There's no horror, and he is, after all, a horror writer. That it says it at the very start of the movie, in the opening credits, is almost immaterial: to most people, it doesn't feel as they imagine a Stephen King story should. This film that they loved – like so many people, their favourite film (going by the fact that it's currently rated the best movie of all time over at IMDB – was based on a story by the man who wrote that book about the killer clown. When I assured them that it was, and that it was published in the same novella compendium as the story that became the classic 80s movie Stand By Me, it was possible to see their belief system crumble. It wasn't complicated: they didn't believe me that it was written by Stephen King. “The wondrous readability of his work, as well as the instant sense of communication with his characters, are what make Stephen King the consummate storyteller that he is,” hailed the Houston Chronicle about Different Seasons.I once had an argument with somebody about The Shawshank Redemption. This novella became the movie Stand By Me.įinally, a disgraced woman is determined to triumph over death in “The Breathing Method.” In “The Body,” four rambunctious young boys plunge through the façade of a small town and come face-to-face with life, death, and intimations of their own mortality.

Next is “Apt Pupil,” the inspiration for the film of the same name about top high school student Todd Bowden and his obsession with the dark and deadly past of an older man in town.

This gripping collection begins with “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” in which an unjustly imprisoned convict seeks a strange and startling revenge-the basis for the Best Picture Academy Award-nominee The Shawshank Redemption. Includes the stories “The Body” and “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption”-set in the fictional town of Castle Rock, MaineĪ “hypnotic” ( The New York Times Book Review) collection of four novellas-including the inspirations behind the films Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption-from Stephen King, bound together by the changing of seasons, each taking on the theme of a journey with strikingly different tones and characters.

Different seasons novellas