Book: Different Seasons
Author: Stephen King
Publication Date: August 27th, 1982
Ratings:
"Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption"- 5/5
"Apt Pupil"- 3.5/5
"The Body"- 4.5/5
"The Breathing Method"- 2.5/5
Stephen King's short stories, in a way, define him. Though his novels are often considered his claim to fame, it was his aptitude for short fiction that developed him as a writer and elevated him enough to pursue writing as a career. They are often excellent showcases for his cinematic writing style and knack for the supernatural; they also prevent the inevitable King Crash and Burn that typically occurs in his longer books. While the author himself might disagree, I consider King's short stories to be essential reading, especially his novellas, which are often brilliantly plotted and the perfect length for him to fully exercise the story's creative potential. In Different Seasons, King's first anthology since 1978's Night Shift, his penchant for short fiction and drama is turned up to eleven (one louder) with four stories that show every facet of King's writing--and not always for the better.
"Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" is the only novella of the quartet that I gave a perfect rating to and probably the only work of King's I'll ever give such a rating to (although some of his individual short stories, such as "The Jaunt", could earn a perfect rating for sheer imagination and imagery). This novella is the second shortest of the bunch and the most realistic. Red, an inmate at Shawshank Prison, is an adept purveyor of smuggled items and is locally known as "the guy who can get it for you". While serving his sentence, he meets Andy Dufrense, a quiet man wrongly convicted of shooting his wife and her lover. Dufrense spends his days at Shawshank avoiding The Sisters (a prison-rape gang), carving rocks he finds in the prison yard with a rock hammer procured from Red, and managing the prison library. He soon lands a cushy job: doing financial work for the prison guards. Red is often amazed by Dufrense's calm nature and intelligence, and the two men become friends--until one day, almost twenty-seven years into his incarceration, Andy escapes from his locked cell and becomes a mystery for Red to pursue.
This novella is brilliant because it's modest. Unlike King's other prison-related work, The Green Mile, there are no supernatural elements to this story: it is merely the story of two prison inmates navigating the emotionally-ravaging tedium of their lives. While I wouldn't accuse King of being over-researched, quite a lot of detail goes into the story, especially about the redundancy of prison life and how it changes men. It's an emotional piece of work (although, somehow, not quite as poignant as its equally impressive film adaptation) that manages to be abstemious from fictional splendor and grandness, yet simultaneously touching and inspirational. Perhaps the most amazing part is that, unlike some of King's more dramatic work, the prose never loses its signature touch of King. It is a King story and, in this humble blogger's opinion, one of his best.
"Apt Pupil" deserved a 3/5. I'll be perfectly honest. The only reason it didn't is because I enjoyed it too damn much. If I hadn't, I would have been much stricter in my grading. "Apt Pupil", the longest story of the bunch, concerns thirteen-year-old American boy Todd Bowden and elderly Nazi war criminal Kurt Dussander. Todd matches Dussander's face to a war magazine he found in a friend's garage and threatens to turn him into the authorities if he doesn't regale Todd with stories of his part in the Holocaust. They form a twisted relationship: Todd makes Dussander wear a Nazi Halloween costume and tell him every detail of his dark past, which Dussander reluctantly does in order to keep his identity a secret. As Todd grows older, his grades slip due to the frequency of his visits and the nightmares these visits produce; Dussander pretends to be his grandfather in order to prevent Todd's parents from finding out about his poor grades. The two soon find themselves entangled in a web of corruption, with each holding secrets over the other and becoming more and more fixated on violence and death.
"Apt Pupil" is perhaps the strangest non-supernatural piece of fiction King has ever written. Having a teenage boy fiercely obsessed with Nazism and seek stories from his Nazi neighbor is a strange enough premise and it just gets stranger as the story progresses. That's where King gets his credit: he takes a shock value plot and actually wrings an entertaining novella from its uncomfortably violent and anti-Semitic guts. However, like all of King's longer works, it goes off the rails as it progresses. At one point, I thought the story was pages from its ending, but it turned out to be another eighty pages longer. It drags out the premise and charts Todd's perfectly normal growth in tandem with his transformation into a demented criminal himself. This should be more interesting, but it just drags. King succeeds by making Dussander very unsympathetic--no Nazi criminal should be sympathized with--but both he and Todd become almost interminable by the end of the story. However, it sticks the ending well enough to make one almost forget about the never-ending journey to it. Almost.
