps that's his virtue: he'd never hurt a woman. Although I'm reluctant to use the word virtue to describe Jack. 

RB: Jack is super complicated, but I never felt like he was never complex—in both the novel and show. I feel like King and the show's writers kind of had him at their whim to be as evil as they needed for their particular needs. That character did have some great moments—like I said, I liked drunken rampage Jack ("Motherrrrrr nature!"), and feel like that was the one of the few times the show actually had some dark, twisted fun. 

JR: I think Episode 8 was very dark and fun: the outsider throwing a bone at Jack in the cave or when the outsider tells him the fisherman he killed is full of cancer and Jack quips, "Well, he won't have that to worry about anymore." 

RB: I never fully understood the outsider's reach over him, or what exactly their relationship was apart from a general parasitic one. 

JR: Ditto, but I have a theory. 

RB: What about the cave showdown with the actual outsider. Did you like it? 

JR: I did but it was pretty chill for a final showdown scene. I get that it was a different mood than the pants-shitting terror of a maniac taking pot shots at you, your vehicle, and your dead friends, but it was kind of a come down. Why show all those scenes of the outsider howling like a wildcat if he's just going to mosey up and be all folksy? I think it's a good thing the writers didn't have Claude shoot the outsider, trigger a cave-in, and then have the creature disappear. Is he under the rubble or did he escape? Tune in next season and find out! That would have been lame. 

RB: I'm just so, so thankful they didn't kill the outsider with a sock full of... whatever. Spoiler for people who haven't read the book: Holly pulls a sock weapon out of her jacket and smashes the outsider's face with it. It's so dumb and random it made me hate everything that I had read before it.

JR: I was already hating the book at that point and the old homemade cudgel trick was just another eye roll for me.

RB: You're right that the cave showdown is super chill, but I liked the strangeness of outsider Claude. There was something primal and off about him, whereas in the book he's kind of like this loquacious bore. I'm glad we got a good head smashing, nonetheless, and I really liked Claude's "dead possum" makeup. 

JR: I think it's weird whenever a monster or alien in human skin starts running its mouth and ends up sounding like every bad guy at the end of every bad movie. Just once I'd like to see the impersonator crumble under the pressure of trying to imitate a human and yell "Potato salad!" and try to bite someone's face off. 

RB: So, let's get to some of the questions I had: What do you think it means when Holly asks "Who's Terry?" And do you have any answers for why Ralph saw the ghosts of his son and the Maitland shooter boy in the cave? 

JR: I've been thinking about this a lot. Obviously, Holly didn't forget who Terry Maitland is. Remembering is her super power, so to speak, so I think we can rule that out. She's just been through a severe trauma and had to tiptoe around a body farm when she left the cave so I'm willing to cut her some slack. But are you ready for this? I don't think it was Holly in the cave. I think it was a doppelgänger from a second outsider. 

At the very end of the episode we see Holly with a scratch. Did she get the scratch while she was stabbing the outsider? It didn't look like it. Plus, we know it takes time for the creature to transform. I think it's an old scratch. She usually wears long sleeves so the scratch could have come at any time and we wouldn't have seen it. But I think it was long enough ago that this second outsider had time to change into Holly and go into the cave to hunt the first outsider. 

All of the questions "Holly" asks make sense in this context. Who are you? What is your name? Who cares? Well, another outsider, obvs. Ralph and Claude just want to blow it away, but “Holly” wants to interrogate it. Plus, remember what she says near the end about it takes an outsider to know an outsider. 

There are plenty of holes in this theory as it involves Holly and "Holly" switching places at some point. Maybe after the shootout when Holly is freaked out over Andy's death and the second outsider swoops in while she grieves? IDK.

Or maybe the second outsider ("Holly") is actually trying to protect the first outsider ("Claude"). Her stabbing of the outsider is just for show and it knows it. Then, when Ralph sees the ghosts, he know the outsider is still alive and playing mind games so he goes back and finishes him off. During this time the second outsider goes back outside and slips away. I mean it is kind of strange that they split up at that moment, right? 

