The Green Mile is creatively packaged as a six-part series of small paperbacks--serial fiction for a new age. The story, set during the Great Depression, tells of John Coffey, an African American convicted of rape and murder who awaits his death in a Southern prison. Coffey has strange powers, and the creepy characters in the prison have their own views of his gifts, and of God's. The mystery is enhanced by the succession of installments.