ROSE MADDER: TRIVIA
• The character Cynthia Smith of Rose Madder also appears in 1996’s Desperation. An alternate universe version of the same character also appears in The Regulators, published that same year.
• Rosie McLendon and Anna Stevenson are fans of Paul Sheldon, the fictional author who is the main character of King’s novel Misery (1987).
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THE GREEN MILE
(1996)
When The Green Mile was originally published, it surprised many people, particularly long-time readers of Stephen King. He had most recently written several books about women in jeopardy (though that’s simplifying matters considerably), and for the most part, those had not been very well received. The last thing anyone would ever have expected from the author at the time was a serial novel about prison guards and inmates on Death Row in 1932, published in six thin monthly installments.
It was an idea, and a book, that seemed to fit more comfortably with some of the works he had produced much earlier in his career. And yet, as written, it is obviously a story only the middle-aged King could create with the degree of subtlety that is present in the narrative.
Serial novels, of course, are a dead publishing format. It hadn’t been done successfully in decades, and it hadn’t been done by a pop culture icon since Charles Dickens wrote in serial form in nineteenth-century England. But in March 1996, the first part of The Green Mile, “The Two Dead Girls,” appeared and was an immediate critical and popular success. The idea of such a series of cliffhangers from the undisputed “Master of Horror” (though this is hardly a horror story in that sense) appealed to a vast number of readers. Anyone who had ever read King, and probably a great many who never had, picked up the first part and were hooked.
But it wasn’t just the promotional gimmick that did it. A gimmick is, after all, only effective once. The truth of the matter was that The Green Mile was King’s best writing in years. Interesting, since the author plainly admitted to not having had the ending fully fleshed out even as the first installments were being published.
The story is a deceptively simple one. Paul Edgecombe is the senior guard working on E Block at Cold Mountain Prison in the southern United States in 1932. E Block is, for all intents and purposes, Death Row. A new prisoner, John Coffey, is brought into E Block, and changes the lives of everyone with whom he comes into contact. A simpleton with a supernatural healing gift, Coffey is set to be executed for a crime he didn’t commit. The interaction of the guards and inmates is both a chilling and tragic plot and a wonderful morality play. The fact that it is all bookended by the story of the 104-year-old Edgecombe looking back on the events adds texture that is surprising in a book as short (in comparison to most of King’s works) as this.
On the other hand, since the long-term effects of exposure to John Coffey are really what the book is about—along with mortality, and the fragility of the human condition, both physical and emotional—the book could not have worked successfully without that framing sequence.
King had, of course, already successfully done a prison novel (or, in this case, novella) called Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. It appeared in 1982 in the collection Different Seasons. More dauntingly, perhaps, by the time King was working on The Green Mile, the novella had been made into an extraordinarily good (and very faithful) film called, more simply, The Shawshank Redemption (1994).
Of course, calling both stories prison novels and expecting them to be the same is sort of like expecting ’Salem’s Lot (1975) and Christine (1983) to be identical simply because they each deal with small-town horror. Certainly, the atmosphere of prison life (and lest we forget, both of the tales are period pieces, which adds a certain texture) was something King had proven he could do. But the stories themselves are very different. There are instances in The Green Mile when it seems about to turn into a caper or escape yarn. It never does.
While the two tales share a focal character who is apparently innocent of the crimes for which he has been imprisoned, there is little similarity beyond that. Shawshank is about the prison experience, and finding a way to triumph over a system that has malfunctioned and destroyed an individual’s life. It is about escape.
The Green Mile, on the other hand, is about suffering the tragedy that ensues because of a malfunction in the system (here, of course, the system is not merely prison, but society as a whole, given that racism is one of the keys to Coffey’s wrongful imprisonment). It is not about beating the system. Instead, it focuses on what the characters around John Coffey learn from the wrongs that have befallen him, and the benevolence with which he faces them. Finally, more than anything, The Green Mile is about transcendence, both for John Coffey and for the other characters involved in the narrative.
