MONSTER WRITER

By BRUCE HANDY

Another chapter is hurtling toward what its author hopes will be a breathtaking close. Storm clouds are gathering, foreshadows lengthening. You are firmly in the grip of what the book jacket avers is "Stephen King's boldest exercise in terror." Your eye skips to the bottom of the page, and this is what you read:

"Thunder rumbled somewhere far off, and unfocused heat lightning flashed in the darkening sky overhead. Bill looked up uneasily, his laughter dying.

"'I'll tell you what, though,' he said. 'I don't like this weather much. Feels like something's gonna happen. Something bad.'

"About that he was right. The bad thing happened right around quarter of ten that night. That was when Percy killed Mr. Jingles."

Mr. Jingles? Say, isn't that a dangerously silly name for a character taking part in a bold exercise in terror? Especially when he's a cute widdle mousey? Well, Stephen King's The Green Mile is an unusual book, and not just because it is being published serially, in 19th century fashion, with the first installment having hit bookstores in March and new volumes following monthly. As risky as any publishing venture that involves Stephen King's name in almost 200-point type--which is to say not so risky at all--The Green Mile has become a publishing sensation, with each of the first five installments having shipped more than 3,000,000 copies, and four of the five currently occupying positions on the New York Times paperback best-seller list, which all but guarantees that the sixth and concluding installment, in stores this week, will also be a hit. It's a nifty trick: at $2.99 a pop for each roughly 90-page paperback book, and $1 more for the half-again-as-long conclusion, readers of the complete Green Mile will have shelled out a total of $18.94 for what would have cost around $6.99 if it had been a normal, one-volume, mass-market paperback.

Brand loyalty like that should be heartening to publishers throughout the book industry, which has suffered a lackluster season for sales. High-profile disappointments have included the well-reviewed Rose by Martin Cruz Smith and Petru Popescu's Almost Adam, a well-hyped (and widely panned) thriller about early man. Some agents even blame the slump on King for crowding competitors off shelves and best-seller lists with his flotilla of Green Mile installments. Others in the industry see more pandemic ills, citing a trend toward increasingly larger advances paid to authors, and the increasingly larger printings that are subsequently ordered in an eager effort to make a profit.

The industry will surely perk up with the arrival of new novels from the likes of Michael Crichton, Scott Turow, John le Carre and Tom Clancy (see box). But rival publishers are probably not happy knowing that within a month there will be two more Stephen King books on the market. In another bit of publishing gimmickry, both novels--which share the same cast of characters in skewed, slightly different roles--will be published the same day, Sept. 24. One is Desperation (Viking; 688 pages; $27.95). The other is The Regulators, written under King's occasional nom de plume, Richard Bachman (Dutton; 475 pages; $24.95). Along with The Green Mile's 592 pages, this means King will have graced his fans with a total of 1,755 pages of fiction in less than 12 months. By way of comparison, you can get a standard-size, paperback King James Version of the Bible that tallies only 1,112 pages--a pretty slack job considering the Bible's authors had a number of centuries in which to crank it out (although in fairness to Moses, Jeremiah, Matthew, Mark et al., it must be pointed out that King's books are printed in somewhat larger type than theirs).

Is there such a thing as writer's unblock? King, who works virtually nonstop, regularly churning out two and sometimes three books a year, provides a clue about how he is able to manage such a forest-clearing output. In his introduction to the first volume of The Green Mile, he writes, "Most of the second chapter was written during a rain delay at Fenway Park!" Throw in a couple of pitching changes for revisions, and Anne Rice had better start watching her back on the hardcover best-seller list.

But hadn't we better get back to Mr. Jingles? He has befriended the death-row inmates and guards who are The Green Mile's core cast of characters (the Mile itself is a painted corridor the cons must walk to what is inevitably known as Old Sparky). Set in the deep, sleepy and racist South of 1932, the novel asks the question, What if a hulking but gentle and close-to-mute black man with a gift for Christlike healing were sentenced to die for the brutal kidnapping and murder-rape of two little white girls--crimes he may or may not have committed? There are many familiar King elements: gore ( in this regard a botched electrocution is the novel's tour de force), ambiguous supernatural powers, cruelty and revenge. Newcomers to King may be surprised to discover his fascination with bodily fluids other than blood (a bladder infection and a trouser wetting are key plot points). But the real shocker is that The Green Mile, with its doomed pet mouse and weepy, tender-hearted cons, is less a bold exercise in terror than a queer exercise in pathos.

In the final volume particularly, with its long autumn-of-my-years coda, King seems less interested in frightening readers than in setting them to dabbing their eyes and musing ruefully about life and death and stuff like that. It is a conclusion that may feel anticlimactic after five months in which the novel's narrator has been hinting at a more hair-raising denouement. Still, like the best popular art, The Green Mile has the courage of its cornier convictions. You might even say the palpable sense of King's sheer, unwavering belief in his tale is what makes the novel work as well as it finally does. Or maybe it is the palpable sense of his sheer need to write.

Desperation and The Regulators will bring a return to sturdier, more surefire thrills: heaps and heaps of gore (the words rill and freshet crop up in relation to hemorrhaging), ambiguous but decidedly malevolent supernatural powers, and cataclysmic battles between good and ultimate evil. (Is there any other kind in horror novels?) Both books feature a broken-down writer whose output has dwindled from his glory days--one imagines that might be a scary thought for King. But here's an even scarier idea for a novel: What about a writer who couldn't stop writing--ever?