The Body (Short Story)

The Body is a novella by Stephen King, originally published in the collection Different Seasons (1982) with the subtitle Fall from innocence. The novella deals with a group of boys who go traveling down railroad tracks looking for the corpse of a boy hit by the train.

Format of the story

The narrative of The Body is somewhat complicated in comparison with King's prior works. It is told in first person by the novelist Gordon Lachance. He is around thirty years old, and describing an event that took place when he was twelve. Most of the story is a straight retrospective of what happened, but now and then are comments or entire chapters that relate to the present time.

Although he was only twelve at the time of the story, Gordon's favorite diversion is writing - and occasionally telling - stories. Three times during the narrative, he tells stories to his friends, and twice these stories are presented in the text as short stories by Gordon Lachance, complete with attribution to the magazines they were published in. More about them later.

The Story

The real story of The Body takes place in 1960 when Gordon is a twelve year old boy living in the town of Castle Rock, Maine. He and his three friends, Chris Chambers, Teddy Duchamp, and Vern Tessio, find out where the corpse of Ray Brower, a boy their own age, is and go out to take a look at it. Ray had gone out to pick berries and never got back. Apparently he got hit by a train.

It is nearing the end of summer vacation, and as usual, the gang are spending their time hanging around in their treehouse playing cards and generally goofing off. Vern comes running, having overheard his older brother Billy speak with his friend about the corpse of Ray Brower, which they had found at a place called Back Harlow Road, but didn't dare tell anyone about since they had encountered it in the course of taking a joyride in a stolen car.

The gang decides that they will go to the spot which Billy has described, there to look at the corpse. Since it is longer than they can walk on one day, they plan to tell their parents that they are going to camp in Vern's back yard, and then rig a flashlight in the tent to make it look as if they're there. Gordon's parents, as usual, react almost absentmindedly when he tells them that he's sleeping over. Gordon used to have an older brother (Dennis) who died some years ago, and who was his parents' favorite. They are still mourning, and don't pay much attention to Gordon. This is echoed in the story Stud City, interleaved in the text at this point.

• Stud City by Gordon Lachance. Originally published in Greenspun Quarterly, issue 45, Fall, 1970. It has also been published as a separate short story by Stephen King in Ubris (University of Maine's literary journal), Fall, 1969.

• Stud City is about Chico, a young man who still lives at home even though his family situation isn't what it should be. His older brother is dead in a racing accident some years ago. His father has remarried, and Chico doesn't like his stepmother at all. He also has a younger brother. He has brought his girlfriend home and had sex with her a couple of times. Afterwards, he drives her home in his dilapidated old car. When Chico gets back the rest of his family have come home, and his father, obviously prompted by his stepmother, starts giving him a bad time about the girl. The story ends with Chico driving off into the rain in his old car to sleep over at a friend's.

The next chapter contains an analysis of the story by Gordon, who dismisses it as a typical product of an undergraduate creative writing workshop. It's written in terse prose in third person present. There are also a number of things in the story that are taken from Gordon's own experiences. The dead older brother is taken straight out of his own life, of course. He describes this story as the first he didn't show his parents, since it had too much of Dennis in it, "and most of all, too much 1960." The description of Chico's older brother just before he gets smashed between two cars is echoed in the story about Gordon and his friends a little later.

After this interlude, the gang of friends start walking along the railroad tracks toward the presumed location of the corpse of Ray Brower. They get to the town dump, where they scale the fence and drink from the water pump, even though the caretaker is rumored to have a vicious dog that he sics on trespassers. Gordon goes off to buy some food while the others wait. On the way back, he gets discovered by the caretaker and chased by the dog. It turns out that the dog isn't that fearsome, and they start taunting it (and the caretaker) through the fence. Teddy uses the epithets "fat-ass" and "lard-bucket", but does not take kindly to the caretaker's calling his father a "loony" and, to the others' alarm, attempts to climb the fence to attack the caretaker. Chris and Gordon are able, with some difficulty, to drag him away from the dump in order to continue their quest for the body.

