Different seasons
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9781501143489
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From the Book - First Scribner trade paperback edition.
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Kirkus Book Review
It will take all of King's monumental byline-insurance to drum up an audience for this bottom-of-the-trunk collection: four overpadded novellas, in non-horror genres--without the gripping situations needed to transcend King's notoriously clumsy writing. Best of the lot is Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption--in which banker Andy Dufresne, in a Maine prison for life for murdering his wife and her lover, plans his escape over a 20-year period, working his way through four feet of concrete to get to the sewer shaft beyond. The climax is feeble (especially after such a long build-up), the redemption theme is murky--but the close observation of prison life offers some engaging details. ""Apt Pupil,"" on the other hand, is crude and utterly unconvincing: Todd, an All-American California boy, discovers that Mr. Denker down the block is really an aged Nazi war criminal--so he extorts long confessions from the old man, relishing all the atrocity details, becoming totally corrupted by the Nazi mystique; at last, however, the old Nazi (who gets his kicks by killing winos) takes revenge on the boy--and their evil symbiosis ends in a muddle of suicide, murder, and madness. The third piece is the most conventional: ""The Body,"" a familiar fall-from-innocence tale about four not-very-bright Maine lads (one of whom, the reminiscing narrator, will become a novelist) who go into the woods to locate the body of a boy thrown from a trestle by a train. And ""The Breathing Method""--told, à la Peter Straub's Ghost Story, as a gentleman's club anecdote--is the most explicitly horrific: an unwed mother is decapitated on Christmas Eve but gives birth in falling sleet anyway. . . because of the Lamaze Method. Thin gimmicks, weighed down with King's weak characters and weaker prose (unlike his crisp short stories)--but the fans may come around yet again, despite the clear evidence that King needs the supernatural to distract from his awesome limitations as a mainstream storyteller. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.