59 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen KingThe Outsider
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 11: “The Marysville Hole”
Part 11, Chapters 1-15 Summary
July 27
Jack returns to his vigil at the Marysville Hole. Later, an SUV stops at the entrance of the cave, and the five investigators get out. Ralph waits for them to move into a position that will give him a clear shot.
The investigators find the main entrance to the cave blocked with cement. They will have to go around to the back entrance. They hear a rifle shot. A second shot takes Howie in the head. A third shot gets Alec. The three survivors run for cover.
The noise of the gunshots disturbs a rattlesnake, which bites Jack. By the time Jack has dealt with the snake, the “meddlers” are running for cover. Jack shoots Sablo in the arm, dislocating his shoulder. With the investigators then out of sight, Jack fires into the gas tank of the SUV, blowing it up in a tower of smoke and fire.
Holly and Ralph run for the trail toward the back entrance of the cave system while Sablo gives them cover fire. Jack intercepts them on the trail. He is all but dead from the snakebite and the outsider’s poison touch, but he still tries to shoot Holly. Ralph shoots him first.
Part 11, Chapters 15-27 Summary
Reaching the back door, Ralph and Holly enter the cave and follow the main passage to a metal stairway running down into a cavern. Below them, they see the outsider. They descend the stairs. Ralph had intended to shoot the outsider, but a gunshot might bring down the roof of the cave and kill them all. When the outsider realizes that Holly seems to know what it is, it asks urgently whether she has encountered another of its kind. Holly tells the outsider that it is nothing special—just another sadistic pedophile. Enraged, the outsider rushes her. Holly pulls the happy slapper from her pocket and slams it across the outsider’s face. Two more blows from the sock crush its head completely. The outsider dissolves into a mass of swarming red worms, reminding Ralph of the maggots infesting the cantaloupe. Ralph and Holly flee up the stairs and out of the cave.
Back at the parking lot, they find Sablo in pain but functioning. The tower of smoke from the burning SUV has attracted attention, and they hear police and fire sirens. The three of them have just enough time to work out the story they’re going to tell.
Part 11 Analysis
Ralph’s skepticism has come home to roost. The investigators didn’t prepare for the possibility of the outsider having help, and two good friends are dead because of it. With that, however, Jack Hoskins’s role in the story is effectively over. He returns just long enough to challenge Ralph on the trail, but he is too near death himself to present much threat. This defeat may seem anticlimactic. According to the traditional rules of the detective genre, the detective can’t receive aid from either accident or supernatural intervention, but the rattlesnake that bites Jack is an unearned help to the investigators.
King sometimes employs opposing forces of good and evil. King’s universes are influenced by the cosmicism of H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft saw the universe as essentially indifferent to humans. King differs from Lovecraft in that his universes also contain something that—if not necessarily benevolent—at least sometimes uses humans to maintain cosmic stability. That force or entity occasionally adjusts fate or chance in the protagonists’ favor. Jack’s death thus makes more sense in the context of King’s larger body of work.
King rarely writes action/adventure. The shootout in the parking lot is as close to a fight scene as he ever gets. Instead, King writes discovery stories in which his protagonists (and readers) collect more information each time they encounter the antagonist. The characters build up an understanding of their opposition until they have the knowledge or the tools they need to overcome it. Holly’s real “weapon” is her understanding of the outsider’s nature, which allows her to manipulate it into dropping its guard and coming within reach of her physical weapon.
Ralph has been struggling to reconcile the material world he can see with the hidden world under the surface. It is all he can do to suspend his disbelief long enough to get Holly where she needs to be. Descending under the surface of the earth, he comes face-to-face with the inexplicable. The encounter finally forces him to enlarge his view of the universe.
The image of the red worms dovetails with Ralph’s memory of the infested cantaloupe, but the novel hasn’t otherwise foreshadowed it. Previous evidence, like the stains on the clothes in the barn, suggests that the outsider would be more likely to collapse into a puddle of organic residue. However, the cantaloupe image gives Ralph a sense of closure.
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