The Green Mile by Stephen King

Genre: Fiction, Horror, Fantasy, Thriller

At Cold Mountain Penitentiary, along the lonely stretch of cells known as the Green Mile, killers are depraved as the psychopathic “Billy the Kid” Wharton and the possessed Eduard Delacroix await death strapped in “Old Sparky.” Here guards as decent as Paul Edgecombe and as sadistic as Percy Wetmore watch over them. But good or evil, innocent or guilty, none have ever seen the brutal likes of the new prisoner, John Coffey, sentenced to death for raping and murdering two young girls. Is Coffey a devil in human form? Or is he a far, far different kind of being?

The complete Green Mile serial, this set includes The Green Mile #1: The Two Dead Girls, The Green Mile #2: The Mouse on the Mile, The Green Mile #3: Coffey’s Hands, The Green Mile #4: The Bad Death of Eduard Delacroix, The Green Mile #5: Night Journey and The Green Mile #6.

I have seen the film to this so many times but never actually realised it was a book and more importantly a book written by Stephen King?! How did I never realise this?! Anyway I finally picked it up!

In this book we follow Paul Edgecombe, a guard of The Green Mile, where death row inmates stay before they get killed via the electric chair. We follow Paul as he deals with the inmates and the staff during a few short years during his time there.

This book was 500 pages with really tiny font however I flew through it. The book was originally published in installments which makes each “book” around 100 pages if not less, this means you can fly through a major part of the whole story without realising it. The writing is incredibly fast paced and there is always something going on.

Fans of the film will not be disappointed, the two are really alike and only have one or two minor changes throughout the story, the ending is more satisfactory in the book though as we get more closure on the story of the characters and what happened to them which is a part I particularly liked.

For those of you who haven’t seen the film (which I definitely recommend) both the book and the film are really long but it doesn’t feel long if that makes sense. It just seems like a really great story which sucks you in, you want to know what is going to happen to these characters and how the ending will turn out.

With a little bit of magic thrown in this is a really great book, although focusing on a rather dark area (after all a few of the inmates do end up getting violently electrocuted in the electric chair) the story overall isn’t really about that. It is about how one man can change things and make you see the world in a completely different way.

I always cry at the film and the book is exactly the same, for the last 30 or so pages I just could not stop crying, I loved every bit but at the same time it was just so sad! I liked that we got more closure than the film though as there were some lingering questions at the end of the film which are answered in the book so I liked that but it still didn’t make it any easier to read!

Overall I would definitely recommend this book, you can absolutely fly through it and the story is so enjoyable! Like I said previously if you liked the film then you’ll like the book as they are pretty similar. If you haven’t seen the film or read the book then don’t let the setting put you off, it is so much more than about the electric chair, you get to meet new interesting characters and see from points of view that are hardly written about.

Rating: 5/5

Summing up: A non depressing tale about a miracle and the electric chair