by Stephen King
Part of The Green Mile
First published 1996
Eduard Delacroix sits in his cell on Death Row at Cold Mountain Penitentiary, counting the days until his execution. He has made an unlikely friend during his time there: a small mouse that the guards and inmates have come to know well. When his date arrives, Delacroix prepares to say goodbye to the men he has lived among, the guards who have watched over him, and the creature that gave his final weeks something close to warmth. What waits for him at the end of the Green Mile is not a clean death. Someone with a grudge and the means to act on it has arranged for the execution to go badly, and it does. The scene is brutal and extended and witnessed by everyone present. This is the fourth installment in King's serialized Green Mile story, and it delivers the moment the earlier parts have been building toward. The tension is not about whether Delacroix will die. It is about what kind of death a man gets, who decides that, and what it costs the people who have to watch. King keeps the camera close and the pacing slow, which makes everything that happens harder to look away from.
Genres: drama, american-fiction, crime, horror, adult-fiction, thriller
Vibes: brutal, dark, emotionally-devastating, haunting, intense, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, institutional-horror, unlikely-friendship, witnessing-trauma
Setting: Cold Mountain Penitentiary, Green Mile
Period: 20th-century
90 pages · Mass Market Paperback · Signet
Content warnings: death, graphic-violence, murder, torture