The Green Mile

The Green Mile was published in 1996 as six paperback instalments, one a month, and then collected into a single volume. The serial format is unusual for a writer at King's level of sales and it shaped the way readers met the book, with each part ending on an enforced pause. It won the Bram Stoker Award for best novel in 1996, and it is set in a Louisiana prison in the middle of the Depression, which places it with the American prison fiction of the period rather than with King's contemporary Maine novels.

The novel is narrated by Paul Edgecombe, the block's supervisor, and his account is careful about procedure: the routine of the last walk, the rehearsals the guards run before an execution, the way the chair is tested, the paperwork. That ordinariness is what the supernatural element is set against. John Coffey's healing power is presented without explanation, and the book's interest is in what the men do with a prisoner who is both the most dangerous man on the block in the eyes of the law and the only innocent one in the building.

The other prisoners matter as much as Coffey. Eduard Delacroix, his trained mouse and the guard Percy Wetmore between them supply the novel's worst sequence, and the block's inmates give the book a cast the film adaptation kept almost intact. Frank Darabont's film followed in 1999, three years after the last instalment appeared, and the novel has remained in print in both its serial and single-volume forms.