"The Body" is probably better known as Stand By Me, an absolutely wonderful film adaptation that skins the fat from the novella. Not to say "The Body" is another interminable King venture: in fact, it's nearly perfect. "The Body" is about a group of four twelve-year-old boys on the cusp of autumn: Gordie Lachance, the story's narrator, is an intelligent boy who is ignored by his parents in the wake of his popular older brother's death and writes stories in his spare time; Chris Chambers, simultaneously the group's toughest member and its peacemaker, comes from a family of delinquents and is considered one by the entire town; Teddy Duchamp, physically scarred by his veteran father and mentally scarred by the experience, is a military-obsessed oddball who is fiercely defensive of his father; Vern Tessio, slow in school and in real life, is terrified by his older brother and his gang, whom Vern desperately wants to please. The boys hear about a boy who was hit by a train and decide to hike out of their hometown of Castle Rock to see the body and report it to the news. Along the way though, they discover something much bigger than a body: the difference between life and death.
"The Body" screams Stephen King. He is a professional nostalgic, always waxing poetic about Coke bottles and boyhood friendships, and these aphorisms about life through a child's eyes are the centerpiece of the story. As kitschy as this sounds, King instills the story with enough realism to keep it from feeling as silly and unfettered as twelve-year-olds are: there is a conversation between Gordie and Chris that is some of the most heartbreaking dialogue King has ever written. And the final confrontation between Gordie's gang and the older kids who also want to claim the body is a phenomenal mediation on lost innocence and the finality of death that one wouldn't have expected from a novella that contains a detailed story about a pie-eating contest gone awry. The characters are occasionally grating (although that may just be the opinion of a girl who finds prepubescent boys annoying), but there's an undeniable touch of magic to this novella that sets it apart from the rest.
"The Breathing Method" has a low rating for many reasons, one of which you'll stumble upon in the proceeding synopsis. David, the narrator, is a Manhattan lawyer who is invited to a mysterious club by a co-worker. There, middle-aged and elderly men read and play pool while being served by unflappable butler Stevens. David initially feels out of place, but returns to continue reading from the club's extensive library and is entertained by the Thursday night storytelling. On the Thursday before Christmas, Doctor Emlyn McCarron tells the tale of a unmarried pregnant woman who became his patient in the thirties. Unlike other women in her situation, she decides to keep her child and is admirably professional about the whole business of pregnancy. Because of her composed manner, McCarron decides to teach her the Breathing Method, a breathing pattern for women at every age of labor. She begins to practice it in spite of a recurring sense of doom that plagues her greater with every doctor visit--and Doctor McCarron feels it too.
"The Breathing Method" was not meant to be a novella. All of the business about David joining the club is dreadfully boring and tedious: in fact, everything up to the story told by McCarron is almost interminable. No one wants to read about a man going to a club for other well-off, old men, especially when it is written as dryly as it is here. With the exception of the surprising and almost satisfying conclusion of McCarron's story, the novella doesn't feel like a King story. It's as dull and cold as the characters and setting. If King had turned the McCarron tale into an independent short story, it would have been excellent, as this is the most intriguing and inventive piece of writing in the entire collection. However, King decided to bog it down with the David character and his club struggles, which prevents it from even brushing with the greatness it could have achieved on its own.
Over all, this is an excellent King anthology. While he never gets to exercise his horror and supernatural chops, his flair for drama flourishes with the support of sharp dialogue and reliable prose. If "The Breathing Method" had been switched for something more interesting or perhaps excised all together, this would have been the best piece of work ever published by King. Instead, it sits comfortably in the Best Of chest, reminding us of the enthralling magic King can work when he uses his imagination at full capacity.
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