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The Green Mile (Paperback)
by Stephen King
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Horror fiction, Bestsellers, Original books |
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MSL Pointer Review:
A haunting tale of miracles, and the battle between Good and Evil, which in the end leaves you with chills of emotion and tragedy. A statement about life, death, the beauty and horror of humanity. A great masterpiece of the bestseller author Stephen King. |
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Author: Stephen King
Publisher: Pocket
Pub. in: November, 1999
ISBN: 0671041789
Pages: 544
Measurements: 6.9 x 4.2 x 1.2 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00928
Other information: ISBN-13: 9780671041786
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- Awards & Credential -
The #1 New York Times Bestseller and a winner of 1997 Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel. |
- MSL Picks -
Have you ever really smelled fear in a terrified man? Can you taste the air in a prison? Do you know what hope and frustration feels like in rapid fire secession? Can you see the scene laid out before you without a screen or TV?
Stephen King's classic bestseller, and Tom Hanks stars in a film of this novel by Frank Darabont, a statement about life, death, and the beauty and horror of humanity. King here delivers a masterpiece. The Green Mile is a work of genius that not many authors could have pulled off as well as Stephen King. This amazing novel was originally published as a serial novel in six parts. The book flows wonderfully even though with the start of a new part King may review the last scene of the last book that was read. Reading each part of the book together as the one whole novel make the book more enjoyable, so for people who have read this book when it was first being published in parts, you may want to re-read this book to get a better feel for what King is writing.
The novel takes place on the E Block of Cold Mountain Penitentiary (a death row, or "Green Mile") and takes place over a fairly short amount of time. The book tells the story of the times when convicted murderer John Coffey is going to be put to death. The book is told in the first person through the eyes of Paul Edgecombe, the leader of the E Block. This novel also involves many other people, such as the other men that run the E Block and other murderers that are on death row.
One of the things about this book that is so great is its characterization. Paul Edgecombe is a likeable and believable protagonist as he has his faults and his problems. Some characters, particularly the snobbish Percy, are very hateable, yet you may feel a bit sympathetic for him at times. The murderers that are waiting to "walk the Green Mile" can be felt for as King puts you in their footsteps. John Coffey is one of Stephen King's best characters as you can feel for him on an emotional level. Coffey is the central character in which Edgecombe focuses, and he literally is a "savior" to the people he touches. The story also features Mr. Jingles, a small and unnaturally intelligent mouse who befriends Delacroix. The mouse learns various tricks and appears to follow commands; Delacroix insists that the mouse whispers things in his ear.
King's novel presents many lessons and themes about human life, from the destructive evils of hatred to the love and dedication of sacrifice. One theme is prominent throughout the entire novel: life is full of good and bad people. King requires the reader to apply the above theme to each person's lives. We can decide to live life like Coffey by helping and being kind to others, or we can contribute to the poisonous disease of hatred like the characters of Percy Wetmore and William Wharton. Either way we decide, the Green Mile awaits us at one point or another. When we walk down that final mile, we are the people that determine our worth in life.
Great character descriptions, beautiful use of the English language, a fluid plot and an all-around masterpiece! Take the walk down The Green Mile today, and you will never regret it!
Target readers:
General readers
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Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947. After his parents separated when Stephen was a toddler, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought her children back to Durham, Maine, for good. Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth King was persuaded by her sisters to take over the physical care of the elderly couple. Other family members provided a small house in Durham and financial support. After Stephen's grandparents passed away, Mrs. King found work in the kitchens of Pineland, a nearby residential facility for the mentally challenged.
Stephen attended the grammar school in Durham and then Lisbon Falls High School, graduating in 1966. From his sophomore year at the University of Maine at Orono, he wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper, The Maine Campus. He was also active in student politics, serving as a member of the Student Senate. He came to support the anti-war movement on the Orono campus, arriving at his stance from a conservative view that the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional. He graduated from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, with a B.A. in English and qualified to teach on the high school level. A draft board examination immediately post-graduation found him 4-F on grounds of high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums.
Stephen made his first professional short story sale ("The Glass Floor") to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. Throughout the early years of his marriage, he continued to sell stories to men's magazines. Many of these were later gathered into the Night Shift collection or appeared in other anthologies.
