First Lines Friday – 2/7/20

First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?  If you want to make your own post, feel free to use or edit the banner above, and follow the rules below:

• Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
• Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
• Finally… reveal the book!

First Lines…

   THIS HAPPENED in 1932, when the state penitentiary was still at Cold Mountain. And the electric chair was there, too, of course.

   The inmates made jokes about the chair, the way people always make jokes about things that frighten them but can’t be gotten away from. They called it Old Sparky, or the Big Juicy. They made cracks about the power bill, and how Warden Moores would cook his Thanksgiving dinner that fall, with his wife, Melinda, too sick to cook.

Any Guesses???

This one I read many, many years ago.  Like, a long time ago.

Before Goodreads was a thing and way before I started blogging.

I’m talking after my oldest was born, but before my youngest was born.  You know, the kid who now has a kid.

When this was first published, it was actually done as a serial.  If I remember correctly, there was one short book published each month for 6 months. Which actually made it do-able for my non-reading husband.  Yep, he actually read this book, too!

The Green Mile by Stephen King

At Cold Mountain Penitentiary, along the lonely stretch of cells known as the Green Mile, killers as depraved as the psychotic “Billy the Kid” Wharton and the possessed Eduard Delacroix await death strapped in “Old Sparky”. Here guards as decent as Paul Edgecombe and as sadistic as Percy Wetmore watch over them. But good or evil, innocent or guilty, none have ever seen the brutal likes of the new prisoner, John Coffey, sentenced to death for raping and murdering two young girls. Is Coffey the devil in human form? Or is he a far, far different kind of being?

There are more wonders in heaven and hell than anyone at Cold Mountain can imagine – as the truth emerges in shock waves that only Stephen King could create and a blast of revelation that will truly blow your mind.