This story blew me away with its subtle readability. Even though it encompasses a few days on death row and lasts a few hundred pages, by the end of it you’ll feel like you’ve read a huge epic.

Many books pump themselves up like movie trailers until they almost have “THIS IS A GREAT BOOK” written across the pages. The Green Mile is not nearly so insecure. The writing is folksy and mild, and the story presents itself in such unpretentious fashion that I was surprised by how fascinating it is. Paul Edgecombe is a prison guard in Depression-era Mississippi, working on death row and trying to hold on to his job against a connected asshole on the guard team who makes his life a misery. Prisoners enter and leave death row like ocean currents, “The Prez”, a man who pushed his crippled father out a window, Eduard Delacroix, a mild-mannered Frenchman who burned to death six people, and “Wild Bill” Wharton, a lunatic who tries to kill virtually everyone he sees.

Then comes John Coffee, a black man who was convicted for murder under very questionable circumstances. Just as you’re getting settled in for a retelling of To Kill a Mockingbird, the plot suddenly gets much more interesting. You see, even though John Coffee, intelligence-wise, is equal to a small child, he has an incredible gift of healing that makes him a living legend on death row, and prompts Paul Edgecombe to take the biggest risk of his life.

Yes, the supernatural plays a part in this story, but it exists just as another prop. It never gets carried away and doesn’t influence the story beyond a very small part. Far more wondrous are things like Mr Jingles, a small white mouse who befriends the murdering Frenchman and comforts him to the very last.

Apparently the book was published as a serial novel in six parts before being collected into the edition I have here. I don’t know how heavily it was edited for the collected version, but the way it flows (with each of the six parts prefaced by one of Paul’s memoirs which explains the events in the last part) is, for the most part, very natural and unobtrusive. There’s an epilogue involving Mr Jingles that I’m not sold on, but the author admits he added it as a request from his wife so I guess it’s not part of the story proper.

This books stands among the formidable collection of Stephen King’s classics, and I enjoyed it like hell. It’s not really horror, but, you know, Stephen King actually does well outside of horror. If you liked Hearts of Atlantis, get ready for something ten times better.