In the fall of 1971, Stephen began teaching high school English classes at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels.
In the spring of 1973, Doubleday & Co. accepted the novel Carrie for publication. On Mother's Day of that year, Stephen learned from his new editor at Doubleday, Bill Thompson, that a major paperback sale would provide him with the means to leave teaching and write full-time.
At the end of the summer of 1973, the Kings moved their growing family to southern Maine because of Stephen's mother's failing health. Renting a summer home on Sebago Lake in North Windham for the winter, Stephen wrote his next-published novel, originally titled Second Coming and then Jerusalem's Lot, before it became 'Salem's Lot, in a small room in the garage. During this period, Stephen's mother died of cancer, at the age of 59.
Carrie was published in the spring of 1974. That same fall, the Kings left Maine for Boulder, Colorado. They lived there for a little less than a year, during which Stephen wrote The Shining, set in Colorado. Returning to Maine in the summer of 1975, the Kings purchased a home in the Lakes Region of western Maine. At that house, Stephen finished writing The Stand, much of which also is set in Boulder. The Dead Zone was also written in Bridgton.
In 1977, the Kings spent three months of a projected year- long stay in England, cut the sojourn short and returned home in mid-December, purchasing a new home in Center Lovell, Maine. After living there one summer, the Kings moved north to Orrington, near Bangor, so that Stephen could teach creative writing at the University of Maine at Orono. The Kings returned to Center Lovell in the spring of 1979. In 1980, the Kings purchased a second home in Bangor, retaining the Center Lovell house as a summer home.
Because their children have become adults, Stephen and Tabitha now spend winters in Florida and the remainder of the year at their Bangor and Center Lovell homes.
He has put some of his college dramatic society experience to use doing cameos in several of the film adaptations of his works as well as a bit part in a George Romero picture, Knightriders. Joe Hill King also appeared in Creepshow, which was released in 1982. Stephen made his directorial debut, as well as writing the screenplay, for the movie Maximum Overdrive (an adaptation of his short story "Trucks") in 1985.
Stephen is the 2003 recipient of The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
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Read this history-making serial novel - from cliffhanger to cliffhanger - in its entirety.
When it first appeared, one volume per month, Stephen King's The Green Mile was an unprecedented publishing triumph: all six volumes ended up on the New York Times bestseller list - simultaneously - and delighted millions of fans the world over.
Welcome to Cold Mountain Penitentiary, home to the Depression-worn men of E Block. Convicted killers all, each awaits his turn to walk the Green Mile, keeping a date with "Old Sparky," Cold Mountain's electric chair. Prison guard Paul Edgecombe has seen his share of oddities in his years working the Mile. But he's never seen anyone like John Coffey, a man with the body of a giant and the mind of a child, condemned for a crime terrifying in its violence and shocking in its depravity. In this place of ultimate retribution, Edgecombe is about to discover the terrible, wondrous truth about Coffey, a truth that will challenge his most cherished beliefs... and yours.
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Chapter One
This happened in 1932, when the state penitentiary was still at Cold Mountain. And the electric chair was there, too, of course.
The inmates made jokes about the chair the way people always make jokes about things that frighten them but can't be gotten away from. They called it Old Sparky, or the Big Juicy. They made cracks about the Power bill, and how Warden Moores would cook his Thanksgiving dinner that fall, with his wife, Melinda, too sick to cook.
But for the ones who actually had to sit down in that chair, the humor went out of the situation in a hurry I presided over seventy-eight executions during my time at Cold Mountain (that's one figure I've never been confused about; I'll remember it on my deathbed), and I think that, for most of those men, the truth of what was happening to them finally hit all the way home when their ankles were being damped to the stout oak of "Old Sparky's" legs. The realization came then (you would see it rising in their eyes, a kind of cold dismay) that their, own legs had finished their careers. The blood still ran in them, the muscles were still strong, but they were finished, all the same; they were never going to walk another country mile or dance with a girl at a barn-raising. Old Sparky's clients came to a knowledge of their deaths from the ankles up. There was a black silk bag that went over their heads after they had finished their rambling and mostly disjointed last remarks. It was supposed to be for them, but I always thought it was really for us, to keep us from seeing the awful tide of dismay in their eyes as they realized they were going to die with their knees bent.
