Of mice, men and magic between heaven and earth
Block E of Cold Mountain Southern Prison, recalled to the ages by then head warden and now bullied nursing home client Paul Edgecombe, used to be a grim waiting room for death.
Even in the fall of 1932, the convicts there dreaded the day when the guards would lead them across the green linoleum to the room with the electric chair. The pariahs in the cells have just been joined by a weak-minded black man, John Coffey, convicted of the rape and murder of two white girls - only something is wrong from the start. First, his healing hands relieve Paul of his lingering health problems and then he revives a mouse that the criminal next door has been keeping for his own pleasure, thus angering the unprincipled warder Wetmore, who is ripe for trouble.
Will Coffey, a godly supplicant capable of taking pain away from others, even though he himself is suffering for someone else? Parables of Mice, Men and the Supernatural is one of King's most compelling novels. He reflects not only on the inhumanity of capital punishment, which, with the blindness of the prosecutors, can easily turn into judicial murder, but also on the burden to which man is condemned in the pursuit of earthly justice.
The novel was made into a film in 1999 by director Frank Darabont, starring Tom Hanks.
