Gertie Kindle 'Turn to Page 390' said:
Except for the serialization thing (which I was warned about ahead of time), I like The Green Mile better as a book. Tom Hanks just didn't fit my idea of what's-his-name.
I understand that, can see that.
I think it was an emotionally richer work than the King thing, and that's why I preferred it.
I was on the Amazon boards yesterday, and I was discussing the differences between Koontz and King, and why it amazes me how people keep comparing them. Yes, yes, I know I'm comparing them, but let's ignore that bit of hypocrisy, shall we?
King is, by all accounts, a stand-up sort of guy. He had his substance abuse issues, but he's still married to his high school sweetheart and they raised some solid citizens. I can't stress enough that I know he's a nice dude, but his characters rarely touch me, because he seems to keep a distance from them and make them morally ambiguous. There are exceptions -- the part in Cujo about him being a good dog who was confused at why he was doing bad things, I could tear up just thinking about it -- Delores Claiborne, Rose Madder, the woman in The Gingerbread Girl, Danny in The Shining...
But all too often his stories miss the emotional mark for me until they become movies and the visuals bring it home. That's why Shawshank and Green Mile make me cry in a way they original stories didn't. He's also not afraid to kill some people!
Speaking of The Shining -- I did so, too, scroll up -- he once said that Danny would probably grow up to be a drunk who beats his kids, and that says a lot about the tone of his stories.
Koontz, on the other hand, is all emotional, all Root For The Good Guys! His endings are usually against-all-odds happy, and when he goes a different way
it leaves me gob-smacked.
These two men are very different writers, who see the world in very different ways. I think King brings the brains and Koontz brings the heart.