When the first installment of The Green Mile was released in 1996, Stephen King was already one of the world's most famous writers. As an exercise, King decided to release the book in the serialized format used by early novelists such as Dickens. Every month, between April and August of 1996, King would publish a new book in The Green Mile. He published each book as he wrote it, which means that readers already had copies of the first book when he began writing the sixth.
The result is a sometimes uneven but fascinating text, which reflects the mindset of its main character, 104-year-old Paul Edgecomb. From the Georgia Pines nursing home in the year 1996, Edgecomb describes his...