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 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 6: “Holly”
Part 6, Chapters 1-11 Summary
Holly has dealt with an outsider before. She starts her investigation by determining that the white van had been abandoned and probably restolen two days before the Maitland family arrived in Dayton, so Terry would never have had access to it.
Looking through local news headlines, Holly finds a reference to two little girls reported missing and found dead and mutilated the same way Freddie Peterson had been. Dayton police arrested Heath Holmes, an orderly at the memory care facility where Terry’s father lives. They had unimpeachable evidence that he was the murderer, but his mother insisted he had been with her 30 miles away at the same time.
At the memory care unit, Holly finds an employee willing to talk to her. During the time Terry was making his last visit to his father, Heath Holmes was acting strangely unlike himself. Ordinarily, Heath is particularly kind and empathetic. Walking down the hall, he slipped on the wet floor just as Terry was leaving his father’s room. Holmes caught hold of Terry’s arm to steady himself and scratched Terry’s wrist.
Part 6 Analysis
Holly Gibney is implied to have anxiety and OCD, which the novel frames as contributing to her attention to detail and imagination (perhaps the quality that Ralph most lacks). Her worrying makes her a “doubtful person,” which can undermine her confidence but also helps her avoid the kind of misplaced faith in rules and rationality that Ralph shows. When Holly hears the conflicting and irreconcilable evidence, she immediately thinks of an outsider. Holly has an advantage in that she has encountered this kind of supernatural occurrence before, and to her, it is as much a part of the real world as fingerprints and DNA.
Heath Holmes is an obvious allusion to Sherlock Holmes, recalling his adage about eliminating the impossible and accepting the improbable. We now have two suspects who appear, impossibly, to have been in two places at one time. That might be coincidence by itself, but Terry and Holmes are also connected through the memory care unit, making the possibility of coincidence highly unlikely. This particular Holmes reference never plays a great role in the story, nor does it illuminate anything. Like Tommy and Tuppence in previous chapters, it comes across as an authorial nod and wink that calls attention to itself and disrupts the reader’s suspension of disbelief.
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By Stephen King
