The Green Mile
#1 The Two Dead Girls
#2 The Mouse on the Mile
#3 Coffey's Hands
#4 The Bad Death of Eduard Delacroix
By Stephen King
Signet, $2.99 each
The Two Dead Girls ISBN 0451190491
The Mouse on the Mile ISBN 0451190521
Coffey's Hands ISBN 0451190548
The Bad Death of Eduard Delacroix ISBN 0451190556
Review by James Neal Webb
Stephen King isn't the first writer to create a serialized novel -- Charles Dickens did it over 150 years ago. And while King can certainly be said to be infinitely richer than Dickens ever was, and probably is responsible for the decimation of thousands of acres of forest for the pages of his books, he can't hold a candle to the excitement generated by each episode of Dickens's novels. The man literally had a nation in thrall.
This is not to say that King's experiment isn't good fiction -- it is. Nor is it to say that it isn't a grand experiment -- it most definitely is.
The Green Mile returns to a milieu that King has visited before, that of a prison. Like Shawshank Prison in The Shawshank Redemption, Cold Mountain Penitentiary's Death Row is populated by good and bad people on both sides of the bars. The guards of "the Green Mile" methodically go about their business, that is, until the day John Coffey, convicted murderer of two young girls, shows up in the cell block.
The Green Mile necessarily covers events leading up to the black giant's arrival, but the enigmatic prisoner is the point of focus. I, like so many others, want to know what will happen to Coffey, the evil Percy Wetmore, and Paul Edgecomb, senior guard and narrator of the story.
In this hustle-bustle world we live in, not all that different from the vibrant, economically burgeoning London of the 1850s, we need our information in compact packages. This doesn't mean we have to settle for dumbed down, sound-bite literature. Stephen King is to be commended for his entertaining effort. Serialization is an idea whose time has come-again.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
www@bookpage.com
Support your local independent bookseller