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Different Seasons cover
SEE THROUGH IT FEEL THE FISSURE

Different Seasons

by Stephen King

How fascism finds the boy next door.

For you if

you've wondered what ordinary people are capable of when no one's watching.

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Different Seasons is four novellas that share a cover, and the reason it belongs in this catalog is Apt Pupil — one of the most unsettling and necessary explorations of how fascism moves through ordinary people that American fiction has produced. Todd Bowden is thirteen, an all-American kid, a model student. He discovers his elderly neighbor is a Nazi war criminal — and instead of turning him in, he wants to know everything. What King builds is an anatomy of fascist seduction: how the pull toward transgression, power, and suspended moral limits doesn't require ideology first. The other three novellas are no slouches — Shawshank Redemption tracks wrongful imprisonment and what institutional corruption does to human beings; The Body follows four boys walking toward a dead body, and what you learn about mortality when you confront it before you're supposed to. Together this is a book about what evil looks like from the inside — including from the inside of an ordinary American kid who just wanted to know.

In effect right now

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Different Seasons has been challenged in Iowa (1987), Connecticut (1989), Minnesota (1992), California (2012), and elsewhere — consistently for the rape scene and graphic violence in 'Apt Pupil.' The Rocklin, California case is instructive: a parent objected, an initial committee voted to remove it, and the book was retained only after the district superintendent convened a broader review. A student was the lone voice against censorship in the first committee. What they're consistently trying to remove is King's examination of how a normal American kid becomes complicit in evil — because that implication is uncomfortable. Discomfort is the point.

The record

  • Utah

    2026

    Removed statewide (state law or state board rule) · Every public K–12 school

    Public libraries (students may not bring copies to school)

    Initiated by: government or statute

    In effect nowLast verified Oct 2, 2026Source ↗

Where This Book Lives

Themes
authoritarian playbookcoming of agecomplicitycorruption of the soulhope and resiliencehorrorinjusticeordinary people and evil
Topics
nazi germanythe holocaust

Most people know Apt Pupil from the 1998 film, which softened it considerably. The novella is darker and more philosophically serious — King doesn't give you a monster, he gives you a thirteen-year-old who looks exactly like the good American kid he is, and shows you how evil doesn't recruit, it seduces. The graphic violence and rape in Apt Pupil aren't gratuitous; every horrific detail shows what Todd is drawn toward and eventually replicates. This is adult fiction — it should never sit near the kids catalog — but for the reader who wants to understand how fascism actually operates, not as ideology but as contagion, Apt Pupil has never felt more necessary.

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