by Stephen King
First published 1996
Paul Edgecombe runs E Block at Cold Mountain Penitentiary, where the condemned men walk the Green Mile to the electric chair. The work is grim and the days follow a hard routine. Then John Coffey arrived. Coffey is enormous, convicted of murdering two young girls, and he sits in his cell with the quiet of a man who has already made peace with dying. Paul has been watching him closely, trying to square the gentleness he sees with the crime on the record. Something does not add up. In this installment, Coffey does something with his hands that Paul cannot explain and cannot forget. A man who should be nothing but a killer turns out to hold something inside him that has no business existing on death row. Paul is left standing in the corridor trying to understand what he just witnessed. The job was supposed to be simple: keep order, move the men forward, throw the switch. Now Paul is not sure what any of it means anymore.
Genres: fiction, drama, literary-fiction, american-fiction, adult-fiction, thriller
Vibes: dark, emotional, haunting, introspective, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-humanity, moral-reckoning, unreliable-justice
Setting: Cold Mountain Penitentiary, E Block, Green Mile
Period: 20th-century
96 pages · Paperback · Penguin Books Ltd
Content warnings: death, murder, violence