RB:  [Keanu Reeves voice] Whoa. You're blowing my mind, but also I have very little patience for twists in films and shows, and I feel that any twist that requires this much thought is probably more the result of lazy writing than anything profound. I think you're onto something with the timeline and logistics, but it's still kinda shitty to do to the audience. If I were to watch the episode would I be able to point out the scenes of Holly vs. Not-Holly? I don't think so. 

JR: If a second outsider compromised Holly, I don't think that's lazy writing, especially when you consider that if it takes several weeks to make the transformation, Holly would have been cut a long time ago. Maybe as far back as Dayton or New York. And if you think about it, her flat affect, loner nature, and awkward social interactions makes her the perfect person for the outsider to impersonate. Why is Holly acting like a weirdo? Because that’s how she always acts. 

RB: But we do know that Holly is not Holly at the end—what with the scratch, the line about Terry, and the fact that she's listening to music (she never listens to music). 

JR: Well, that's Holly at the end. The scratch seems to indicate the outsider has copied her, not replaced her. Then again, sometimes a scratch is just a scratch...

RB: All in all, did you like this episode? Did you like this series? What did you learn about yourself along the way? 

JR: I liked the show. I wasn't always patient with it. I don't know if that's because it's based on a book I didn't enjoy. That probably made me less willing to suspend my disbelief. I think I can be a pretty unsophisticated viewer at times because I love story. I always want to know what's going to happen next, and because I so often felt like I knew the answer to that, I wasn't as invested. 

RB: RB: For the most part, I loved The Outsider, and I'll definitely watch it if there's a second season. The more I think about it, though, the more I kind of think the finale shit the bed. I definitely dug the bonkersness of the gun fight, but the cave showdown felt a little anti-climatic for me. And then, the open-endedness of it was just confusing and not really in a thought-provoking way.  Would you watch a second season of The Outsider? 

JR: I would watch a second season, but I'm not reading any more of Stephen King's books. I felt like the novel was poorly put together and very corny. I mean King has incredible resources he's not taking advantage of. There are amazing writers in his own family. He could literally email any writer in the world and ask for notes. Who's going to say, "Um, no Steve, I'm busy." Instead of being in a hurry to crank out the next book maybe he should spend more time in the worlds he creates. 

RB: I think you're the second person that I've turned off of Stephen King's books, and I wonder if that's because you didn't grow up reading them. Or correct me if you did. 

JR: I read several of King’s books when I was in the Navy. I got in a lot of trouble and was frequently restricted to the ship, and Stephen King, along with Dean Koontz and Mary Higgins Clark, kept me company. 

RB: I've found that getting adults to like and appreciate King is very hard. You rarely meet anyone who gets into King as an adult, but this is what I was reading when I was, say, 11 or 12, so it's a lot like comfort food for me, and I'm a lot more forgiving of his corniness. Sorry you hate King. 

JR: It’s not hate. It’s an intense meh. If there's another season of The Outsider, should we do this again? 

RB: I'd do Inside the Outsider with you again, Jim. I feel like we learned a lot about each other. It's not exactly the outsider we found at the end, but the friends we made along the way.

Lit Picks for March 12-18

It’s been a very difficult week. Like many people I fretted over travel plans. I was planning on going home to visit my mother in Virginia, but she has a lung condition that puts her in the high-risk group for COVID-19. We decided to postpone my visit. It was an easy call to make, but a disappointing one. 

I know that many of you have had tougher decisions to make and/or have been at the mercy of institutions that have been slow to react to this global health crisis (Hi, AWP). We’re all in the same boat. I think it’s important to remember that. 

I just got back from a short road trip to Northern California for an assignment. Over the past few days I’ve spent a great deal of time in my car listening to audio books and looking at the scenery. I was mostly offline for 48 hours and when I returned to San Diego today it felt different. Friends from around the country have reported on how quiet it is, even in Manhattan. 

When I look back at last week’s newsletter, I seem so certain about my travel plans. The world seems a lot more uncertain now. 

