David Sven's Reviews > The Outsider

It’s very difficult saying too much about this story without giving things away so I’ll try not to spoil it. The story is told in the first person by someone who is trapped in extreme isolation – both internally and externally. We start knowing very little about this person other than their situation is rather bizarre to say the least and I found myself extremely intrigued from the very first few sentences about who this person is and even where this person is. As the story progresses our narrator seeks to lift themselves out of this isolation and in so doing we begin to discover more even as the narrator discovers more about themselves. And things get increasingly bizarre until we reach the crescendo when we get a more complete picture to which my first reaction was “Ah Ha!” and my next was “What is it?” and then it was an immediate rewind back to the beginning and start over, abandoning all the assumptions I had made that blinded me to all the clues strewn through the whole book.

Now I’m not going to tell you what that picture is other than to say think of a Mr Potato Head. Lovecraft gives you a Mr Potato Head in the beginning, unassembled. He then lets you make whatever assumptions you like in putting that Potato Head together. And in the end, Mr Potato Head looks pretty weird. But what is more in this story, I was not sure that I had actually put Mr Potato Head together right. Hence my re listen. But even the second time around the brilliance of this story is there is no right way to put Mr Potato Head together. Now there might be some wrong ways to interpret this story, but there is definitely no one single right way. And its all rather bizarre and macabre however you do it and I found it rather satisfying.

I’ve said this before, but a mistake I feel a lot of horror writers make is revealing the monster too early. The fun and scariness lies in the unknown. Once the horror is revealed it loses a lot of its power. This short story gives us the cake and lets us eat it too. We get the big reveal, but what we see is still subject to interpretation and so we are still left something lurking in the corner of the eye that gives this story re-readability.

5 stars