There was no death row at Cold Mountain, only E Block, set apart from the other four and about a quarter their size, brick instead of wood, with a horrible bare metal roof that glared in the summer sun like a delirious eyeball. Six cells inside, three on each side of a wide center aisle, each almost twice as big as the cells in the other four blocks. Singles, too. Great accommodations for a prison (especially in the thirties), but the inmates would have traded for cells in any of the other four. Believe me, they would have traded.
There was never a time during my years as block superintendent when all six cells were occupied at one time - thank God for small favors. Four was the most, mixed black and white (at Cold Mountain, there was no segregation among the walking dead), and that was a little piece of hell. One was a woman, Beverly McCall. She was black as the ace of spades and as beautiful as the sin you never had nerve enough to commit. She put up with six years of her husband beating her, but wouldn't put up with his creeping around for a single day. On the evening after she found out he was cheating, she stood waiting for the unfortunate Lester McCall, known to his pals (and, presumably, to his extremely short-term mistress) as Cutter, at the top of the stairs leading to the apartment over his barber shop. She waited until he got his overcoat half off, then dropped his cheating guts onto his tu-tone shoes. Used one of Cutter's own razors to do it. Two nights before she was due to sit in Old Sparky, she called me to her cell and said she had been visited by her African spirit-father in a dream. He told her to discard her slave-name and to die under her free name, Matuomi. That was her request, that her deathwarrant should be read under the name of Beverly Matuomi. I guess her spirit-father didn't give her any first name, or one she could make out, anyhow. I said yes, okay, fine. One thing those years serving as the bull-goose screw taught me was never to refuse the condemned unless I absolutely had to. In the case of Beverly Matuomi, it made no difference, anyway. The governor called the next day around three in the afternoon, commuting her sentence to life in the Grassy Valley Penal Facility for Women - all penal and no penis, we used to say back then. I was glad to see Bev's round ass going left instead of right when she got to the duty desk, let me tell you.
Thirty-five years or so later - had to be at least thirty-five - I saw that name on the obituary page of the paper, under a picture of a skinny-faced black lady with a cloud of white hair and glasses with rhinestones at the comers. It was Beverly. She'd spent the last ten years of her life a free woman, the obituary said, and had rescued the small-town library of Raines Falls pretty much single-handed. She had also taught Sunday school and had been much loved in that little backwater.
Librarian Dies Of Heart Failure, the headline said, and below that, in smaller type, almost as an afterthought: Served Over Two Decades in Prison for Murder. Only the eyes, wide and blazing behind the glasses with the rhinestones at the comers, were the same. They were the eyes of a woman who even at seventy-whatever would not hesitate to pluck a safety razor from its blue jar of disinfectant, if the urge seemed pressing. You know murderers, even if they finish up as old lady librarians in dozey little towns. At least you do if you've spent as much time minding murderers as I did. There was only one time I ever had a question about the nature of my job. That, I reckon, is why I'm writing this.
The wide corridor up the center of E Block was floored with linoleum the color of tired old limes, and so what was called the Last Mile at other prisons was called the Green Mile at Cold Mountain. It ran, I guess, sixty long paces from south to north, bottom to top. At the bottom was the restraint room. At the top end was a T-junction. A left turn meant life - if you called what went on in the sunbaked exercise yard life, and many did; many lived it for years, with no apparent ill effects. Thieves and arsonists and sex criminals, all talking their talk and walking their walk and making their little deals.
A right turn, though - that was different. First you went into my office (where the carpet was also green, a thing I kept meaning to change and not getting around to), and crossed in front of my desk, which was flanked by the American flag on the left and the state flag on the right. On the far side were two doors. One led into the small W.C. that I and the E Block guards (sometimes even Warden Moores) used; the other opened on a kind of storage shed. This was where you ended up when you walked the Green Mile.
