The Body

The Body is a novella originally published in the collection Different Seasons (1982). It follows four twelve-year-old boys who walk along railroad tracks to find the body of a missing boy. Rob Reiner adapted it as Stand by Me (1986), starring River Phoenix, Wil Wheaton, Jerry O'Connell, and Corey Feldman—a film widely regarded as one of the finest coming-of-age movies ever made.

The story is narrated in the first person by Gordie Lachance as an adult writer looking back on the events of the summer he was twelve. The adult narrator's interruptions and reflections are an essential part of the text—he meditates on what happened to each of his friends in the years after that summer.

King has acknowledged drawing on his own Maine childhood for the texture of the story—the landscape, the slang, the social dynamics of working-class boys in the late 1950s. The character of Gordie as a writer who feels guilty about his talent is widely understood as a self-portrait. The specific plot events are fictional.

The novella is remarkable for its integration of metafiction—Gordie's adult frame, his interpolated stories within the story—and its focus on grief, mortality, and the loss of childhood innocence rather than supernatural threat. It demonstrates that King's reputation for horror obscures the literary range present throughout his work.