Here we have another Stephen King story overshadowed by the film adaptation, in this case the 1986 classic Stand by Me. (Side note: you may have noticed by now that I’ve been making my way through the novella collection Different Seasons, which in addition to the three novellas I’ve reviewed so far has a fourth entry which I think is too short to be counted as a separate book.) Anyway, while it’s impossible not to see the movie play out as you read along, King’s […]

Stephen King strikes out on an unlikely course in this novella and follows it through all the way to a chilling conclusion. Thirteen-year-old Todd Bowman seems like a perfectly healthy and happy boy. He’s good at sports and does well in school (hence the “apt pupil” descriptor) and his successful, happy parents love him to pieces. After a magazine article piques his interest in the Holocaust, Todd makes a shocking discovery.  A local old-timer is actually a Nazi war-criminal named Dussander living in America under […]

When I reviewed The Queen’s Gambit I talked about how difficult it can be to read the source material after seeing the adaptation. You can’t help but notice what details were altered or left out entirely and as you’re doing so you evaluate those decisions just as much as you react to the text itself. Well, as you can imagine, that was very much still a problem for me while reading this novella. I’ve seen The Shawshank Redemption a number of times, especially in the […]