TBR Review: The Green Mile
The Green Mile by Stephen King was my second read for the TBR challenge. Let me tell you: it’s a bit difficult to read an easy book like this one if you’ve got reader’s block, but I finished it. Woot! And remind me never to read two books at once. Gah - that nearly ruined me.
I’ve been a big fan of Stephen King for the last few years - in fact, you might say I’m something of a King apologist. Ever since I read Lisey’s Story, it’s been a bit difficult to think of King as a horror novelist. Bizarre, sure. Horrific? Scary? Nah. The Green Mile only convinces me that this is indeed the Number One fact about him, and from the little I’ve read of Duma Key, I refuse to view King as a horror novelist any longer. (And please don’t try to persuade me otherwise!)
The Green Mile is told from two different points in time by the narrator, Paul Edgecombe, who recounts his time as the chief prison guard for Block E, Death Row, at the Cold Mountain prison in 1932. The title of this book refers to the green-tiled path from prison cell to electricity chair, dubbed “Old Sparky” by its handlers. Enter John Coffey, sentenced to die for raping and killing twin girls, and the story comes to life as Edgecombe records it at the retirement home where he lives in the present.
This tale is told with King’s usual sharp eye for description and character development. I’ve noticed that in King’s most recent work, he artfully weaves the supernatural and the physical together, and the story that results produces a lesson about humanity in general. I suppose this is contributing to my insistent belief that he’s not a horror novelist, since how horror’s defined is really a question of a reader’s tastes. Even King’s early work demonstrated that lessons could be learned about man’s ability to handle that which he can’t control, whether it be strange, nasty creatures or unseen menaces. (If you ask me, only several protagonists of those early works were crazy enough to survive whatever strange supernatural force was thrown at them.) Yet, the protagonists in King’s stories are usually very human and pragmatic, and as insane, surreal and terrifying as their circumstances are, they persevere or die trying. In The Green Mile, the lightning rod for the supernatural causes that occur isn’t an unseen force or an oddity of nature - rather, it’s a man with healing powers and the ability to sense the evil or good in another human being. King’s most recent work doesn’t need total evil to push the lesson forward; instead, he takes a human being who can access another dimension of life, whether by supernatural means or even natural ones, and uses that person to demonstrate a trait about man’s nature. I’d like to think that The Green Mile started King on this track, although this way of telling a story was also used for Shawshank Redemption.
At any rate, The Green Mile is an excellent tale. If you don’t plan to read anything by King because of his reputation, do yourself a favor and at least try to check out this book. It’s not a horror story.
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