Scan barcode
A review by alexauthorshay
Different Seasons by Stephen King
slow-paced
3.0
Having read <i>Night Shift</i> before this one, I assumed it would be another short story collection, only to find out it's actually four novellas. (And despite the afterword by King talking about the process of trying to place these long-short stories/short-novels into publication, they were <i>long</i>.) I don't know if it would have felt as painful had I read a physical copy, but my ebook copy just felt like it kept going and going, and each story took forever to get through.
Rita Hayworth - all the interesting bits happened off screen, only partially saved by the tone/style of the narrator, who was not even the protagonist.
Apt Pupil - the worst of the bunch, this story just went on for ever and ever. I actually liked it to start with, but as it dragged on over years and years and I came to understand the two main characters no better than when I started the story, it became quite the painful read.
The Body - Overall, I did like this one.
Breathing Method - Interesting setup, but ultimately not at all required for the story that's actually the namesake of the story.
All four stories went into a lot of backstory on the narrators/protagonists/central characters, and I think that's a large part of what made them so long. If you stripped them down to the essentials of the active plot only, they probably could have been short stories. Which is not to say I think they would have been better as short stories, but they all started out in such minute detail only to start skipping months or years or to flash forward in time to the narrator reflecting back on the experience and tying in other memories that weren't really related to the plot but illuminated the narrator's personality. Each story included so much information that felt tangential and bogged the pace of the main stories down, or was bookended by the setup to the actual story but said bookends ended up being such a large chunk of the story that switching to the actual namesake of the story felt like moving into an entirely separate, unrelated story that had nothing to do with the lead up before it.
Rita Hayworth - all the interesting bits happened off screen, only partially saved by the tone/style of the narrator, who was not even the protagonist.
Apt Pupil - the worst of the bunch, this story just went on for ever and ever. I actually liked it to start with, but as it dragged on over years and years and I came to understand the two main characters no better than when I started the story, it became quite the painful read.
The Body - Overall, I did like this one.
Breathing Method - Interesting setup, but ultimately not at all required for the story that's actually the namesake of the story.
All four stories went into a lot of backstory on the narrators/protagonists/central characters, and I think that's a large part of what made them so long. If you stripped them down to the essentials of the active plot only, they probably could have been short stories. Which is not to say I think they would have been better as short stories, but they all started out in such minute detail only to start skipping months or years or to flash forward in time to the narrator reflecting back on the experience and tying in other memories that weren't really related to the plot but illuminated the narrator's personality. Each story included so much information that felt tangential and bogged the pace of the main stories down, or was bookended by the setup to the actual story but said bookends ended up being such a large chunk of the story that switching to the actual namesake of the story felt like moving into an entirely separate, unrelated story that had nothing to do with the lead up before it.