It was a small door - I had to duck my head when I went through, and John Coffey actually had to sit and scoot. You came out on a little landing, then went down three cement steps to a board floor. It was a miserable room without heat and with a metal roof, just like the one on the block to which it was an adjunct. It was cold enough in there to see your breath during the winter, and stifling in the summer. At the execution of Elmer Manfred - in July or August of '30, that one was, I believe - we had nine witnesses pass out.
On the left side of the storage shed - again - there was life. Tools (all locked down in frames crisscrossed with chains, as if they were carbine rifles instead of spades and pickaxes), dry goods, sacks of seeds for spring planting in the prison gardens, boxes of toilet paper, pallets cross-loaded with blanks for the prison plate-shop... even bags of lime for marking out the baseball diamond and the football gridiron - the cons played in what was known as The Pasture, and fall afternoons were greatly looked forward to at Cold Mountain.
On the right - once again - death. Old Sparky his ownself, sitting up on a plank platform at the southeast comer of the storeroom, stout oak legs, broad oak arms that had absorbed the terrorized sweat of scores of men in the last few minutes of their lives, and the metal cap, usually hung jauntily on the back of the chair, like some robot kid's beanie in a Buck Rogers comic-strip. A cord ran from it and through a gasket-circled hole in the cinderblock wall behind the chair. Off to one side was a galvanized tin bucket. If you looked inside it, you would see a circle of sponge, cut just right to fit the metal cap. Before executions, it was soaked in brine to better conduct the charge of direct-current electricity that ran through the wire, through the sponge, and into the condemned man's brain.
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View all 15 comments |
J. Jesse (MSL quote), Canada
<2007-01-31 00:00>
I have to admit that I watched the movie before I read the book. I was very pleased after finishing the book to realize that the movie did not deviate too far from the book at all.
This is the first Stephen King novel I've ever read. I don't care for horror and supernatural stories, but this particular story I felt needed to be read, not for the supernatural tale, but for the human experience.
In the 6 sections of the serial novel that comprises the paperback, King develops the story of John Coffey, who is sent to death row, which is also called "The Green Mile", for the rape and murders of twin girls. However, Paul Edgecombe, security guard, doesn't believe that this man, who's afraid of the dark, could have committed such a terrible crime. Intertwined within this story are subplots that include, Percy Wetmore, Eduard Delacroix, and William 'Billy The Kid' Wharton, and of course Mr. Jingles.
The movie is approximately 3 hours long, and it was worth every minute. I read the book in 2 days, and that's a record for me, and it was also worth every minute.
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-31 00:00>
I am, by admission, not a Steven King fan. However, this book may change that! From the first page to the last, this book not only held my interest but my heart. King weaves a beautiful tale of the memories of a prison guard who presided over death row inmates in the 1930's. But the story is more about the relationships on the "Green Mile" than the executions. It is a story of hope, not death, and of the energy that exists between human souls.
King explores the ability of one person to heal another, and in the end, it is the guard who heals, by writing his memoirs many years later.
The movie, starring Tom Hanks, is especially faithful to the book, a credit to both author and screen writer. The integrity of the story, the humor, pathos, and affirmation of life is preserved.
Both deserve 5 stars! One to watch, one to read, again and again. Bravo!
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Nick Devlin (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-31 00:00>
The Green Mile is, hands down, the best novel I've ever read. John Coffey is a great character and you know almost from the very beginning that there is something special about this behemoth of a man, who supposedly raped and murdered two 9-year-old twin sisters, yet asks Paul Edgecombe to leave the light on after dark. The suspense is so great it is terrifying, but in general the book is not typical King. It is not the normal twisted horror found in his other novels. This is a must-read for any King fan and it never gets boring. It's also a great book to get someone interested in King. Thank you.
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-31 00:00>
King has done it again! This time his magic has been woven through characters on death row-either the inmates or their keepers! The green mile refers to the stretch of linoleum leading to the electric chair. A mystical experience brought on by a giant black man waiting to die for a crime he didn't commit, has a lasting affect on a guard who believes this gentle giant couldn't harm anyone! But this takes place in the 30's in the South when racial divisions were at their height. When the reading gets too intense, a mouse is introduced who humanizes everyone bringing out the best and worst in the men caught up in this drama. You will experience many emotions as you read what is perhaps the best thing Steven King has ever written!
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