The Green Mile

Almost thirty years on, I'm finally reading this as a single novel. The first time, I read it in the monthly installments that came out, and enjoyed the heck out of it.

But this time? This novel has struck me like no other King novel. King has scared me. King has tugged at my heart. King has shown me evil and good, wonder and despair. He's made me laugh and made my cry. He's created characters that I loved and characters that I've despised, and even characters that have been incredibly close to people I know in real life.

He has never written a book that's affected me the way this one does. Even reading it for the second time, knowing some of the twists at the end, King's writing, his story, his storytelling, his characters, his show more situations...they hit me.

When a book hits me like this, I literally feel my mind splitting into two different, but equally active modes:

The first is the Reader, who still continues to move through the story, immersed in the story, and enjoying every word as it carries me on the path that King has woven. This is the part of me that's deeply affected.

The second is the Writer, who steps back a bit and sneaks over to that curtain and lifts it to take an admiring look at the inner workings of the story, the mechanics that King built so carefully and put in place to make this entire machine work so well. This is the part of me that's impressed and also trying to learn from it.

King has always been good at creating his everyman characters. They aren't rich, they aren't overly exciting...they're just you and me, but thrown into extraordinary circumstances. He's also been pretty good at creating those meaner characters, the bullies and the brutes. He's also created a lot of very good exceptional characters, Carrie White, Danny Torrance, Charlie McGee, Johnny Smith, and he's done it again with John Coffey. So, it's not these that make this novel special. They're what make it a King novel.

I think it comes down to two things.

The first is the incredible set pieces that King builds into this novel. Coffey with the two girls in the field. The first death of Mr. Jingles. William Wharton's arrival. The very bad death of Eduard Delacroix. Coffey with Melinda. Coffey with Percy, and Percy with Wild Bill, and two more scenes toward the end of the novel that enter into spoiler territory. I don't know that King's created a novel and packed such powerful scenes into it since maybe THE SHINING or IT. His novels all have one or two, but nine or ten? No. So, that's one. King was on fire with this one.

The other is how much King was able to dig into life and death and the consequences of both. How he was able to talk about the influence and indifference of God. And how he was able to build such nobility and pathos into his flawed characters that it literally hurts to see them in pain.

I don't think King ever wrote another novel like this, one so deeply affecting. But I will say, to anyone who ever doubts the man can write, this will always be the one I'll point to to prove them wrong. show less

Originally published in six serial installments, Uncle Stevie held multiple places on the New York Times Best Seller List in 1996. I didn't read them then, but this is a re-read for me. What most people know about the story, because it's in the cultural consciousness, is about the main narrative, with John Coffey on death row. But the book details a good deal of Paul Edgecomb's further life in an 'old-age home' long after the events of the summer of John Coffey. The mirror of Edgecomb's later life to those events is an important counter-weight was he details the long-ago summer.

Fun to re-read this one and look for Dickens references, as Uncle Stevie paid a good deal of homage to the man who helped inspire him to try serial publication.

5 show more bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended show less

Cuando salió este libro, King ya era un autor de renombre. Ya existían los blockbusters de Carrie, Misery y El Resplandor. Pero quizá faltaba una obra sensible, un "tear jerker" que le diera el status de "escritor serio". Bueno, La milla verde seguro que hizo un montón para dárselo.

King escribió (¿por primera vez?) una novela apta para toda la familia, inspirada en el caso de George Stinney, un adolescente negro de 14 años ejecutado en la silla eléctrica de quien más tarde se demostró su inocencia. Les recomiento el documental "Murder on a Sunday Morning", que trata este caso.

Pero es un libro con buenas intenciones, que peca de estar demasiado dirigido a los suyos. Una historia en la que se utiliza un personaje negro para show more tratar la trama de un montón de blancos (y que intenta por todos los medios dar una moraleja sencillísima sobre el racismo). Una historia que es desde el principio un alegato contra la pena de muerte y su arbitrariedad (pero que insiste en diferenciarla de la arbitrariedad divina).

Me llama la atención por momentos la forma en que se comunica en este libro con el público. En primera instancia, tenemos acá una parábola cristiana. El dolor es inevitable, Dios da su bendición a ciertos elegidos y deja morir en formas terribles a personas que "no lo merecen". Es por eso inevitable que recaiga mil veces en simplificaciones y estereotipos.

King hace un montón acá para educar al público promedio desde su lugar de escritor para públicos promedios. "El racismo y la pena de muerte están mal". Lo hace, claro, deshumanizando al propio personaje que busca rescatar. Un "gentle giant" repleto de bondad que es víctima de la violencia humana imperante en el cosmos como si fuera un animalito imposible de maldad (una violencia que en King también suele ser sobrenatural, dicho sea de paso, salvo cuando viene de bullies y nepobabys). Esa violencia la dirige en el plano simbólico contra las minorías raciales y en el plano concreto (sexual sobre todo) hacia las mujeres.

