Author's Afterword

I don't think I'd want to do another serial novel (if only because the critics get to kick your ass six times instead of just the once), but I wouldn't have missed the experience for the world. As I write this afterword on the day before Part 2 of The Green Mile is to be published, the serialization experiment is looking like a success, at least in terms of sales. For that, Constant Reader, I want to thank you. And something a bit different wakes us all up a little, maybe—lets us see the old business of storytelling in a new way. That's how it worked for me, anyway.

I wrote in a hurry because the format demanded that I write in a hurry. That was part of the exhilaration, but it also may have produced a number of anachronisms. The guards and prisoners listen to Allen's Alley on their E Block radio, and I doubt if Fred Allen was actually broadcasting in 1932. The same may hold true for Kay Kyser and his Kollege of Musical Knowledge. This isn't to let me off the hook, but it sometimes seems to me that history which has recently fallen over the horizon is harder to research than the Middle Ages or the time of the Crusades. I was able to determine that Brutal might indeed have called the mouse on the Mile Steamboat Willy—the Disney cartoon had been in existence almost four years by then—but I have a sneaking suspicion that the little pornographic comic book featuring Popeye and Olive Oyl is an artifact out of time. I might clean up some of this stuff when and if I decide to do The Green Mile as a single volume... but maybe I'll leave the goofs. After all, doesn't the great Shakespeare himself include in Julius Caesar the anachronism of a striking clock long before mechanical clocks were invented?

Doing The Green Mile as a single volume would present its own unique challenges, I have come to realize, partly because the book couldn't be published as it was issued in its installments. Because I took Charles Dickens as my model, I asked several people how Dickens had handled the problem of refreshing his readers, recollections at the beginning of each new episode. I had expected something like the synopses which preceded each installment of my beloved Saturday Evening Post serials, and discovered that Dickens had not been so crude; he built the synopsis into the actual story.

While I was trying to decide how to do this, my Wife began telling me (she doesn't exactly nag, but sometimes she advocates rather ruthlessly) that I had never really finished the story of Mr. Jingles, the circus mouse. I thought she was right, and began to see that, by making Mr. Jingles a secret of Paul Edgecombe's in his old age, I could create a fairly interesting "front story." (The result is a little bit like the form taken by the film version of Fried Green Tomatoes.) In fact, everything in Paul's front story—the story of his life at the Georgia Pines old folks, home—turned out to my satisfaction. I particularly liked the way that Dolan, the orderly, and Percy Wetmore became entwined in Paul's mind. And that was not something I planned or did on purpose; like the happiest of fictions, it just ambled along and stepped into its place.

I want to thank Ralph Vicinanza for bringing me the "serial thriller" idea in the first place, and all my friends at Viking Penguin and Signet for getting behind it, even though they were scared to death at the beginning (all writers are crazy, and of course they knew that). I also want to thank Marsha DeFilippo, who transcribed a whole stenographer's notebook full of my cramped handwriting and never complained. Well... rarely complained.

Most of all, though, I want to thank my wife, Tabitha, who read this story and said she liked it. Writers almost always write with some ideal reader in mind, I think, and my wife is mine. We don't always see eye to eye when it comes to what we each write (hell, we rarely see eye to eye when we're shopping together in the supermarket), but when she says it's good, it usually is. Because she's tough, and if I try to cheat or cut a comer, she always sees it.

And you, Constant Reader. Thank you, as well, and if you have any ideas about The Green Mile as a single volume, please let me know.

Stephen King

April 28, 1996

New York City

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