Different Seasons

 Author: Stephen King 

Genre: Fiction, mystery

Original publication date: August 27, 1982

Book description: This gripping collection begins with “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” in which an unjustly imprisoned convict seeks a strange and startling revenge—the basis for the Best Picture Academy Award-nominee The Shawshank Redemption. Next is “Apt Pupil,” the inspiration for the film of the same name about top high school student Todd Bowden and his obsession with the dark and deadly past of an older man in town. In “The Body,” four rambunctious young boys plunge through the façade of a small town and come face-to-face with life, death, and intimations of their own mortality. This novella became the movie Stand By Me. Finally, a disgraced woman is determined to triumph over death in “The Breathing Method.”

Thoughts:

It took a while for me to pick this book up for no real reason. I was afraid I was not going to like it. But then I found the audiobook in Scribd and decided to go for it. I was tricked into believing I would really like it. As it happens with collections you like one more than the rest. The first one I found intriguing,  I was a bit uncomfortable right at the beginning when the descriptions of the way newbies are treated, it makes my skin crawl and I find it very uncomfortable any rape scene in any book be it to a man or woman. 

So be warned like in most of King's works we have sex-related topics, be it sexual innuendos, in this particular first novella a few rape scenes, or men thinking in a very sexual way about the women they come accross. 

My favorite was the first novella. It tells the story of a man who was convicted of the murder of his wife and her lover. The case seemed very straight forward and even if he always declared himself guilty, it did not make a difference. He was sent for life behind bars. While there he starts with a shaky foot. He as the new guy gets the worst of the worst. Things start to look up once he starts to help the guards and the Dean of the prison with their taxes. He starts to get respect and guards start to look out for him as he should not be bothered as he is helping them out. We follow him for a few years while he is there, he does not get many friends but he does meet one guy he connects with. The bystander is the one telling us the story. 

He does manage to escape from prison and that is not the end of the story. The narrator is left behind and he wonders and theorizes where the man could have ended up in. 

It is a very interesting story and even if takes place all in the prison, it makes it so captivating you just need to keep reading. It is a short read so it can be hacked in a single sitting. I would rate this as 4 stars. It is a shorts story but so worth the read. I will try to get my hands on the digital version of this and simply have it at hand to reread the first short story here. 

As you can probably guess the next ones, well I didn't really care about them at all. The interest level just kept going down.

The second story was: "the apt pupil". It started off a bit shaky, a kid was interested in the second world war and he keeps going over a few of the magazines showing important people of the time. He runs into a man who he thinks was in charge of one of the concentration camps. A famous monster of the time. 

He starts to blackmail the man into telling him about his time in the camps, the torture methods, and all kinds of gory details. The man seems tortured about having to relive his past. He wanted nothing more than to forget it ever happened. The boy seems twisted from the start, he just can't get enough. We see his dark emotions translated into a very odd sexual fantasy, again I think it unnecessary but it can make sense. He is young and impressionable so it could make sense to have his subconscious come up with weird coping mechainsm. 

The boy and man continue to have their own separate lives and yet continue in touch for a few years. The time spent together woke in them their thirst for violence, torture, and killing.

It comes to an end pretty quickly after things start to unravel. So if I had to rate this one alone I would give it a 3-star rating. It was an ok read, not something super groundbreaking or something I would reread. But again a nice short thing you can push through in a single sitting. 

The last two, well that's when things just went downhill for me. The next story felt pointless for me. We follow a group of kids who have a very bad family life in their own ways. There was no overall plot and the main characters were not likable enough for me to care. This one took a bit longer to complete simply because I couldn't really find a good enough reason to pick up the book again.  I vaguely remember they wanted to see the dead body of a boy, it felt pointless. Nothing came of that and it seemed like they grew apart and grew up -end of the story. I am not sure if maybe I missed an important message there but t really didn't interest me. If I had to give a rating this one gets a 2 star rate because I think it can be for someone else surely.

I know this is supposed to be a friendship story about young people standing up for one another, doing the rights thing, and overcoming the difficult family situation. But I just did not connect with it at all. I am recommending this overall as a book because it is dealing with topics we should read about. There is a movie about this story, I will try to find it, I might connect better after a reread, and after watching the film.

The last story is the hardest to describe for me. It was the weakest because it felt to go nowhere. We follow a doctor who is treating pregnancies, he is using the Breathing method and trying to get rid of the superstition about pregnancy and labor the vast majority of the people of the time had. Let's be real, there is always a lot of superstition around pregnant women even nowadays. 

I am not sure of superstitions in other places but in Mexico when a woman is pregnant they wear a safety pin in their blouse, this is to protect the baby from harm while in the womb. The newborn baby and mother also have a few other weird beliefs, right after birth. The woman wears cotton in her ears to protect her from getting sick, the baby wears not something red, no you have to get a red strand and glue it to the baby's forehead with the saliva from the mom for protection, some wear a deers eye (it's not a real eye is a block of wood or circle seed, it has to be round and they bind that in a bracelet), we can't forget the belief that a baby must be baptized or bad things will befall them. 

Anyhow, there has always been a few odd beliefs about pregnancy. The doctor is trying to teach women about eating healthy, doing the breathing exercises (I forget bt there could be a name to designate this practice. It might be Lamaze Breathing, it is a physical and psychological training, but might be something different. I am not sure if the name was mentioned in the story), and takings vitamins during pregnancy. We also have a bit of prejudice about pregnancy out of wedlock. It is infuriating but true, in some countries there is still this type of discrimination. The topics were good ones but for the most part of the story it felt pointless and irrelevant, there was nothing to follow, it felt like it had no plot especially considering this was the story within the story. The main storyline is of a group of men coming together in this club and telling interesting stories to one another. So yeah both storylines were not very interesting to me.

It turns out to have a much darker turn than I expected but the ending was the most memorable thing. So I guess taking into account the topic, the surprise at the end that I didn't see coming, well I would say another 3 stars. 

I recommend this to fans of Stephen King who want to see more of his work in something other than horror.