As explained at the end of my last post, The Body is a novella by Stephen King assembled into a collection of novellas named Different Seasons. This story was fairly long for a novella. If another couple of scenes were added, it could have filled out a 250 page novel. It’s pretty hard to discern fact from fiction in this novel. It is well known that Stephen King witnessed a friend of his get killed by a train as a youth. There definitely seem to be elements of this event sprinkled into The Body.
The story follows a group of four 12 year-old boys through an adventure toward the tail end of summer. They learn that a classmate’s body has been found after being hit by a train. The body is initially discovered by an older brother and friend of one of the boys in the group. The older brother and friend are afraid to reveal that they located the body because they found it while driving around in a stolen car. The body is quite a distance from the boys’ neighborhood. The adventure covers the boys’ thirty, or so, mile trek along the train tracks to find the body and hopefully, some notoriety.
The plan starts with all the boys asking their parents’ if they can camp out for the night in a friend’s field. They setup a fake camp site complete with tent and lit flashlights and head out with sleeping mats in tow. Their journey to find the body will take the better part of two days.
During the story the dis-function of each of the boy’s family is explained. None are from great environments. The main character, Gordie, who appears to be a young Stephen King, has the best upbringing of the group, but his family is troubled by the unexpected death of Gordie’s older brother. Neglected by his distraught parents, Gordie narrates much of the story. Gordie is revealed to become a famous author later in the story. This is a primary reason for my suspicions that Gordie is a young Stephen King.
Stephen King does a great job of describing of the characters. He provides just enough of the “essence” of the character’s physical appearance, mannerisms, and history to allow the reader to vividly fill in the rest. I think this is key to much of his work. Readers make the story somewhat “their own” by the way he creates characters and settings using just the essence of their characteristics.
There is a scene where the boys are camped out for the night and Gordie tells the story of “Lard ass Hogan”. It is about a big chubby kid that turns a small town’s pie-eating contest into a barf-O-rama to get revenge on his fat-shaming tormentors. I read this portion on a plane and had trouble not laughing out loud.
In the end the group of boys find the body, but decide not to report it. The boys did a great deal of bonding during their adventure, but grow apart as they get older. It is revealed that only Gordie makes it into his 30’s. Memories of those few days with his friends stay with him forever.
This is a great story and it is prompting me to find the movie (Stand by Me) on Netflix or Amazon to watch it again.