King’s latest will leave you hanging

Editor’s Note: Maine Bound is a column featuring new books written by Maine authors or set in the Pine Tree State.

BY DALE MCGARRIGLE

OF THE NEWS STAFF

THE COLORADO KID, by Stephen King, Hard Case Crime, New York, 2005, paperback, 184 pages, $5.99.

Here’s a nifty little read to tide over King’s fans until his next novel “Cell” comes out in late January.

Bangor’s favorite son has got to be the biggest author connected to the relatively new imprint Hard Case Crimes, which, according to the publisher, “brings you the best in hard-boiled crime fiction, from lost pulp classics to new work by today’s most powerful writers, all in handsome and affordable paperback editions.”

Yep, the cover with the auburn-haired beauty in the black cocktail dress says “pulp fiction” (a genre around long before Quentin Tarantino), but the text inside is pure King.

In it, two crusty newspapermen living on a Maine island, one old and one ancient, relate to their new, young, female protege the story of the Colorado Kid.

In a tale set 25 years in the past, the Colorado Kid was a man from away who was found dead on the beach one April morning. Who he was, how he got there, how he died – these are all questions that the two reporters spent the next quarter-century trying to figure out. It looks like an accidental death, but was it?

King’s central premise in “The Colorado Kid” is that not all mysteries are meant to be solved, which is bound to infuriate some readers. Those who like their mysteries tied up neatly with a bow needn’t apply here. Yet this is still an intriguing page-turner that’s also an enjoyable character study.

BY DANA WILDE

OF THE NEWS STAFF

SETTLING: POEMS, by Patricia Ranzoni, Puckerbrush Press, Orono, Maine, 2000, reprinted July 2005, 208 pages, large-format paperback, $14.95.

In the last decades of the 20th century, Maine’s literary world wrangled about what a “Maine writer” is, producing little more than hard feelings. Amid the failed definitions, writers who simply understood the subject matter traipsed on. Among them were Carolyn Chute, Leo Connellan and Pat Ranzoni. This third printing of Ranzoni’s “Settling” is not just backtracking. It’s a necessary reminder, by someone who actually knows, of where Maine came from to get where it is now.

Like Chute’s “The Beans of Egypt, Maine” and Connellan’s “Maine Poems,” “Settling” has an unusual accuracy. It’s a book about chronic pain that’s rooted in Maine’s pre-1970s past, and that’s still present in the place the state has become. The heart of one of the darknesses is trailblazed in the poem “Cultural Guide,” which shows that the humiliating chasm between plebeian natives and wealthy summer people is elemental.

Maine is a hard place to grasp in words. When you try to talk about what actually goes on, the internal matter quickly becomes too dense to manage in clean sentences, the way an easy stroll through the woods in most of this state is nearly futile because bogs, briars, hillsides, ruts and barbed wire are constantly forcing you to climb, circumvent or backtrack. (“Doubt is the star I was born under, the only dance I know how to do.”) The paved roads are easy; the countryside is a boreal jungle. Carolyn Chute overcame the problem by writing prose that chopped away at facts, not trying to connect things by syntax but by statement. Leo Connellan wrote poems about meanness and beauty with diction as jagged as low-tide ledges.

Pat Ranzoni’s poems are so true to the subject that they frequently bog down. But the insulated, bitter-cold, weather-beaten, ocean-blue atmosphere of Maine is everywhere in “Settling.” And so Puckerbrush Press does a good literary deed by resupplying the bookstores. Anyone who sometimes feels baffled by what he’s gotten himself into just living here could benefit from reading this book slowly.