Different Seasons

All right, Ray, tell me all about Stand by Me.

I knew about Stand by Me when it was the fourth novella in the novel Different Seasons, and it was entitled The Body, and I loved it back then.

Fast-forward to 1986, and I was working at a movie theater as an usher when this movie came out, and I've seen Stand by Me, I won't say hundreds of times, a lot.

I, I know all the beats of the movie.

Okay.

Uh, at number two, uh, I'm going to play my number one movie.

Uh, it was the first novella in Stephen King's Different Seasons.

And back in the day it was entitled Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.

And there is no better example of this methodology than Frank Darabont's 1994 adaptation of Stephen King's novella, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.

This novella was published in 1982 in a collection called Different Seasons, and it is a masterclass in economical writing.

It really is.

It is a tight, clean, deeply unsentimental account of a banker named Andy Dufresne, who is wrongfully convicted of murder, and his decades-long friendship with a prison smuggler named Red.

Oh, absolutely.

If we analyze the true depth of his Hollywood footprint, we have to look at the 1982 publication of Different Seasons.

This book completely breaks the mold of what a Stephen King movie is.

It is a collection of four novellas, not a traditional novel.

And Apt Pupil was later directed by Bryan Singer in 1998.

Wow.

So the, the sheer versatility demonstrated by different seasons elevated King from a genre specialist to a foundational pillar of American cinema.

And, and the industry recognition eventually caught up to the box office returns too.

Let's look at the resume Urquhart provides for Muller.

He did four of the Dark Tower books, all the novellas in the collection Different Seasons, The Talisman, and its sequel, Black House.

That is a massive chunk of work.

It really is.

And incredibly, both of these stories, these monumental pillars of the novella format, come from the exact same collection.

A single book published in 1982 called Different Seasons.

It really is a staggering testament to Stephen King's mastery of narrative economy.

While he is globally recognized and sometimes exclusively categorized for his massive doorstopper supernatural horror novels like The Stand or It.

His short fiction, and particularly his novellas, arguably represent his absolute finest, most disciplined work.

The Different Seasons collection is a landmark achievement in his bibliography because it largely stepped away from the supernatural elements he was famous for.

And focused instead on deeply human, grounded, dramatic stories.

So let's start with the darker cut coming in at number nine on the all-time list, The Body.

It's your story.

The Body is the novella which forms part of a larger book called Different Seasons that Stephen King wrote.

I think it was maybe the early 80s.

And it became Stand By Me, directed by Rob Reiner.

How would you sell it to them, Babs?

Well, I did reacquaint myself because it had been – well, I hadn't read the book since I was about 13, but obviously I've seen the film probably about maybe a dozen times, so plenty – And firstly, in Stephen King's Four Seasons, it is broken up into four seasons and the body has a little subtitle called The Fall of Innocence.

And it takes place in autumn, the autumn section of the Different Seasons book.

Interesting.