Synopsis: 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 lists—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 beliefes... and yours.
Review: I read, and watched, The Green Mile for The Reading Rush. I’m not super familiar with Stephen King’s books, but I had watched this movie in the past. The story is interesting. We follow a prison guard, Paul Edgecombe, as situations arise with his prisoners. The prisoners in his care are all on death row, and they are waiting to be taken to the electric chair. Stephen King is pretty known for writing books set in times when racial and homophobic slurs are common. The Green Mile is very much like this. That being said, the movie handles this much better. Some slurs are used, but not nearly as often. Overall, Paul was a pretty okay character, and he tried to treat his prisoners fairly well considering they are all killers. This includes John Coffey who is a large, black man convicted of raping and killing two little white girls.
The story is meant to be a suspense, thriller novella series. If I read these as they were coming out, then I would have liked the story better. Each novella starts with an aged Paul Edgecombe as he recounts his experience working on death row. It read fine today, but the overall story felt disjointed because of the back and forth between older Paul Edgecombe and younger Paul Edgecombe. The other book I’ve read where Stephen King does this was IT, and I felt like the story in IT flowed better. This could be a personal preference. The Green Mile is definitely more character focused rather than plot focused. If anyone is into the Orange is the New Black hype, and wants to read more prison centered books with social justice at its core, The Green Mile is not that book. Through the story, Paul doesn’t seem to treat Coffey any differently from the other prisoners, and he does come to learn the truth about Coffey’s imprisonment. Still, there is no justice and some of the other characters are awful to Coffey.
Not the most engaging story, and I definitely would have enjoyed this if I read it in parts instead of as an entire novel.
3 howls
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