Word: miles
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...disappointments have included the well-reviewed Rose by Martin Cruz Smith and Petru Popescu's Almost Adam, a well-hyped (and widely panned) thriller about early man. Some agents even blame the slump on King for crowding competitors off shelves and best-seller lists with his flotilla of Green Mile installments. Others in the industry see more pandemic ills, citing a trend toward increasingly larger advances paid to authors, and the increasingly larger printings that are subsequently ordered in an eager effort to make a profit...
...share the same cast of characters in skewed, slightly different roles--will be published the same day, Sept. 24. One is Desperation (Viking; 688 pages; $27.95). The other is The Regulators, written under King's occasional nom de plume, Richard Bachman (Dutton; 475 pages; $24.95). Along with The Green Mile's 592 pages, this means King will have graced his fans with a total of 1,755 pages of fiction in less than 12 months. By way of comparison, you can get a standard-size, paperback King James Version of the Bible that tallies only 1,112 pages--a pretty...
...there such a thing as writer's unblock? King, who works virtually nonstop, regularly churning out two and sometimes three books a year, provides a clue about how he is able to manage such a forest-clearing output. In his introduction to the first volume of The Green Mile, he writes, "Most of the second chapter was written during a rain delay at Fenway Park!" Throw in a couple of pitching changes for revisions, and Anne Rice had better start watching her back on the hardcover best-seller list...
...hadn't we better get back to Mr. Jingles? He has befriended the death-row inmates and guards who are The Green Mile's core cast of characters (the Mile itself is a painted corridor the cons must walk to what is inevitably known as Old Sparky). Set in the deep, sleepy and racist South of 1932, the novel asks the question, What if a hulking but gentle and close-to-mute black man with a gift for Christlike healing were sentenced to die for the brutal kidnapping and murder-rape of two little white girls--crimes...
...dabbing their eyes and musing ruefully about life and death and stuff like that. It is a conclusion that may feel anticlimactic after five months in which the novel's narrator has been hinting at a more hair-raising denouement. Still, like the best popular art, The Green Mile has the courage of its cornier convictions. You might even say the palpable sense of King's sheer, unwavering belief in his tale is what makes the novel work as well as it finally does. Or maybe it is the palpable sense of his sheer need to write...