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 8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 8: “Macy’s Tells Gimbels”
Part 8, Chapters 1-7 Summary
July 25
Before leaving for Flint, Holly visits some places associated with Heath Holmes—the cemetery where he is buried, his mother’s house (the place where she hanged herself), and the shrine where his two victims were discovered. She theorizes that the outsider goes there to feed on the pain of the people still grieving over the deaths of its victims. Standing in the parking lot of the cemetery where Holmes and some of his family are buried, Holly takes photographs of nearby abandoned buildings that seem like likely places for the outsider to hide while it adopts the face of its new target.
Holly then takes a flight to Flint and meets Howie, Alec, Ralph, Jeannie, Marcy Maitland, and Bill Samuels. Holly asks if she can hold her report for the end of the meeting. Howie compares her to the detective in a mystery story by Agatha Christie. When Detective Sablo has summarized the case so far, Holly begins by telling them that both murders were committed by an outsider. The outsider relies on modern forensics to confuse pursuit, but his most effective defense is that no one believes in the supernatural.
While the investigators are meeting, Jack Hoskins dreams about the thing that put the burn on the back of his neck. It warns him that the cancer is spreading and that if Jack wants it to go away, he has to stop Ralph Anderson and the others from meddling.
Part 8, Chapters 8-11 Summary
Holly shows Howie, Alec, Ralph, Jeannie, Marcy Maitland, and Bill Samuels an old Mexican movie in which a Mexican professional wrestler, Rosita, and her sisters do battle with El Cuco, a demonic creature with a face like Play-Doh and glowing prongs emerging like straws from its eye sockets. The monster is based on a creature of folktale with parallels all over the world. Ralph protests that if they are going to believe supernatural explanations, then they can’t really believe in anything.
Holly shows them the pictures she took near the cemetery in Dayton. She says she believes they will find evidence of the outsider there. Holly asks Marcy where Terry is buried. Marcy replies that she had him buried at Memorial Park Cemetery, but she knew about “the other place.” Terry has a number of ancestors buried in a cemetery near the barn where his bloody clothes were found. This confirms what Holly has suspected—that the outsider is attracted to burial sites associated with its targets.
Ralph, dismissing El Cuco as a fairytale, proposes to interview Claude Bolton in Texas. Detective Sablo telephones Claude and arranges to interview him. The outsider, however, knows everything Claude Bolton knows. The investigators have just warned it that they are coming. It tells Jack Hoskins to get to Texas ahead of the conspirators.
Part 8 Analysis
Reinforcing the detective mystery motif, Howie compares Holly to characters like Sherlock Holmes, or Agatha Christie’s detectives Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, who are all distinguished by unusual cognitive traits or abilities. Holmes is obsessive, single-minded, and goes through episodes that resemble mania and depression. Poirot is also obsessed with detail, having a strong need to place facts and objects in their proper places. Jane Marple has a gift for recognizing obscure patterns in human behavior. Holly approaches the world as a kind of outsider herself. This allows her to look at a problem from a perspective not available to others.
What makes Ralph as a detective different from Holly is that Ralph’s cognitive processes are typical of the average person. He’s well suited to the mystery genre, but he’s not like the great classical detectives. In the classic detective genre as created by Poe and Doyle, Ralph is ideal to serve as the detective’s “Watson.”
However, Ralph initially resists Holly’s ideas, saying that if you believe in the supernatural, you can’t believe in anything. The possibility of the supernatural breaks the natural laws Ralph uses to understand and predict reality: for example, the irrefutable fact that no one can be in two places at the same time. In order to eliminate the impossible, you have to first have parameters to define what is and is not possible. Without those rules, an investigator has nowhere concrete to begin.
Ralph’s position is overly rigid but logical. As per the Holmes adage, the investigator should eliminate all possible material explanations before turning to the improbable supernatural ones. Holly considers the possibility of an outsider only because she is familiar with its modus operandi and it is a part of her material reality. Furthermore, Holly’s evidence for the existence of the outsider is at best circumstantial. She relies on fiction and folktale, arguing that most cultures have tales of some variation on outsiders—vampires, shapeshifters, doppelgängers, the bogeyman, demons that steal naughty children, etc. True, the El Cuco movie depicts something exactly like the descriptions they have of the outsider that killed Frankie, but Ralph rejects fiction as evidence.
The other characters, however, are increasingly persuaded that the outsider provides the best explanation for Terry and Holmes appearing to be in two places at once. They are employing not only the Holmes adage but also the principle of Occam’s razor, which states that when evaluating two different explanations, the simpler of the two is most likely to be right. In this case, the outsider is the simplest explanation they can find that accounts for all the evidence, including the fact that no one can be in two places at the same time.
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