Different Seasons

King collects four novellas, each attached to a season, that step away from the ghosts and monsters of his earlier books toward more grounded, though still often brutal, stories. In Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne, a banker wrongly convicted of murdering his wife, spends nearly two decades in Shawshank State Penitentiary laundering the warden's corrupt money while quietly, patiently tunneling toward the prison wall behind a poster in his cell, and finally crawls to freedom through a sewage pipe on a stormy night, leaving his friend Red to join him in Mexico after his own parole. In Apt Pupil, a curious, cruel teenager named Todd Bowden discovers that his elderly neighbor is a fugitive Nazi war criminal and blackmails the old man into recounting his crimes in detail, a relationship that corrupts them both until Todd is killing on his own and the exposed Nazi kills himself rather than face capture. The Body follows four boys walking the railroad tracks out of their small Maine town to see the corpse of a missing boy hit by a train, an ordinary summer errand that becomes, by the story's end, the last unclouded day several of them will ever have, since Gordie alone survives into a stable adulthood while his friends die young in violence, war, or accident. The Breathing Method closes the collection with a strange, tightly told story of a doctor recalling the night an unmarried mother, decapitated in a car accident on her way to deliver her baby, kept breathing and pushing after death until the child was safely born.

King writes each novella in a distinct register suited to its own season, warm and patient in The Body, clipped and unsettling in Apt Pupil, and the collection reads faster than its length suggests precisely because so little of it depends on the supernatural machinery readers came to it expecting.