Cody reads a collection of Stephen King novellas.
DIFFERENT SEASONS by Stephen King
Although Stephen King intended to write more than horror stories, he didn’t worry about getting “typed” as a horror writer as he sent his first several horror novels into the world, writing about a telekinetic teenager (Carrie), a town overrun by vampires (Salem’s Lot), a haunted hotel (The Shining), a clash between good and evil following a viral apocalypse (The Stand), and various other unnerving subjects. By 1982, he was successful enough that he could do anything he wanted to. So he gathered four novellas together into a collection he decided to call Different Seasons, since a couple of the stories would be giving readers a glimpse at his ability to write about non-horrific subjects.
The four novellas that make up Different Seasons are the prison drama Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, which would go on to get a very popular and highly regarded film adaptation with 1994’s The Shawshank Redemption; the dark and disturbing Apt Pupil, which also got the film treatment in 1998 (following a failed attempt in the ‘80s); The Body, which also got a popular and highly regarded adaptation with the 1986 film Stand by Me; and The Breathing Method, which hasn’t been brought to the screen yet, although not for a lack of trying on the part of director Scott Derrickson, who made a movie based on The Black Phone, a short story written by King’s son Joe Hill. Going along with the title of the collection, each story is given a seasonal subtitle. Shawshank Redemption is subtitled “Hope Springs Eternal,” Apt Pupil is “Summer of Corruption,” Stand by Me “Fall from Innocence,” and The Breathing Method “A Winter’s Tale.” That makes it sound like each story only takes place within one season, but that’s only the case for a couple of them, and the only one that truly fits with the named season is The Breathing Method. Of course, “Hope Springs Eternal” and “Fall from Innocence” are cheats anyway, so it doesn’t really matter that Shawshank plays out over decades and Stand by Me is actually set at the end of summer. “Summer of Corruption,” though, only fits the first couple passages of Apt Pupil before it also goes on to span years.
Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption is told from the perspective of “Red,” a prisoner at Shawshank State Penitentiary in Maine who is inspired to write out the experiences of a fellow prisoner, Andy Dufresne, who Red believes was locked up for a crime he didn’t commit: the murder of his wife and her lover. Andy had his ups and downs at Shawshank, that’s for sure – but he eventually found a way to escape, and Red has a lot of information on Andy that seems to be very unwise for him to be writing down on papers that he keeps in his cell, even if he did change some of the details at one point. Even if you question the logic of Red writing this out, Shawshank is a fascinating and ultimately uplifting story, and it’s no surprise that what King wrote here ended up serving as the basis of an Oscar-nominated film. The only surprise is that it took twelve years for a filmmaker (Frank Darabont) to realize they could earn Oscar nominations by bringing this story to the screen. The movie was a reasonably faithful adaptation, and it’s a powerful film that sticks in your memory. So much so that, despite the fact that I have only watched The Shawshank Redemption a few times (even though it was filmed in the area where I grew up), reading the novella brought images from the film to my mind throughout.
Apt Pupil, on the other hand, is an oppressively dark story. Set in the 1970s, it starts with teenager Todd Bowden taking an interest in World War II simply because stories of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust give him a thrill. To his delight, he recognizes an elderly man who lives in his city to be Nazi war criminal Kurt Dussander, who he has seen pictures of in magazines. So he goes to Dussander’s house and reveals that he knows the man’s true identity, blackmailing him into telling him stories about the concentration camp horrors he oversaw. Eventually, the stories aren’t enough to satisfy Todd’s bloodlust, so he becomes a serial killer, whittling down his city’s homeless population – while, unbeknownst to him, telling the stories has also reawakened Dussander’s bloodlust, so he starts murdering homeless people as well. This story is so dark and nihilistic, it comes off more like a story King would have usually published under his pseudonym Richard Bachman. It fits right in alongside Bachman stories Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, and The Running Man. It’s odd that he put his own name on this one... and odd that even with Apt Pupil out there, nobody realized King and Bachman were the same person until two years later.
Rising back up out of the darkness of Apt Pupil, we have The Body, which ranks as one of my all-time-favorite stories, as it was turned into one of my favorite films. It centers on a group of twelve-year-old friends – Gordie Lachance, Chris Chambers, Vern Tessio, and Teddy Duchamp – who set out on a morbid quest. Vern has overheard a conversation his tough guy older brother had with a friend of his and learned that the older boys stole a car to go out to a secluded location, where they stumbled across the corpse of a missing local kid who appeared to have been hit by a train. Since the older boys were in a stolen car, they can’t explain how they found the body, so they don’t intend to alert the authorities. So the younger boys decide to hike out to the location and “find” the body themselves. This is a heartfelt, nostalgic look back at what it was like to be a kid and go on adventures, even if this one is a bit twisted, with friends. It’s a great coming-of-age story, but it’s not sugarcoated. These kids aren’t just bouncing through happy days, they all have problems to deal with in life and come from imperfect households. Again, this was already such a great story on the page, the Stand by Me screenwriters really only had to change most of it into screenplay format, with the biggest differences between the novella and the film being that the teenage hoodlum characters (including Vern’s brother) have more to do in the movie, but the movie leaves out the section where the hoods get violent revenge on Gordie and his friends after they have a confrontation over the body. The Body is great and Stand by Me is great.
The collection wraps up with The Breathing Method, which is about a storytelling club in New York. They save their strangest stories for Christmastime, and this Christmas an elderly doctor has decided to tell the tragic story of a pregnant woman he treated decades earlier. This one is like an episode of a horror anthology series, it’s all building up to a shocking bummer of a conclusion – and since that’s really the point of it (there are strange things going on with this club on the periphery), it takes a bit too long getting there. I can understand why the three other stories have been turned into films but The Breathing Method is still waiting for its adaptation more than forty years later. I don’t see the appeal of bringing this story to the screen, but maybe Derrickson has figured out a way to make it something more than it is on the page. We might find out someday.
Your mileage will vary with the stories, but I found Different Seasons to be an interesting, engaging read for most of its pages... and feel that Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption and The Body are two of the best stories King has ever written.
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