SOURCE: Reino, Joseph. “Fantasies of Summer and Fall: Full of Sound and Fury.” In Stephen King: The First Decade, Carrie to Pet Sematary, pp. 117-35. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988.

In the following essay, Reino provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of the novellas comprising Different Seasons.

With brief seasonal subtitles, Different Seasons (1982) attempts to bind together four unusual novellas of varying lengths and moods. Taken from the optimistic “Essay on Man” of the eighteenth-century English poet Alexander Pope, “Hope Springs Eternal” is the subtitle of the vernal season, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption—a subtitle that is, at the tag-end of the violence-ridden twentieth century, little more than a pleasant, but not quite believable, cliché. The second and longest of the novellas, the sinister Apt Pupil, is a “Summer of Corruption”—an apparent variation on the “winter of our discontent” from the oft-quoted opening line of Shakespeare's Richard III...