by Stephen King
First published 2018
Gordie Lachance is twelve years old and already familiar with loss. It is the summer of 1960 in Castle Rock, Maine, and a boy named Ray Brower has gone missing from a nearby town. Word gets around that his body is somewhere along the railroad tracks outside of town. Gordie and his three friends, Chris Chambers, Teddy Duchamp, and Vern Tessio, decide to go find it. The journey takes them away from Castle Rock and away from the cramped, limited lives waiting for them there. Castle Rock is a factory town. It does not offer much, and the boys know it. As they walk the tracks, they argue, dare each other, tell stories, and get into real danger. They are still kids. They are also running out of time to be kids. What they find at the end of the tracks is a dead boy their own age. Standing over Ray Brower, they each have to reckon with what death means and what their own lives are likely to add up to. Stephen King wrote The Body as a story about four specific boys in one specific summer, and that precision is exactly what makes it cut so deep.
Genres: drama, classic-literature, literary-fiction, american-fiction, coming-of-age, young-adult
Vibes: bittersweet, introspective, melancholic, nostalgic, poignant
Tropes: coming-of-age-journey, found-family, loss-of-innocence
Setting: Castle Rock, Maine
Period: Summer 1960, 20th century
192 pages · Paperback · Scribner
Content warnings: child-death, death