by Stephen King
First published 1996
Paul Edgecombe works as a guard on Block E, the death row unit at Cold Mountain Penitentiary. The men there wait for their turn on the electric chair, and the days follow a grim, predictable pattern. Then a small mouse appears. Eduard Delacroix, a convicted murderer, takes to the creature immediately. He names it Mr. Jingles, feeds it, trains it, and treats it as the one good thing left in his world. Not everyone shares his feeling. Guard Percy Wetmore despises the mouse from the moment he sees it, and Percy is not a man who lets things go. The tension between Delacroix's quiet attachment and Percy's cold hostility runs underneath every shift, every meal, every walk down the green mile to the chair. King sets a story about cruelty and tenderness inside a place designed for neither. The mouse is just a mouse. But on Block E, what happens to Mr. Jingles ends up saying everything about the men who surround him, and about what it costs to hold onto something worth protecting when the world around you is built to take it away.
Genres: fiction, drama, literary-fiction, american-fiction, adult-fiction, thriller
Vibes: dark, emotional, gritty, introspective, melancholic, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, good-vs-evil, institutional-cruelty, unlikely-bond
Setting: Cold Mountain Penitentiary, Block E
Period: 20th-century
96 pages · Paperback · Penguin Books
Content warnings: death, murder, violence