The Green Mile - Stephen King, ebook
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Stephen King: The Green MileStephen King: The Green MileELECTRONIC VERSION 1.1 (Mar 29 00). If you find and correct errors in thetext, please update the version number by 0.1 and redistribute.Foreword: A LetterDear Constant Reader,Life is a capricious business. The story which begins in this little book existsin this form because of a chance remark made by a realtor I have never met. Thishappened a year ago, on Long Island. Ralph Vicinanza, a long-time friend andbusiness associate of mine (what he does mostly is to sell foreign publishingrights for books and stories), had just rented a house there. The realtorremarked that the house "looked like something out of a story by CharlesDickens."The remark was still on Ralph's mind when he welcomed his first houseguest,British publisher Malcolm Edwards. He repeated it to Edwards, and they beganchatting about Dickens. Edwards mentioned that Dickens had published many of hisnovels in installments, either folded into magazines or by themselves aschapbooks, (I don't know the origin of this word, meaning a smaller-than-averagebook, but have always loved its air of intimacy and friendliness). Some of thenovels, Edwards added, were actually written and revised in the shadow ofpublication; Charles Dickens was one novelist apparently not afraid of adeadline.Dickens's serialized novels were immensely popular; so popular, in fact, thatone of them precipitated a tragedy in Baltimore. A large group of Dickens fanscrowded onto a waterfront dock, anticipating the arrival of an English ship withcopies of the final installment of The Old Curiosity Shop on board. According tothe story, several would-be readers were jostled into the water and drowned.I don't think either Malcolm. or Ralph wanted anyone drowned, but they werecurious as to what would happen if serial publication were tried again today.Neither was immediately aware that it has happened (there really is nothing newunder the sun) on at least two occasions. Tom Wolfe published the first draft ofhis novel Bonfire of the Vanities serially in Rolling Stone magazine, andMichael McDowell (The Amulet, Gilded Needles, The Elementals, and the screenplayBeetlejuice) published a novel called Blackwater in paperback installments. Thatnovel - a horror story about a Southern family with the unpleasant familialtrait of turning into alligators - was not McDowell's best, but enjoyed goodsuccess for Avon Books, all the same.The two men further speculated about what might happen if a writer of popularfiction were to try issuing a novel in chapbook editions today - littlepaperbacks that might sell for a pound or two in Britain, or perhaps threedollars in America (where most paperbacks now sell for $6.99 or $7.99). Someonelike Stephen King might make an interesting go of such an experiment, Malcolmsaid, and from there the conversation moved on to other topics.Ralph more or less forgot the idea, but it recurred to him in the fall of 1995,following his return from the Frankfurt Book Fair, a kind of international tradeshow where every day is a showdown for foreign agents like Ralph. He broachedthe serialization/ chapbook idea to me along with a number of other matters,most of which were automatic turndowns.The chapbook idea was not an automatic turndown, though; unlike the interview inthe Japanese Playboy or the all-expenses-paid tour of the Baltic Republics, itstruck a bright spark in my imagination. I don't think that I am a modernDickens-if such a person exists, it is probably John Irving or Salman Rushdie -but I have always loved stories told in episodes. It is a format I firstencountered in The Saturday Evening Post, and I liked it because the end of eachepisode made the reader an almost equal participant with the writer-you had awhole week to try to figure out the next twist of the snake. Also, one read andexperienced these stories more intensely, it seemed to me, because they wererationed. You couldn't gulp, even if you wanted to (and if the story was good,you did).Best of all, in my house we often read them aloud-my brother, David, one night,myself the next, my mother taking a turn on the third, then back to my brotheragain. It was a rare chance to enjoy a written work as we enjoyed the movies wewent to and the TV programs (Rawhide, Bonanza. Route 66) that we watchedtogether; they were a family event . It wasn't until years later that Idiscovered Dickens's novels had been enjoyed by families of his day in much thesame fashion. only their fireside agonizings over the fate of Pip and Oliver andDavid Copperfield went on for years instead of a couple of months (even thelongest of the Post serials rarely ran much more than eight installments).There was one other thing that I