Where I didn't see myself was in The Breathing Method, my favourite of the four.

(The narrative even features some short stories that Gordon supposedly wrote, although they are rather more fully-formed and complete than those a real 12-year-old would write, I suspect.) So there, I saw myself, or what I wanted to be. The narrator in it, Gordon, is now older, but he tells the story looking back at his teenage self: a boy who loved reading, who wanted to be a writer. I did, however, love The Body, where four teenage friends, about my age, go off to find the body of another teenage boy, presumed dead. I didn't necessarily want to read him writing about a prison escape or a Nazi war criminal, so I actually gave up on Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (to give it its full title), and on Apt Pupil, because I thought they were really quite boring.

So, my misunderstanding of what I was coming to read was understandable my relative dislike my fault, however, not his.

Different Seasons is a collection of four novellas, published together because they were, according to King, 'mainstream (almost as depressing a word as genre)', and yet sold as any other of his novels was. So, I read the stories, but found myself marginally disappointed. Based on that cover (bats, full moon, screaming woman, slash of blood), I expected Salems Lot 2: A Lot More. And the cover of my edition was about as ' generic horror book' as it's possible to find. Way back when – and I actually can't remember the first time that I read this, only that I did and possibly more than once, given the state of my collapsing copy – I didn't read this with any baggage. (Of course, now I see that there is horror in the stories, just maybe not the horror that I was used to from him: instead, it's the horror of emotional lurches, of war crimes, of being an overly inquisitive kid, of telling stories designed to unsettle and shock: but it's a horror you have to want to see, I suspect.) There's no horror, and he is, after all, a horror writer. That it says it at the very start of the movie, in the opening credits, is almost immaterial: to most people, it doesn't feel as they imagine a Stephen King story should. This film that they loved – like so many people, their favourite film (going by the fact that it's currently rated the best movie of all time over at IMDB – was based on a story by the man who wrote that book about the killer clown. When I assured them that it was, and that it was published in the same novella compendium as the story that became the classic 80s movie Stand By Me, it was possible to see their belief system crumble. It wasn't complicated: they didn't believe me that it was written by Stephen King. I once had an argument with somebody about The Shawshank Redemption.

Different seasons stephen king summary