Reviews

"And I guess you judge how well you're doing by how well you sleep at night... and what your dreams are like."

Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption - 4 stars
Apt Pupil - 5 stars
The Body - 3 stars
The Breathing Method - 2 stars

beckyboof's review against another edition

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4.0

Great collection of short stories.

jordanbires's review

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medium-paced

4.0

jpjkuijper's review against another edition

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5.0

This collection shows Stephen King can write splendidly outside the horror genre. Shawshank Redemption and the Body are quite famous stories from their movie adaptations, but I still enjoyed their original telling in this book. Apt Pupil and the last story were cool in their own right, but a bit more whimsical and leaning on the scary sublime.

gharris777's review against another edition

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5.0

What a great compilation of short stories by Stephen King! FANTASTIC!!

I knew going into this book that I’ve seen movies for two of the stories. I thought, “Since I’ve seen the movies, do I need to read the actually book?”

And that’s a resounding YES. A big HELL YES!

1st story: Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption

I’m sure most of us have seen this movie at least once or 50 times in your life. The book is so well done. There were subtle differences in the book vs the movie but it wasn’t enough to take away from the masterpiece of this story.
Shawshank is about redemption, revenge and hope. And King kills it with this one. Bravo King!!

2nd story: Apt Pupil

Woah! What a head fuck this dark story turned out to be. It’s about a story of a young kid who finds out that a former Nazi general is living in a house on his paper route. It’s a psychological, epic tale of who’s the worst and I haven’t decided on the answer between these two head cases.
I think evil tends to find evil in all arenas of life and this was a perfect example of that. I really liked this one!

3rd story: The Body

Or as most of you know it as, “Stand By Me”. What a great story!!
It’s about childhood friendship, dealing with shitty family members and coming to grips with doing the right thing. There is a level of conflict in this story that’s well written. You want these kids to succeed after all the trials and tribulations that occur in the journey in this book.
The movie and book were close to each other in regards to plot. It was nice to see the movie industry not changing much about this well-loved tale.
"Chopper, sic balls!"

4th story: Breathing Method

This story started slow and I wasn’t sure where it was going. It ended on a pretty creepy situation with a pregnant woman, a strange building in New York City and I’m glad I stuck it out. It was the weakest of the 4 stories but was still decent.

If you’ve ever wondered whether Stephen King is a good storyteller, read this book!

jcarlberg's review against another edition

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3.0

The four novellas in this book are very diverse. Two of them, "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" and "The Body" were superb. "The Shawshank Redemption" is one of my favorite movies, and the novella is probably one of my favorite stories. I was also excited that in the novella, you actually find out what crime Red is imprisoned for. "The Body" is a great story of friendship and adventure.

"Apt Pupil" is the main reason this book received only 3 stars. It was certainly hard to put down, but it is a story that I wish I could unread. King is a master of horror, and I found this story to be more than I could take. (Though the horror is more on a psychological level than on a physical gory level). It was immensely disturbing.

The last story fell somewhere in the middle. It was a story of a pregnant woman who faced social isolation because of being pregnant and unmarried and the woman's determination to deliver her child. The ending has a bizarre twist what was good but... bizarre.

wakejald's review against another edition

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5.0

I've said time and time again on this list that King actually operates very well outside of the genre fiction for which he is so acclaimed, and I cannot think of a better example of this than the stories collected in Different Seasons. Despite an extreme lack of the occult or the macabre (for the most part, anyway), King still manages to craft some of his most engaging and emotionally affecting stories yet, and I think this can be attributed to a handful of different things. For one, I think novella-length-stories are something King excels at. Obviously he has somewhat of a reputation for writing extremely long, 1000 page plus novels (which he certainly does well), but novellas need to be concise. Although books like The Stand and It are incredibly immersive and well-thought-out stories, I'd be lying if I said there weren't parts of both novels that tend to drag, or slow the novel down in some capacity. In a novella there's no time for that. And conversely with short-story-length writing, while never too bloated or over-developed, there's never really enough time for character development or world-building. So taking into account King's penchant for incredibly deep and complex character writing, as well as his tendency to overwrite on occasion, the novella seems to me the perfect format for a good King story. And while, anecdotally, this collection is my only evidence of this so far, it's good enough for me to stand by (ha) this opinion. So, to get into the actual collection itself, Different Seasons is split up into four stories; each of which corresponds to a certain (you guessed it) season. Beginning with the Hope Springs Eternal story of Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. Now I've already written a full review for each of the respective novellas in this collection, but to give another brief overview, this story (if you somehow aren't already familiar with it), is about a wrongfully imprisoned man named Andy Dufresne who, over the course of several years, slowly and meticulously plots his escape from Shawshank State Prison. He works his way up to be one of the most well-standing prisoners in the facility, is able to acquire an entire cell to himself, and day-by-day for years he slowly chisels a hole in his wall to escape. And while on the surface it's just a badass prison escape / revenge story, there's a ton of subtext to read into. As is implied in the sub-title of this story, it's about hope. The fear of losing it, how it can mess with your head, and how it can make you move forward each and every day regardless of your current circumstances. After this we get the Summer of Corruption story, Apt Pupil. This is perhaps the darkest story of the collection, but in a less horrifying and more disturbing way. It follows around a teenager named Todd Bowden who finds out his elderly neighbor is actually a former Nazi in hiding named Kurt Dussander. At first, Todd begins to blackmail Dussander for information, using his true identity as a threat, but as Todd gets more and more involved, Dussander develops an equally strong blackmail death-grip on him. It's a riveting story that only gets more intense as it goes on, and like the accurate subtitle of the story before it, the summer in which most of this novella takes place truly is one of corruption. Next, it's the Fall of Innocence story, The Body. This is my personal favorite of the bunch, and the one that hits me the most viscerally in my emotions. It's just four young boys going on an adventure to find the corpse of one of their classmates who recently died, but it quickly turns into an amazing coming of age story. Through their encounters with shitty adults, bullies, close friends opening up emotionally, and finally confronting their own mortality by finding this dead body, this story just does an amazing job of painting a picture of the magic of childhood, and subsequently, what it's like to lose that magic. The prose throughout this entire story is gorgeous, and I don't think any Stephen King property has made me cry more than this one. And last, we have A Winter's Tale, or, The Breathing Method. Comparatively, this story is definitely somewhat of an outlier. It's the closest this collection comes to actual "horror", but it's still filled with all sorts of quirks and idiosyncrasies that separate it from most of King's body of work. There's an outer story about a very strange and enigmatic club in which there exist books that exist nowhere else, where there are endless hallways and doors, and where time and space seem to stand still. Around Christmas each year, one of the members of the club tells a long story dealing with something supernatural, hence: "A Winter's Tale". The inner story that's told inside of this outer story is the one after which the novella is named, and it's about a woman who is so determined to give birth to a healthy child that, even when she gets decapitated in a car accident, she still remembers and utilizes "the breathing method" that was taught to her by her doctor (who happens to be the club member telling this story) until the baby is born and she is able to die. It's a really chilling story (ha), and while it may be slightly different in tone than the rest of this collection, it's still wonderfully written, and a fantastically eerie way to close out this book. So overall, yeah, Different Seasons is amazing. It's King showing that he can stray away from supernatural horrors, and focus on more emotional ones. The horror of losing hope, the horror of biting off more than you can chew, the horrors of growing up, and well, just a weird horror story! It hits the sweet-spot of being both well-connected through the representation of each story as a season, as well as being varied in its themes and storylines. It's just an incredible reading experience, and easily some of the strongest Stephen King writing that I've encountered.

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