This is not a review, and I don't hand out stars either. It is part of my annotated reading list. Whatever first comes to mind when I pick up the book. More about it in this blog post.
written on October 31, 2026, read October 2026
When Stephen King gets really good, he usually ends up in prison. The novella “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption”, on which “The Shawshank Redemption”1 is based, is really very good. The film deserves its excellent reputation. But I read the novella a long time ago.
I saw “The Green Mile” in the cinema back then. Many years ago. So I allow myself a certain amount of “spoileriness”2 in this text – but only a very mild one. Over the years I’ve also watched the film several times at home. But I actually only got around to reading the book this week. And I have to say: really good. The film sticks quite closely to the book, even though the parts of the story set in the protagonist’s old age are heavily cut.
If you read the ending in the book, it also becomes clearer why he believes he is mortal after all. The whole story naturally has strong religious undertones (John Coffey = J. C. = Jesus Christ – nobody can tell me that wasn’t intentional), but they really are undertones and not the thick layer of religion you get in “The Stand”.
Above all, though, I liked how King describes the microcosm of death row here. And that’s what makes both the book and the film.
It’s somehow interesting that the three books3 by King that I like most are precisely not horror: the two I already mentioned, plus “The Life of Chuck”. Yes, King is a horror writer, and that is certainly his great strength too, but for me it’s not the place where he tells stories best.
However, reading it also shows once again how hard it is to form your own picture of the characters when you’ve seen the film first. The actors keep pushing themselves into the foreground, and you start reading quickly and filling in skimmed passages from the film – until you force yourself to read more slowly, so as not to create a hybrid of book and film in your head. One in which, after the end of the Green Mile, the E Block supervisor goes on to a career at NASA, then spends a while flying passenger planes himself – and always has trouble with his aircraft. And when he dreamed himself away to a desert island during those nights on E Block, he probably didn’t know yet what was still to come. Thanks a lot, Mr Hanks.4
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Known in Germany as “Die Verurteilten” (“The Condemned”). ↩
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Or is it really still news to anyone here that Darth Vader is Luke’s father? ↩
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Out of about ten that I’ve read. Then again: they’re more stories than books – but I don’t want to go through the collections now and count how many stories they contain. ↩
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A dancing night manager is just as hard to get out of your head, by the way. ↩