A review by trudilibrarian
The Little Green God of Agony by Stephen King

4.0

I usually like to end my year (or start) with Stephen King, so I decided upon this feisty freebie available online here. I first read this back in October as a short story included in the Stephen Jones anthology [b:A Book of Horrors|12711120|A Book of Horrors|Stephen Jones|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327598597s/12711120.jpg|17844816]. I enjoyed it then very much, but I really dig it as a graphic novel.

I love the coloring used - almost a sickly underwater green, black and bruised shades of blue - and I love the facial expressions. I'm not a graphic artist by any stretch of the imagination, but I found the close-ups of the eyes very effective.

This is also a very text heavy adaptation, so if you don't like your comics to be swimming in words, that will probably be a turn off. I didn't mind it though. I love how King's words build mood and atmosphere and a slow, inevitable creep towards something sinister.

In my original review of the short story I made comparisons to those great speculative machines of the past famous for churning out stories of the weird and the macabre -- Tales from the Crypt, Twilight Zone and Night Gallery to name the holy trinity. King himself has described his adolescent obsession with horror comics (before such comics were disbanded as lewd and contributing to the delinquency and illiteracy of juveniles). Good call guys. Job well done.

King's love for the genre eventually culminated in his collaboration with George Romero producing the cult classic Creepshow, a cheesy romp of delight and a fitting homage to the great horror comics of the past from two rabid fanboys. This story - "The Little Green God of Agony" - could have been slipped in there and filmed with all the others without missing a beat.

King is no stranger to excruciating pain. His long road to recovery after his near fatal accident has definitely influenced his approach to the subject. Fans won't be surprised to see him turn his writer's eye to a pain so intolerable one can only imagine the body itself has been possessed by an evil entity that feeds off the agony. While the ending is not that surprising, it sure is sweet getting there.