King In Pieces Horror Writer Resurrects Serial Novel Genre To Take Readers On An Unpredictable Ride
“The Green Mile: Part 1 - The Two Dead Girls” By Stephen King (Signet, 92 pages, $2.99 paper)
Stephen King’s latest effort gets an A for concept and a B- for execution but that could change by next month.
For the three of you who haven’t heard already, the horrormeister - whose book copy now includes the slightly unsettling information that he’s the world’s best-selling novelist - has undertaken a kind of writing that hasn’t been dusted off since the heyday of Dickens: the serial novel. “The Green Mile” will be written in six short volumes, the first of which, “The Two Dead Girls,” hits the shelves this month.
It’s an exciting idea for a few reasons. One is economics. Instead of paying $25 or more for a weighty hardcover tome, the installments sell for $2.99, so you can get an entire King novel for $18 and tax - hey, a bargain!
The other reason is excitement. By doing his latest work in pieces, King gets to enjoy the kind of tension that has to be a rarity for authors of his ilk.
Think of it this way. King, or Danielle Steel, or Mary Higgins Clark writes a book, which hits the stores and immediately becomes a guaranteed best-seller. The only choice left for the author is where to deposit the big, fat royalty check.
But because “The Green Mile” isn’t done yet - and because King has let it be known that he doesn’t even know how it will end - reader and author alike get to share in the sense of expectation, the “where’s he going with this?” that keeps you reading into the wee hours even though you’ve got a staff meeting at 9 a.m. tomorrow.
Anyone who works with words, deadlines or both for a living can’t help but admire the sheer in-your-face perversity of this endeavor. “At this point,” King writes in his chatty introduction, “I’m driving through thick fog with the pedal to the metal.” How exciting! How anarchic! Best of all, “he must be giving his editors fits!”
While the idea of a serial novel, fusing reader and author with the same sense of the desperate is worthy, sweaty-palmed, gotta-know-how-this-turns-out panic, the first segment poses a problem.
There’s just not much of a story here. Or, rather, there’s too much of a story, all rendered in King’s familiar, serviceable prose - too many threads, too many characters, too many portentous moments where you can practically hear that ominous organ music swelling in the background, too many leads that don’t pan out in the 90-plus pages of “The Two Dead Girls.”
What have we got? Death row - the eponymous Green Mile, a “wide corridor up the center of E Block . . . floored with linoleum the color of tired old limes.” At the end of the Green Mile are two turns. “A left turn meant life - if you called what went on in the sunbaked exercise yard life, and many did… . A right turn though - that was different.” It’s 1932, somewhere in the Deep South, where “King Cotton had been deposed … 70 years before all these things happened, and would never be king again.”
Our tour guide through this cheerful world is Paul Edgecombe, the superintendent of the Green Mile, who has watched over 78 deaths in the electric chair that stands at the end of the Mile. I’m a little worried about Paul. Oh, he seems like a nice enough guy, a quintessential King hero, which is to say plainspoken, hardworking, devoted to his wife and as kind as he can be to the collection of rapists, sadists and murderers in his charge. But instead of giving Edgecombe a unique character, King instead has given him a urinary infection - “not bad enough to put me in the hospital,” Paul muses, in one of the frequent mentions of his condition, “but almost bad enough to make me wish I was dead myself … “
Into this world King introduces John Coffey, a gentle giant of a man who has been found guilty of the murder of 9-year-old twins. After Paul’s initial interview, Coffey utters the same sad, single sentence that he said to the deputy who caught him with the girls’ mutilated bodies in his arms: “I tried to take it back, but it was too late.”
What does that mean? Did Coffey, who serenely answers Paul’s questions, murder the two girls of his own free will, or was he (cue organ music) manipulated by some mysterious, dark force? And what’s up with Delacroix, two cells down, and his preternaturally personable pet mouse Mr. Jingles, who may or may not be some rodent variation of a guardian angel? Or with Percy Wetmore, the nastiest of the guards?
Wherever King winds up driving this unlikely crew of men, mice and murderers, you can bet that this Constant Reader will be along for the ride.