Different Seasons – Stephen King, 1982 ★★★★

Reclaiming the Lost Art of the Novella

During his first seven years as America’s biggest-selling author, Stephen King took readers into all kinds of forbidden, frightening territory. Haunted hotels, apocalyptic ruins, teenage hormones, he ran the gamut. In 1982, King ventured into a dead zone of a different kind: Novellas.

Novellas are like the walking dead of fiction. Respectable authors with hopes of profit do anything to avoid them. Weighing in between 10,000-40,000 words, novellas are too short to interest commercial publishers and too long to fit into magazines. Too often, they wind up wandering the tenebrous outskirts of literature, ignored by nearly all.

King in 1982 challenged this dogma, perhaps the most successful such challenge since Henry James penned The Turn Of The Screw. Go figure. James’ novella is a touchstone of American horror fiction. King, the master of horror fiction, pointedly avoids that genre here. Different Seasons’ title alludes to the idea that what we get here is King as straight-fiction writer.

Such an approach invites failure. So what happened? Different Seasons not only sold, it triumphed, topping the New York Times Fiction Best Seller list that summer and spinning off two beloved films that made the case for taking King seriously for decades to come.

Throughout this collection, King signals big ambitions:

The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them. It’s hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life.

That’s from “The Body,” a story about four adolescent boys searching the Maine backwoods for a dead body. Like the prison story “Rita Hayworth And Shawshank Redemption,” “The Body” was adapted into a movie, in its case one called Stand By Me which back in 1986 was not only in theaters but on radios, too, with its reuse of the Ben E. King hit quoted in the film’s title. “Shawshank” is today the top-ranked film on IMdB.com, one you would know at once if I was reading this in my Morgan Freeman voice.

The third novella, “Apt Pupil,” is the most harrowing in the book and closest in tone to King’s horror fiction, though nothing supernatural goes on here, just a California boy letting himself be slowly corrupted by an aged concentration-camp commandant. Rougher around the edges than its more celebrated kin, “Apt Pupil” at its darkest best retains the power of vicious revelation.

Finally, there’s “The Breathing Method,” a short story buttressed by a lengthy framing device. The short story is about a pregnant woman in the 1920s, the framing device about the strange Manhattan men’s club where her story is told. “Breathing Method” is the runt of the litter, but the most heartfelt in the way it consciously addresses the craft of storytelling.

It’s that craft, and the calling to same, which forms Different Seasons’ overarching theme. An effort is made to link each story to a particular season (“The Body” is subtitled “Fall From Innocence;” “Apt Pupil” is “Summer Of Corruption”), but the real connective tissue is storytelling as a social need and individual obligation.

Throughout the 1970s, while writing novels like The Shining and Salem's Lot, Stephen King rewarded himself after each successful job by writing a novella he figured at the time had little hope of getting published. It wasn't until Different Seasons that they would see the light. Image from http://www.denofgeek.com/uk/movies/the-talisman/52599/stephen-king-peter-straubs-the-talisman-heading-to-the-movies

In “Rita Hayworth And Shawshank Redemption,” the story is in the form of a manuscript written by Red, an inmate at Shawshank State Penitentiary who recalls a long association with fellow convict Andy Dufresne, “the most self-possessed guy I’ve ever known.” He sees in his friend a story of hope triumphing amid stone environs:

In spite of the problems he was having, he was going on with his life. There are thousands who don’t or won’t or can’t, and plenty of them aren’t in prison, either.

“Shawshank” is a searing, tightly-wrought tale that feels as much a miracle on the page as it would become on screen. I’ve written about the movie adaptation, of which I am an admirer, but there are ways the story works better. For one thing, atypical for King, it is a quiet tale. Three people die violently in the film; their story counterparts make more realistic exits. There’s no audience-pleasing standoff with the guards involving “The Marriage Of Figaro,” or a big vengeance-delivering finale. The message here is of quiet, enduring patience.

Why was this a novella? Couldn’t King have stretched it into a novel, or condensed it into a short story? I don’t think so. “Shawshank” is effective because of the way it lingers over some things, and speeds over others. It has a flow a shorter version would have struggled to emulate. At the same time, “Shawshank” breaks off at just the right moment. The movie is terrific, too, but stretches the story to offer a more satisfying resolution. Not that I don’t like happy endings; I just think this one overlooks the importance of hope as virtue in itself.

