The Body Stephen King File

The story then fast-forwards through the years, delivering a devastating epilogue. Within four years, the gang has fractured. Teddy tries to join the army but is rejected due to his damaged hearing (caused by his abusive father); he ends up in prison. Vern dies in a house fire. Chris Chambers, who had the intellect and heart to escape Castle Rock, gets into law school but is stabbed to death in a roadside diner while trying to break up a fight. Only Gordie survives to become the writer of their story. 1. The Inevitability of Loss. The central metaphor of the novella is, of course, the dead body. Ray Brower is not a mystery to be solved; he is a mirror. The boys are searching for death, but they find their own futures. King writes with brutal clarity that the death of childhood is a death itself. The body represents everything they will lose: innocence, friendship, and their belief in a coherent, just world.

The Body remains King’s most perfect work of short fiction. It is a story about a corpse that is, paradoxically, bursting with life. It reminds us that the scariest thing in the world is not a monster under the bed, but the simple, unstoppable act of growing up—and looking back to see a boy you used to know, lying still and silent by a set of railroad tracks, in the long grass of a lost summer. The Body Stephen King

What follows is an epic, picaresque journey. They cross a junkyard haunted by the mythical guard dog “Chopper” (who turns out to be a sleepy, harmless mutt), swim through a leech-infested water hole, and tell stories around a campfire, including Gordie’s best-known fictional tale: “The Revenge of Lardass Hogan,” a gross-out masterpiece about a fat boy who gets revenge on a town by vomiting spectacularly at a pie-eating contest. The story then fast-forwards through the years, delivering