Y no por eso me parece un mal libro. Es, incluso, muy tierno. Con secciones de las que entiendo a la perfección por qué hicieron llorar a tanto lector. Tenía el potencial de transformarse en la adaptación más aclamada de toda su obra, y casi lo logra. Solo quedó por detrás de "The Shankshawn redemption", otra novela de presidiarios con un personaje inocente y conflictos raciales, pero donde el factor sobrenatural no está presente (y según recuerdo tampoco el religioso, a menos que consideres a Rita Hayworth como elemento de devoción). Algo tendrá la sociedad norteamericana para que estos relatos les impacten más que las historias de payasos asesinos. show less

There are books that put you into reading slumps and there are those that get you out of them. This is the latter. I couldn’t put it down, I didn’t want it to end and I was thinking about the characters long after I was done with it. There’s not much more you can ask from a book.

Our narrator Paul Edgecombe introduces us to the green mile and its 1932 residents. The “Green Mile” is a death row penitentiary, nicknamed for its long hallway paved with green linoleum. It’s full of the worst dredges of humanity and some of the kindest. Paul runs the mile with his fellow guards, keeping the prisoners in check and running an occasional execution via electric chair whenever someone’s time is up.

The convicts include William show more "Billy the Kid" Wharton, one of the most twisted individuals I’ve encountered in a novel. Then there’s Eduard Delacroix, who has made his mistakes, but now spends his time training his sweet pet mouse, Mr. Jingles, to do tricks. John Coffey is the other notable inmate. He’s a huge black man with a gentle spirit and an odd gift.

In addition to the criminals, there are a handful of guards, only one of which truly instills fear in the reader. Percy Wetmore is the nephew of a high-up politician and has wormed his way into this job. I don’t think I’ve ever despised a character more than I did with Percy. He is a cruel coward. Paul is reflecting on this eventful year decades later and he sees Percy’s malice mirrored in Brad Dolan, an employee of the nursing home where he now lives. It’s such a powerful reminder that those kinds of people are everywhere, in all works of life. They thrive on manipulation and intimidation.

One interesting aspect of this novel is the format in which it was written. King decided to try writing a serialized novel. This is how many books were written during the 19th century (Dickens, Thackeray, etc.) and so King split the book into six sections. Each one was published as a paperback with a different title. He published one each month for six months in 1996. The only drawback to this method is that some elements feel repetitive when read as one consecutive novel. King reiterates some plot points as reminders of what happened in the last installment, but it’s not too distracting when taking in context of the original format.

BOTTOM LINE: If The Stand made me second guess my preconceived notions about King’s talent as a writer, this novel solidified him as a brilliant storyteller in my mind. I was so invested in the story and it broke my heart over and over again. I loved reading this and I highly recommend the audiobook version read by Frank Mueller.

“What I didn’t realize was how many doors the act of writing unlocks, as if my Dad’s old fountain pen wasn’t really a pen at all, but some strange variety of skeleton key.”

“The fact that he had killed half a dozen people seemed at that moment the least important thing about him.”

“A lot of things don’t matter, but it doesn’t keep a man from wondering about them, I’ve noticed.”

“Atonement was powerful; it was the lock on the door you closed against the past.”

"Although I know that no one under the age of, say, fifty would believe this, sometimes the embers are better than the campfire." show less

So I decided to catch up with my Stephen King reviews this year too. I have re-read "The Green Mile" once a year from the time I was 16 years old up until I was 27 (I went to Iraq) and at that point my paperbacks had fallen apart. I loved these books because I got the original serials. I loved that it got released like that and waited impatiently to go and get the newest book from Waldenbooks (remember them?) I have said before on Boolikes (RIP) that reading Stephen King books was something that my father and I did once he realized I was a mini-Horror fan. I would read first (I was faster) and pass along to my father. But for this one I just remembered, my dad, mom, and I all read these. I don't know what it was but this story grabbed show more us from the first. Reading about the Green Mile and prisoner John Coffey. I think it resonated with us.

I am black, and reading about a black man who was being put to death for a terrible crime, but reading more and more and realizing what had happened and knowing there was nothing you could do to me at the ages of 16-17 was so frightening. I re-read every year and each time kept hoping for a different ending.

I think that King did a great job of showing not only the racism and the brokenness of the criminal justice system way back when this story takes place, but if you read about a lot of crimes today or how most black men and women can't afford cash bail, you can see how little things have changed.

I did a read of this back in December. But at that point my poor brain did not have the energy to type up a review. With everything going on in the US from December to January it's been really hard to read new books lately. So I have definitely slipped back to re-reading favorites to get me back into the practice of reading.