Also unlike Shawshank, The Green Mile surprised readers by including a supernatural element. Though the presentation of the supernatural is subtle throughout the story, it is there, nevertheless. John Coffey’s empathy and healing touch aren’t merely the alleged God-given gift of a faith healer. It is a real, tangible thing, where Coffey pulls the pain and suffering and disease of others into himself, feels the agony of it, and then expels it in a horrid, visible form, not unlike the demon rising from the ruins of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1977).
But beyond Coffey’s “touch”—which, let’s not forget, manages to make both Paul Edgecombe and Mr. Jingles, the mouse, almost immortal—there’s that damned mouse. Mr. Jingles is no ordinary rodent, even before Coffey gets his hands on him. It may be possible that a mouse is just a mouse, but it’s clear that King doesn’t think so. Neither does Paul Edgecombe.
Which brings us to another element of the supernatural, something even more subtle than the others, which also ties in with John Coffey. Or, more accurately, with Coffey’s execution. Paul—and, we are led to believe, the other characters in the story—can feel the almost electrical current running through the air as Coffey is about to be executed. The weather changes, the air itself is altered, as if some preternatural force is disturbed by what is about to occur. But there is no deus ex machina, much as Paul, and the readers, might have hoped for it. If some cosmic force has empowered John Coffey, or is bothered by the notion of his execution, it does nothing to save him.
But in Paul Edge
combe, and in Mr. Jingles, the “magic” legacy of John Coffey lives on for a very long time.
THE GREEN MILE: PRIMARY SUBJECTS
PAUL EDGECOMBE: As the senior guard on E Block at Cold Mountain penitentiary, Paul Edgecombe has a job no one would envy (save, perhaps, for the sadistic Percy Wetmore). E Block is where prisoners are sent after they are sentenced to die on Old Sparky, Cold Mountain’s electric chair, and Paul is frequently required to strap the convicts into the chair.
During that period in 1932 when John Coffey is on E Block, Paul has one of the strangest and most tragic experiences of his life. Coffey has been convicted of murdering two young girls, but from the moment he is brought into the prison, Paul believes there is something just a little different about John Coffey.
Over time, experiencing Coffey’s ability to heal firsthand, and realizing the large black man is fairly simple-minded, Paul begins to believe that Coffey is innocent of the murders. He sets out to prove exactly that, but racial issues prevent anyone from reopening the case, even though Paul believes he has the actual killer, Billy Wharton, right there on E Block.
Eventually Coffey is executed. None of the other guards will give the order to throw the switch, and Paul is forced to do that himself. Not long thereafter, Paul retires, never participating in another execution.
However, Coffey’s legacy does not die along with him. The influence of his healing power remains in Paul Edgecombe’s life, as well as in the “life” of the mouse, Mr. Jingles. Paul experiences flashes of telepathy, an ability that eventually fades, and is perfectly healthy all his life, up to his present age of 104.
In 1956, Paul and Janice Edgecombe are in a horrible bus accident
from which only four people walk away. Janice dies, but Paul emerges without a scratch.
Finding himself a resident of the Georgia Pines retirement home, he begins to write the story of John Coffey and the events at Cold Mountain. There he meets a woman named Elaine Connelly, who becomes his companion, and he gives her the account to read. Though Elaine finds it difficult to believe, particularly Paul’s advanced age, she believes when Paul shows her the pet he has been keeping—Mr. Jingles. The mouse has survived all that time, just like Paul, thanks to John Coffey’s lasting power.
Eventually, though, Mr. Jingles expires. Elaine passes on as well. For his part, Paul continues on in good health at Georgia Pines.
JOHN COFFEY: A black migrant worker, John Coffey was born with something extra. He has a special empathy with people, and the ability to heal them, to take their pain into himself for a time, and then release it into the ether. Fate is not kind to John Coffey, however. While traveling through the woods, he comes upon the bodies of two young white girls who have just been murdered. Coffey does his best to revive the victims, to heal them, but cannot. When the bodies are found, Coffey is still there, crying over them, a large black man with blood on his hands at the site of the murder of two small white girls.
Simple-minded, Coffey does not have the wits or the will to defend himself, and is convicted of the crime and sentenced to death. While on E Block, awaiting execution, he meets and heals senior guard Paul Edgecombe and others. Edgecombe and several other guards try to help Coffey, but to no avail.