liked about the idea, an appeal that I suspectonly the writer of suspense tales and spooky stories can fully appreciate: in astory which is published m installments, the writer gains an ascendancy over thereader which he or she cannot otherwise enjoy: simply put. Constant Reader, youcannot flip ahead and see how matters turn out.I still remember walking into our living room once when I was twelve or so andseeing my mother in her favorite rocker, peeking at the end of an AgathaChristie paperback while her finger held her actual place around page 50. I wasappalled, and told her so Q was twelve. remember. an age at which boys firstdimly begin to realize that they know everything), suggesting that reading theend of a mystery novel before you actually get there was on a par with eatingthe white stuff out of the middle of Oreo cookies and then throwing the cookiesthemselves away. She laughed her wonderful unembarrassed laugh and said perhapsthat was so, but sometimes she just couldn't resist the temptation. Giving in totemptation was a concept I could understand; I had plenty of my own, even attwelve. But here, at last, is an amusing cure for that temptation. Until thefinal episode arrives in bookstores, no one is going to know how The Green Mileturns out ... and that may include me.Although there was no way he could have known it, Ralph Vicinanza, mentioned theidea of a novel in installments at what was, for me, the perfect psychologicalmoment. I had been playing with a story idea on a subject I had always suspectedI would get around to sooner or later: the electric chair. "Old Sparky" hasfascinated me ever since my first James Cagney movie, and the first Death Rowtales I ever read (in a book called Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing, writtenby Warden Lewis E. Lawes) fired the darker side of my imagination. What, Iwondered, would it be like to walk those last forty yards to the electric chair,knowing you were going to die there? Mat, for that matter, would it be like tobe the man who had to strap the condemned in ... or pull the switch? What wouldsuch a job take out of you? Even creepier, what might it add?I had tried these basic ideas, always tentatively, on a number of differentframeworks over the last twenty or thirty years. I had written one successfulnovella set in prison (Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption), and had sort ofcome to the conclusion that that was probably it for me, when this take on theidea came along. There were lots of things I liked about it, but nothing morethan the narrator's essentially decent voice; low-key, honest, perhaps a littlewide-eyed, he is a Stephen King narrator if ever there was one. So I got towork, but in a tentative, stopand-start way. Most of the second chapter waswritten during a rain delay at Fenway Park!When Ralph called, I had filled a notebook with scribbled pages of The GreenMile, and realized I was building a novel when I should have been spending mytime clearing my desk for revisions on a book already written(Desperation-you'll see it soon, Constant Reader). At the point I had come to onMile, there are usually just two choices: put it away (probably never to bepicked up again) or cast everything else aside and chase.Ralph suggested a possible third alternative, a story that could be written thesame way it would be read-in installments. And I liked the high-wire aspect ofit, too: fall down on the job, fail to carry through, and all at once about amillion readers are howling for your blood. No one knows this any better thanme, unless it's my secretary, Juliann Eugley; we get dozens of angry letterseach week, demanding the next book in the Dark Tower cycle (patience, followersof Roland; another year or so and your wait will end, I promise). One of thesecontained a Polaroid of a teddy-bear in chains, with a message cut out ofnewspaper headlines and magazine covers: RELEASE THE NEXT DARK TOWER BOOK ATONCE OR THE BEAR DIES, it said. I put it up in my office to remind myself bothof my responsibility and of how wonderful it is to have people actually care - alittle-about the creatures of one's imagination.In any case, I've decided to publish The Green Mile in a series of smallpaperbacks, in the nineteenthcentury manner, and I hope you'll write and tell me(a) if you liked the story, and (b) if you liked the seldom used but ratheramusing delivery system. It has certainly energized the writing of the story,although at this moment (a rainy evening in October of 1995) it is still farfrom done, even in rough draft, and the outcome remains in some doubt. That ispart of the excitement of the whole thing, though-at this point I'm drivingthrough thick fog with the pedal all the way to the metal.Most of all...
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