This is a really great book and it is going to make you cry. It makes you sigh and think of the Green Mile that all of us must walk one day. show less

Came to this with no preconceptions- never seen movie, didn't think Stephen King was 'my thing'...well, it's absolutely unputdownable, and I'm now looking out for more of his novels.
This is a spooky, supernatural tale, set on 'Death Row' - it works because the narrator (a decent, good-natured chief warder) and the world he describes are utterly plausible. There are the other staff - mostly good but one not- and a few convicts. Despite the enormity of their crimes, we still feel for them as their date of execution rolls round. And then there's the apparently simple-minded John Coffey, accused of a vile crime, and yet so apparently mild annered, and with strange powers...
Written from a pespective of many decades - the narrator is now an show more unwilling resident in an old people's home - I guess it's quite a simple storyline, but King introduces twists and turns that keep you absolutely riveted.
What a writer! show less

Rarely does it happen to me that I read a book which actually causes me to tear up to some extent and which I can't stop thinking about even months after turning the last page. You might should have heard about the movie adaption starring Tom Hanks and the late Michael Clarke Duncan (may he rest in peace), and if you haven't considered watching it yet, then please don't hesitate to do so for even one moment. The Green Mile is easily one of my favorite movies of all time, and to be completely honest, I had certain doubts about whether the Stephen King novel it was actually adapted from would be capable of causing the same range of emotions in me as the movie did.

And oh, how it succeeded with doing that.

First off, allow me to mention show more something about my love-hate-relationship with Stephen King. During the 80's, he built up for himself a reputation as being one of the major horror writers of his time, but few people actually know about the few touching, emotionally affecting stories he can be called responsible for - let me just mention Stand By Me and Shawshank Redemption, both of which are beautiful movies actually based on a less famous work by Stephen King. I am the first one to admit that King has a capability to write novels you will have a lot of troubles with if you expect to find stories with literary worth. But books like The Green Mile are what I love this author for.


For those who are unfamiliar with the story, The Green Mile is the nickname for the death row at Cold Mountain Penitentiary, a prison in Louisiana. During the 1930s, our protagonist Paul Edgecomb receives John Coffey into his custody as supervisor of the death row. Coffey turns out to be physically intimidating, but mentally challenged. How could a man like him, a man who is afraid if the lights are not kept on during the night, have been capable of murdering two innocent girls? Trust me, this is not a story about Coffey's guilt or innocence, however. What King confronts us with is a character-driven story about the daily events on the death row, raising moral and ethic questions along the way, allowing us to care about the small amount of characters he presented to us. Untypically for King's novels, we only meet a few characters, but even those of minor importance to the story are drawn out in such a fascinating way that it becomes difficult to resist caring for all of them.

Originally, King published this book in six different installments before releasing the six parts altogether in this novel. Each of those six parts focuses on different elements to the story, with all these parts interfering with each other along the way and finally weaving together a convincing picture of a prison in the 30's. Is this book only about life in prison, however? No, it isn't - by far it isn't. In a frame story, King introduces us to the older Paul Edgecomb who revisits the events on the Green Mile in an attempt to write down his story before his memory can begin to fade away. King starts off each of the six installments of the story by including more insight on the story of Paul's older self, until he finally manages to masterfully create the illusion of two deeply connected plots.

Supernatural elements are a minor part of the story, though - as skeptical as I usually am about stories involving magical realism - its inclusion mainly just allowed to emphasize the beauty of the story.


"Coffey like the drink, only not spelled the same way." Coffey is introduced as a simple-minded man who is not capable of even understanding what he is accused of, and Paul Edgecomb realizes this - just like he realizes that there is more to the character of John Coffey than just the accusation of having raped and murdered two girls. The cast of characters in this novel is truly convincing - we meet Brutus "Brutal" Howell, Eduard Delacroix with his beloved pet mouse Mr. Jingles, and of course Percy Wetmore. If you haven't met Percy yet, you just have to know that there are actually polls circling around the internet asking whether Hannibal Lecter or Percy Wetmore is the most evil antagonist ever to be introduced in a novel/movie. And Percy actually has more than just a few votes.


Talking about Mr. Jingles, I will miss him. Oh, how I will miss him.

In the end, this story manages more than just to raise questions. It turned me into a pile of emotions, ranging from nostalgia over grief up to relief - but mostly nostalgia. The last pages included some of the best writing I have ever encountered and yes, I will gladly admit that both the movie and the book made me cry, and I don't find it difficult to believe that they will continue to make me do so in future. Because out of all the movies I have seen and the books I have read, The Green Mile in both its book and its movie version is a story I am going to revisit over and over.

If you have only seen the movie, then please don't fear reading the book because even though it is a completely different experience due to a few minor changes and, obviously, a huge distinction in its narrative, the book doesn't fail to convince even after having watched the movie. And if you have only read the book - then what are you waiting for? The Green Mile is, in my opinion, one of the best book-to-movie adaptions which have ever entered the big screen.

A beautiful, touching book which I am never going to forget.

Buddy Read with Anne who I have to truly thank for continuously encouraging me to keep up reading! show less