In The Green Mile's frame story, Paul Edgecomb enjoys a "special friendship" with Elaine Connelly. Their twilight years romance is reminiscent of the courtship of self-described "Old Crock," Ralph Roberts, and Lois Chasse in King's Insomnia (1994). At sixty-eight, Lois is hounded by grown children trying to put her in a nursing home. In both books, King shows his profound sympathy with senior citizens in danger of losing their personal autonomy. Even the best nursing homes are, King suggests, another kind of death row.

Old age is one of many kinds of imprisonment, literal and figurative, found in King's fiction. The younger Paul Edgecombe has been forced to participate in the deaths of more than seventy human beings because he is a prisoner of Depression economics. The warden's wife, Melinda Moore, is imprisoned by a terminal illness. Melinda, Paul, and, of course, the prisoners on E Block...