Much to Edgecombe’s dismay, Coffey seems almost relieved to face his execution. His empathy—feeling the pain of those around him so constantly—has become an almost unbearable burden. Coffey is executed on November 20, 1932, for crimes he did not commit.
EDUARD DELACROIX: Delacroix lands on E Block after he raped a girl and then set a fire to cover it up that took the lives of six people. While in prison, the skittish inmate keeps mostly to himself, with the exception of Mr. Jingles, a mouse who becomes his pet. However, the guards on E Block have some questions, mostly in jest, as to who is the owner and who the pet. Delacroix claims that Mr. Jingles speaks to him, whispers in his ear, and it seems as though the tricks the inmate “trains” the mouse to do might not have required very much training at all.
It is Delacroix’s ill fortune that a sadistic guard named Percy Wetmore takes an instant dislike to him. Percy brutalizes Delacroix and, when preparing him for execution, purposely does not properly wet the sponges that go into the helmet of the electric chair. As a result, Delacroix is not so much electrocuted as he is burned alive in the chair.
MR. JINGLES: The guards on E Block originally call this mouse “Steamboat Willie,” after the famous Mickey Mouse cartoon. However, the mysterious rodent, who always seems a bit more intelligent than any mouse ought to be, eventually becomes the pet of inmate Eduard Delacroix. Delacroix claims that Mr. Jingles speaks to him, and has told him his “real” name. In order to hurt Delacroix, the sadistic guard, Percy Wetmore, kills Mr. Jingles, but the mouse is revived and healed by John Coffey.
Coffey uses enough of his power in this instance to infuse Mr. Jingles with a miraculous health and life span (just as Coffey does with Paul Edgecombe). Mr. Jingles later shows up, almost as if he’d been searching the man out, on the step of Paul Edgecombe’s Georgia retirement home. It seems an unlikely coincidence, and one can only assume that there is, indeed, more to the mouse than would be considered natural. However, whether that comes from John Coffey’s power or, as seems to be indicated, was always inherent in Mr. Jingles, remains a mystery.
Mr. Jingles dies in the care of Paul Edgecombe at Georgia Pines.
BILLY “THE KID” WHARTON: A nineteen-year-old serial killer, William Wharton fancies himself a modern-day Billy the Kid. Upon his arrival at E Block, he tries to kill a guard named Dean Stanton. It becomes obvious to the jailers, after a time, that Wharton is likely responsible for the murders of the two little girls for which John Coffey is facing execution, but they can do nothing about it.
Coffey, on the other hand, could. After healing the wife of the warden, Coffey holds onto her pain and sickness until he returns to the prison. There he sends all that dark pain into Percy Wetmore, a sadistic guard whom he hates, and somehow manipulates Percy into turning that pain on Wharton. Wetmore shoots Wharton six times.
So Billy the Kid never makes it to Old Sparky.
PERCY WETMORE: A born sadist, Percy Wetmore won his job on E Block by virtue of being the governor’s nephew. That connection also allows him to make a great deal of trouble for Paul Edgecombe and the other keepers on E Block. He brutalizes inmates, both physically and emotionally, and purposely interferes in Eduard Delacroix’s execution so the man will not be electrocuted, but instead burned by the electricity. After that event, he is intimidated into requesting a transfer to Briar Ridge Mental Hospital.
After Percy murders an inmate (though his will is not entirely his own at the time), he is sent to Briar Ridge as a patient, and dies there in 1965.
BRUTUS HOWELL: A guard on E Block along with Paul Edgecombe, Brutus also believes in John Coffey’s innocence and participates in the trek with Coffey that leads to the healing of the warden’s wife. His nickname is “brutal,” though perhaps more because he is physically intimidating than because of any actual brutality. Brutus dies in 1957 of a heart attack.
HAL MOORES: The warden of Cold Mountain penitentiary, Hal Moores is reluctant to see John Coffey executed after Coffey heals his wife’s brain tumor. He is helpless, however, to stop the execution. Warden Moores dies of a stroke.