With these developments in mind, I’ve been thinking about authors with books that came out this week. What a strange time to publish a book. Many of these authors have had events cancelled or will have lower than expected turnouts. Plus, people are more than a little distracted right now. 

That said, I don’t feel right about encouraging people to gather at social events at this particular moment in time. So instead of posting links to events, here are some previews of books that came out this week. Please know these aren’t endorsements, but my modest attempt to raise awareness about books that are being negatively impacted by COVID-19.

If something catches your attention, consider ordering the book online from your favorite retailer or requesting it from your local library. 

The Gringa by Andrew Altschul (Melville House Press). The Gringa has been getting some good buzz and received a starred review from Booklist. I enjoyed Andrew’s novel Deus Ex Machina and he read at Vermin on the Mount *checks notes* a decade ago. Here’s what the publisher has to say about his latest: “Leonora Gelb came to Peru to make a difference, but her beliefs are tested when she falls in with a violent revolutionary faction, and becomes the victim of a sham trial that sends her to prison for life. Ten years later, Andres is struggling to write her story. Is Leonora an activist or a terrorist? Cold-eyed conspirator or naïve puppet? And who is he to decide?” 

Deceit and Other Possibilities: Stories by Vanessa Hua (Counterpoint). Speaking of Vermin on the Mount, I’ve been trying to coordinate an event with Vanessa for years. So of course I’m excited about this collection, which is an expanded edition of the book originally published by Willow Books in 2016. Story collections always get less press than novels and memoirs, so put this one on your radar.

Liberating Sápmi: Indigenous Resistance in Europe’s Far North by Gabriel Kuhn (PM Press). This book came out earlier this month and is the kind of text that typically gets little love from the publishing community that treats books like perishable commodities. From the publisher: “The first accessible English-language introduction to the history of the Sámi people and the first account that focuses on their political resistance, this provocative work gives irrefutable evidence of the important role the Sámi play in the resistance of indigenous people against an economic and political system whose power to destroy all life on earth has reached a scale unprecedented in the history of humanity.” Raise your hand if this is the first you’ve heard of this group. (Raises hand, considers pile of unread books, goes back to bed.)

New Waves by Kevin Nguyen (One World). This novel is about a heist and it’s aftermath, but you’d never know that by the following description from the publisher: “A wry and edgy debut novel about race and startup culture, secrecy and surveillance, social media and friendship.” OK, maybe data theft isn’t the same level of heist as robbing a racetrack, but crime is crime and I’m looking forward to checking this one out. 

Good Citizens Need Not Fear by Maria Reva (Doubleday). A debut short story collection from a Ukrainian writer who grew up in Vancouver and works as an opera librettist. This collection has accumulated a wealth of glowing blurbs that highlight the book’s humor and originality: “A bureaucratic glitch omits an entire building, along with its residents, from municipal records. So begins Reva’s ingeniously intertwined narratives, nine stories that span the chaotic years leading up to and immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union.” Sounds intriguing, doesn’t it? 

You Will Never Be Forgotten by Mary South (FSG) A short story collection about the perils of being a person online. “In this provocative, bitingly funny debut collection, people attempt to use technology to escape their uncontrollable feelings of grief or rage or despair, only to reveal their most flawed and human selves.” Not sure if this is what I want to read when I’m, you know, trying to escape my uncontrollable feelings of grief or rage or despair as a result of being online, but the title story is in the New Yorker so check it out. 

In the Lateness of the World by Carolyn Forché (Penguin Press). It’s her first collection in 17 years. What else do you need to know? I have loved this prose poem from Forché’s first book since I encountered it when I was a little baby undergrad in southwest Virginia. So here it is, “The Colonel,” in its entirety: 

WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried
a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went   
out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the
cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over
the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English.
Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to
scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On
the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had
dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for
calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of
bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief
commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was
some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot
said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed
himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say
nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries
home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like
dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one
of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water
glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As
for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck them-
selves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last
of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some
of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the
ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.