“Apt Pupil,” the second and longest of the stories, opens on Todd Bowden, a perfect blond specimen of California boyhood, paying a visit on an elderly shut-in. Very soon, he explains he knows the shut-in is Kurt Dussander, who ran an extermination camp 30 years before. Todd is a fan of the Holocaust ever since he got an A on his school report on it. “I really groove on all that concentration camp stuff,” he explains.

Dussander calls Todd a monster. This amuses the lad:

“According to the books I read for my report, you’re the monster, Mr. Dussander. Not me. You sent them to the ovens, not me. Two thousand a day at Patin before you came, three thousand after, thirty-five hundred before the Russians came and made you stop. Himmler called you an efficiency expert and gave you a medal. So you call me a monster. Oh boy.”

Todd has the perfect threat to keep Dussander in line: “Remember what they did to Eichmann.” This works, for a while.

“Apt Pupil” is another masterpiece of simple construction. Plot elements are introduced, established, and discarded in what seems to be the right amount of time. His focus this time on corruption rather than hope, King develops a grim suspense story tonally the opposite of the lyrical “Shawshank.” There’s a steady subtext of contrasting and enmeshing Bowden’s all-American, value-free-consumerist upbringing to Dussander’s world of sadistic cruelty which adds a sharp barb to the tale.

I’ve gone back and forth on the ending, and some of the creative decisions King make throughout this story. Did he really need that hapless guidance counselor? But as a novella, it warrants its length, spinning just enough plates to keep you distracted when King delivers his hardest jabs and sharpest twists.

The storytelling theme carries on here, too, as Dussander tells Todd (the name means “Death” in German) about Patin. In our third novella, “The Body,” storytelling takes on a positive role.

As a novella, "The Body" is closest in spirit and story to the movie it begat, Stand By Me. Here, Gordie Lachance (Wil Wheaton) and comrades Chris Chambers (River Phoenix), Vern Tessio (Jerry O'Connell), and Teddy Duchamp (Corey Feldman) follow the train tracks to where they think they will find a dead body. Image from https://hellogiggles.com/reviews-coverage/cast-stand-by-me-30/.

In terms of construction, “The Body” is nothing like the prior two novellas. Forget craft; it is as if King picked up a bag filled with objects from his childhood and dumped them in your lap. The search for the dead body forms the plot, but we get multiple detours. Our narrator, Gordie Lachance, shares anecdotes and even a couple of unrelated short stories while taking stock of his upbringing in Castle Rock, Maine at the dawn of the 1960s:

Everything was there and around us. We knew exactly who we were and exactly where we were going. It was grand.

“The Body” is as rambling as “Shawshank” is tight, but in terms of quality, there’s precious little to differentiate them. As a reflection on mortality seen through the sweet, flickering prism of youth, “The Body” is spellbinding, even when it feels a bit contrived setting up a late-inning conflict with a local gang of punks.

“The Breathing Method” was the last piece King wrote for this collection, written just after his 1980 novel Firestarter. It seems tailored to capping off this collection with a metaphor on storytelling. A mysterious, tony men’s club where bookshelves hold mysterious volumes like Twenty Cases Of Dismemberment And Their Outcomes Under British Law, is the setting for an annual Yuletide gathering where an old man tells an unseasonably grim tale.

“IT IS THE TALE, NOT HE WHO TELLS IT” reads an inscription on a keystone above a giant fireplace. In this case, it’s a story about a woman whose unmarried pregnancy binds her to the story’s teller, a doctor who sees the delivery all the way through to its gory end.

“The Breathing Method” is a masterpiece of mood but not much of a story. In terms of pure narrative, it comes off as a bit of a dud. But it does bring us back to the core theme of the entire book, the thing that binds it together, the function of storytelling in society. You get that not only from the nature of the unnamed men’s club, but in the graphic way King describes the act of childbirth itself, a distending process of creating something from nothing. Maybe it was just me, but I felt him drawing a connection from dogged but abandoned Sandra Stansfield in her 1920s cloche hat to his own path as a once-struggling fiction writer.

King’s affection for the novella continues: He has written more of them over the years, including three more published collections: Four Past Midnight (1990), Hearts In Atlantis (1999), and Full Dark, No Stars (2010). Novellas remain a hard format to sell, but in Different Seasons King demonstrates why word count alone shouldn’t dictate the worth of fine fiction. I read them grateful for the extra breathing room as well as their drive to get to the point.