Different Seasons (Signet)

Different Seasons - Stephen King King in an afterword describes these four novellas of about 20 to 35 thousand words as stories of "an off-beat prison-break, an old man and a young boy locked up in a gruesome relationship based on mutual parasitism, a quartet of country boys on a journey of discovery, and an off the wall horror story about a young woman determined to give birth to her child no matter what." The first three of those stories have been made into films ("The Body" into Stand by Me) and aren't even horror, even if they each have horrific elements. All in all though I think this is some of the best work by King and shows there's a lot more to him than a writer of poltergeist-like adolescents, haunted hotels, vampire-ridden towns and possessed cars. Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption is that prison story, and the most moving story I've ever read by King. In his way, Andy Dufresne, it's subject, is the most heroic figure I've read by King, an author who usually serves up very ordinary men to center extraordinary events upon. He's the "unbowed" man in the poem Invictus who can walk across a prison yard as a prisoner as if clothed in a suit in a cocktail party--who keeps his soul and dignity intact. The story is told by his friend "Red," that man in prison who can get you almost anything for a price--and one of those things is a poster of Rita Hayworth for Andy and there hangs a tale--one spanning 27 years that despite dark elements is the sunniest and most hopeful story I've read by King. Five Stars Apt Pupil is that story of an old man and young boy in a "gruesome relationship." Thirteen-year-old Todd Bowden, an "all-American kid," discovers this 76-year old man in his neighborhood is actually a Nazi war criminal, Kurt Dussander. So does he expose him? No, he goes to him and extorts him into telling him all the gory details, because the holocaust and the Nazis thrill him. I thought most of this tale chilling and brilliant, but I think the impact is blunted by King inserting a serial killer subplot I think is unnecessary and I'd have thought it more effective if things had unraveled otherwise, and spoken more of the ordinary nature of evil. (I also thought a certain dream of the boy over the top--unnecessary to demonstrate this is one creepy kid that even a Nazi death camp commandant can rightly call a "monster" soon after meeting him.) Four Stars The Body is about four 12-year-old boys in late Summer of 1960--and friendship. How it could drag you down or buoy you up. It's an appropriate story to represent Fall--because it is autumnal in the nostalgic way of a mature man recollecting boyhood as well as bittersweet. There's Gordy, the first person narrator who is an obvious stand-in for Stephen King, the crazy half-blind and deaf Teddy, "feebie" Vern, and above all Chris--who King makes you care about a great deal. Just as moving in its way as "Shawshank Redemption." (And I found amusing the references to other King tales--such as Cujo). Five Stars The Breathing Method is the shortest story, and the only one that is a genre horror tale. I wasn't as fond of this one as the others, and not just because this is where I finally got irked by King's gazillionth idiot characterization of Republicans. (Memo to Mr King: Republican does not equal ignorant bigoted bully and lots of us I'm sure are among your readers.) I thought the ending of the core story really ludicrous. On the positive side, I thought Sandra Stanfield, a single pregnant woman in the 1930s, one of King's stronger and more appealing female characters. I also loved the frame to the story. The tale is embedded as being told in the same upscale New York City's gentleman's club first found in "The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands" from Skeleton Crew. It's housed in a brownstone with an unaging servant named Stevens in which you can find in the library novels and poems you can't find outside the club, with many rooms and "entrances and exits" into other worlds. Three Stars