The Body

Good read, dare I say great read. Very, very fun read, and that is what it's all about. Not everything will be It or The Stand. This is fun, which is totally fine.

I like the character development, its impressive the level of childlike wonder, innocence, crudeness for the sake of being crude, and fear that King brings out in child characters. All four are very recognizable caricatures, which helps them feel like a real group of four friends and not one unit that is indistinguishable.

While the book was fun, it doesn't pull punches in the typical Stephen King things. It includes a lot of really sad stuff to do with familial problems. None of the four kids have anything close to ideal home lives, due to all kinds of factors. Abusive show more parents, abusive siblings, dead siblings, manic fathers, and the like. It draws a real good juxtaposition between the "fun" of their journey to find the body and the sad reality of their lives, and the ending only punches that harder.

I'd seen 'Stand By Me', the movie adaptation of this novella, years ago, and I don't usually feel this for movie adaptations, but it was fun to read it after having seen the movie. The constant recall of scenes was a good time. show less

I still haven't seen Stand by Me, but it's been on my list for a while, so I decided to pick up The Body to acquire a feel for the source material before seeing the movie. I really enjoyed this one. It's interesting that it's not all that dark for a King, despite its grisly subject matter. What I found the most interesting, even though it's not really the point of the book, is the sense of it being a story set in a part of America that's right on the cusp of the modern American car culture, where some (but by no means all) have a car, but the small towns are still alive and interwoven, and the age of the train is within living memory. I thought that the "epilogue" did a good job of emphasizing the fact that the storyworld was buried by show more the time the story was put to paper. show less

In many ways, this is amongst my favorite King books. A poignant, insightful look at growing up and the eventual inevitable loss of many of our childhood friendships.

4.5*
I loved this coming of age story (novella) told through the eyes of an author in his middle age about a summer during his 12th year. Some of the lines will really stick with me, which is saying a lot since I listened the audio book versus reading it to myself. Things seem to stick with me more and having a larger impact overall when I read them myself. I thought the narrator was quite good though and while there were a few parts that I lost focus on the plot, I thought this was beautifully written. I felt like I was there with Chris, Vern, Teddy, and Gordy. I have never seen the movie before, but I really want to now.

Gordon and his friends, Chris, Vern, and Teddy, are 12 years old in the 1950s. Summer is almost over and they're hanging out in their tree house. Earlier, Vern accidently overheard his older brother talking with a friend. They were joyriding the previous day and found the body of a missing kid next to the train tracks. The older kids decided not to report it because they didn't want to get in trouble for their own mischief. When Vern tells Gordon, Chris, and Teddy about what he heard, they decide to find the body themselves, so they can report it and get their names in the paper.

This novella has the combination of eloquence and coarseness that I associate with Stephen King. A lot of it is sad (the missing kid who died, the descriptions show more of the kids' home lives, Gordon's thoughts about death). There is some rough language, which should probably be expected from 12 year olds at any time in history. show less

Known to most as the movie "Stand By Me," "The Body" is a great little coming-of-age novella about four boys who take a trek to see the corpse of a boy their own age.

I like how King injects himself into many of his books and that's here in abundance. Also, the characters he develops are extremely strong and real. The dialogue is accurate and perfect for the era, and the tension and wonder of the boys' journey is extremely effective.

I haven't seen the movie "Stand By Me" for 20 years or so but it sounds like it's almost exactly the story from the book. Four 12 year old friends in Maine hear of a dead body - a kid their age named Ray Brower - who went missing and apparently got hit by a train, and they set off to see it. And it's probably been close to 15 years since I've read a Stephen King novel, but I was reminded of just how good a writer he is - the story is outstanding and sucks in you, almost to the point I couldn't stop listening (I listened to the audio version). My complaint - and some will easily dismiss it - is the over-the-top volume of profanity and vulgarity (no, I hadn't forgotten that that is how King writes, but it's probably the biggest reason show more it's been close to 15 years since I've picked up a book by him). I've read King's [b:On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft|437148|On Writing A Memoir of the Craft|Stephen King|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1304619831s/437148.jpg|150292] (one of my favorites) and his comments on the necessity of profanity for realism in fiction, but he takes that to the extreme limit and then goes beyond. Some people may talk that way (and I'll admit to a couple of years as a kid when I should have had my mouth washed out occasionally), but it's not something I find edifying or that I care to listen to - and I think he could have cut out 95% of it and still got his message across. My other complaint is the stupid "Chico" story, which seemed to have no purpose - or if it did, I missed it. Still, credit where credit is due: this is a great story, and if there's a significant difference between the movie and the book, it's probably that the movie is a lot cleaner. show less