MELINDA MOORES: The wife of Cold Mountain’s warden, Hal Moores, Melinda is dying of an inoperable brain tumor before she is miraculously healed by John Coffey. She later expires of a heart attack, in 1943.
JANICE EDGECOMBE: Paul’s wife, she keeps after him to find a way to prove John Coffey’s innocence or to help him escape. She dies in a bus accident in 1956.
ELAINE CONNELLY: A resident of the Georgia Pines retirement home, Elaine becomes Paul Edgecombe’s companion in his (very) old age. Though both Paul and Elaine are tormented by a sadistic orderly (not unlike Paul’s old co-worker, Percy Wetmore) named Brad Dolan, Elaine manages to intimidate Dolan somewhat with her connections at the Georgia state house.
Elaine dies of a heart attack three months after reading Paul’s story about John Coffey and Cold Mountain.
THE GREEN MILE: ADAPTATIONS
King’s groundbreaking serial novel was adapted for the big screen in 1999 by writer/director Frank Darabont, who had previously performed the same miracle with The Shawshank Redemption (1994, the screen version of King’s other period prison story, adapted from the 1982 novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption).
The film featured Hollywood’s favorite leading man, Tom Hanks, as Paul Edgecombe, but also sported a marvelous supporting cast. Michael Clarke Duncan (Armageddon) manages the challenging role of John Coffey with quiet dignity and aplomb. James Cromwell (L.A. Confidential) is a perfect Warden Moores, and Bonnie Hunt (Jumanji) portrays Janice Edgecombe, Paul’s wife, with a wonderful twinkle in her eye and confidence not often found in such roles. Chameleonlike actor Michael Jeter achieves great pathos as Delacroix, and Doug Hutchison and Sam Rockwell are gloriously evil in their respective roles as Percy Wetmore and Billy Wharton. Barry Pepper and Jeffrey DeMunn are equally adept in their parts as Paul’s fellow prison guards, Dean Stanton and Harry Terwilliger. Perhaps the film’s best performance, however, can be attributed to character actor David Morse (The Rock), who gives prison guard Brutus Howell amazing range and texture of emotion.
Darabont’s adaptation is extremely faithful to King’s original text. The only major deviation concerns the wraparound story that the author included mainly as a necessity of the serial publishing format. The film opens and closes with the elderly Paul Edgecombe and Elaine Connelly, and includes Mr. Jingles—all of the elements that are pertinent to the themes of the narrative—but the Per
cy Wetmore–like orderly, Brad Dolan, has been excised completely.
THE GREEN MILE: TRIVIA
• A pair of E Block guards are named “Harry” and “Dean Stanton,” and veteran character actor Harry Dean Stanton appears in the film as inmate trustee Toot Toot. The actor also appeared in the film version of King’s Christine. It is highly doubtful that this is a coincidence.
• Director Darabont has joked that after his first two films he’s firmly established himself as the major force in a sub-sub-subgenre: lengthy period prison dramas based on the works of Stephen King. However, the auteur has also been working for quite some time on an adaptation of King’s novella The Mist.
• Jeffrey DeMunn, who portrays Harry in the film version of The Green Mile, was also in King’s 1999 television miniseries Storm of the Century, as Robbie Beals. DeMunn also appeared in The Shawshank Redemption. David Morse is also a regular in King-related films, having appeared in The Green Mile, The Langoliers, and Hearts in Atlantis.
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SIX STORIES
(1997)
Published by King’s own Philtrum Press, this signed, limited edition of 1,100 copies became an instant collector’s item, quickly appreciating from its original sales price of $85. Designed by Michael Alpert, this handsome trade paperback featured two previously unpublished works, “L.T.’s Theory of Pets” and “Autopsy Room Four.” The other four stories—“Lunch at the Gotham Café,” “Luckey Quarter,” “Blind Willie,” and “The Man in the Black Suit”—were previously published in Dark Love (1995), an anthology edited by Nancy A. Collins; USA Weekend; Antaeus; and The New Yorker respectively.
The Complete Stephen King Universe Page 41