The railroad track leads to a bridge, which the boys have the choice of crossing or making a big detour. They opt for the bridge, but before Gordon and Vern have gotten over, a train comes so they have to run for their lives. Exhilarated by this incident, Gordon starts telling his friends a story. The beginning of it is presented in dialogue, with frequent interruptions by his friends.

• The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan by Gordon Lachance. Originally published in Cavalier magazine, March, 1975. It has also been published as a separate short story by Stephen King in The Maine Review, July, 1975.

• The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan is about a fat kid called Davie Hogan whom nobody likes. In his (fictional) hometown of Gretna, Maine, there is a yearly pie-eating contest. He enters the contest, and no one really thinks that he has a chance against the towns veteran eaters, but he's regarded as a "comer". When they literally dive into their pies (no hands allowed!) it is soon obvious that he's a dangerous competitor. Soon, he's an entire pie in the lead. By then, the bottle of castor oil he drank before the contest is making itself noticed, and he vomits all over one of his competitors, who in turn barfs on someone else, and so it continues. Even the audience starts throwing up on each other. Lard Ass smiles, takes the microphone from the speaker and declares the contest a draw, and goes home.

The story ends without much of a resolution, and Gordon's friends complain a little, but they still concede that they usually like his stories. Chris says that Gordie'll grow up to become a famous writer. Perhaps he'll even write about them some day. Chris also says that soon their friendship will be over. He says that Gordie will go on to college and get somewhere while the other three will trundle along in shop classes and live the rest of their lives in Castle Rock. They stop for the night, and after they have eaten, Gordie tells another story. This time it's one of his "Le Dio" stories about a US Army unit's adventures in a French village during World War II (many written especially for Teddy), but this story isn't present in the text.

In the morning they find that there's still some way to walk. Once at the spot they find the body. They also soon find Vern's older brother, Chris' older brother and a number of other teenagers, who are not happy to see a number of kids at the site of the body that they had planned to discover. After some name-calling, Chris picks up the gun he has taken from his drunken father's things and fires in front of one of them and then threatens Ace Merril, the leader of the older boys, with it. After a brief standoff Ace realizes that Chris is serious. The teenagers leave after promising to get the boys later.

When the boys get back after walking all night, they find that they haven't really been missed. The older boys hold their tongues about the corpse (it is ultimately found by the authorities as the result of an "anonymous tip") but they also hold to their promises and beat the Gordon and his friends up. This is the end of the story proper.

After this, the narration goes into fast-forward. It describes the next year or so briefly. Teddy and Vern drift off from the others, becoming leaders of a few younger boys. Just as Chris said, Gordon starts taking college courses. Unexpectedly, so does Chris. In spite of threats from his father, taunts from his classmates and distrust from teachers and counselors, he manages to pull through with a lot of help from Gordon. Since he had paid no attention to school for a few years there was much catching up to do.

The penultimate chapter describes the fates of Gordon's three friends. None of them survived past young adulthood. Vern is killed in a house fire after a party. Teddy, while under the influence of alcohol and drugs, crashes his car and kills himself with a number of others. Chris, who became a stand out high school and college student and is preparing to attend law school, is stabbed after trying to stop a fight in a restaurant.

Gordon is the only one that survives. He continued to write stories through college, and published a number of them in small literary journals and men's magazines. He has the great luck of having his first novel become a smash hit, and a successful film as well. At the time of writing this story he has written seven novels about the supernatural, and he has a wife and three children.

And the story ends.

On the whole, Gordon Lachance comes across pretty much as a thinly-disguised version of Stephen King. He is the same age, profession and social class and was born, raised and lives in Maine. The only notable differences are that Gordon served in the military (there is a brief reference to his being in Vietnam - King was not drafted) and had a complex relationship with his father (King's father left the family when he was a very young child.)

Film

The Body has been filmed as Stand By Me (1986), directed by Rob Reiner, with River Phoenix as Chris Chambers.