Stephen King is one of America’s most popular fiction writers; more than half of all Americans have read at least one of his books, according to YouGov, which in 2022 also ranked the most popular King titles. “The Stand” was at the top of that list, followed by “The Shining,” “IT” and “The Green Mile.”
Nowhere on that list was “Different Seasons,” King’s 1982 collection that was recently put on a list of titles to be removed from Utah school libraries because it was flagged by four school districts — Davis, Jordan, Tooele and Washington — for objectionable content.
King did not take the news well, writing on X that the book had been “banned in Utah” and saying, “What’s wrong with these people?”
He noted that the book contained two “stories of friendship and courage” — “Stand by Me” and “The Shawshank Redemption,” both of which were made into movies.
In “Different Seasons,” however, those novellas have different names: “The Body” and “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.”
Two other novellas are in the collection, “Apt Pupil” and “Breathing Method.” King’s website says “Apt Pupil” is about “a golden California schoolboy and an old man whose hideous past he uncovers enter into a fateful and chilling mutual parasitism.” It says “Breathing Method” is about “a tale told in a strange club about a woman determined to give birth no matter what.”
“If these tales turn out to have an interlacing of nightmarish elements after all, the reason is not the occult, but twentieth-century humanity’s apparent determination to return to the Dark Ages, a time for which Stephen King is obviously the ideal bard,” the website says.
On social media, people were quick to push back against King, whose strong political takes often cause controversy. Last year, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, King apologized for, and deleted a post in which he said, wrongly, that Kirk had “advocated stoning gays to death.” More recently, King deleted a post in which he said he hoped former Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner would stay in the race and called President Donald Trump the “abuser in chief.”
King’s post about Utahns is still up, however, as well as more than a thousand responses, many of which point out that Utah did not ban the book — it’s available for sale in all the usual places — and noting that “Apt Pupil” is about a teenager who bonds with an elderly Nazi war criminal and commits a series of murders. One person said that he was a fan of King but still considers “Apt Pupil” to be “a tough read.”
In The New York Times’ review of the book, published in 1982, the reviewer noted that the Nazi in the story at one point cremates his cat in his oven, and “the novella begins to reek of more than baking feline flesh. And later, when each of this unlikely pair begins a series of murders, the stench may prove overpowering.”
The removal of the book from school libraries stems from a Utah law enacted in 2024 that allows parents to flag “objective sensitive material” that might not be age-appropriate for students. If at least three school districts, or two districts and five charter schools, remove a title, it triggers removal from all public schools.
“Different Seasons” is the 40th book to be affected by the measure.
In January, the Utah chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint in the United States District Court, saying that the law amounts to censorship.