Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:
Different Seasons
“The Body” is the third novella in King’s collection and, of course, it was made into Stand By Me (God bless you, River Phoenix! How you are missed!! DAMMIT) If people stay away from King because “they don’t like horror novels” – I think that is such a shame – and I say that as a person who doesn’t read horror novels, generally. But I read Carrie in high school (after seeing the film) and I was hooked – and I am so grateful. Because he is a wonderful writer. I think he’s almost (not quite) but almost on the level of Mark Twain – in terms of writing about children – from THEIR level. It’s not an easy feat- but King shines in that regard, above many of his peers. The way he evokes the rules of children, and how intense the friendships can be (especially little boys – like in “The Body”) is absolutely exquisite. And another thing that King does here – that he does also in It, which I consider a masterpiece – is he writes from the perspective of an adult, looking back on childhood … and yeah, lots of writers do that … but without putting a keen of sadness and nostalgia in my heart, like King does. I read “The Body” and my heart literally aches. For youth, for summer vacation, for playing outside in the twilight, for being 4 feet tall, for the intensity of those times. Children have a three-dimensional experience, even though they are not adults yet. They have tough times, they grapple with universal themes, they struggle, they have moments of calm, they have insight … but they are also 11 years old. King, when he writes about looking back, lets that sadness and loss flow through his writing, and it’s just absolutely gorgeous. It is unbearable at points, because of this. Yes, there are monsters, and danger, and terror … but the real heart of the thing (and it’s in the last sentence of It) is remembering, with love, the friends you had before you knew who you were, the friends you made before life got to you … the people you CHOSE as your companions when you were a kid. Those are important choices. And sometimes we never make such friends again. That’s what “The Body” is all about, too.
Beautiful story. Four little boys – all misfits, for different reasons – hang out in their treehouse, playing cards, smoking cigarettes, fighting, talking. They hear a rumor – that out in the woods – there is a dead body. Nobody has discovered it yet. So they make a plan – to lie to their parents (those who have parents who care) and trek out into the woods to see the body. They will have to sleep in the woods one night. It will be an adventure.
How much of an adventure they could not know when they set out.
The narrator is writing the story – it’s first person – and he’s looking back on it, as an adult. He is now a writer. So the story is interspersed with his published works – so we can see how he has used the stuff of his life (the pie-eating contest, etc.) to create a career as a fiction writer. But this … this story of “The Body” … he has never written before. So there are times when the prose palpitates with emotionality, you’ll see what I mean in the excerpt below – which is, hands down, some of my favorite writing of King’s ever, in all of his books.
If you don’t know what happens … I beg you to read “The Body”. Even if you’ve already seen Stand By Me. It’s something else – a really special piece of work.
Here’s an excerpt. I chose it because it stands out for me – in the whole of the story – as something singular, unconnected to other events … and also because I have had similar moments in my life, nearly identical as a matter of fact – and King, who is known for writing about big gestures – running, killing, screaming – is PERFECT here – in the tiniest of moments. King understands that all of life can be encapsulated in such a moment. That often it is not the BIG things that stay in our mind … it’s the small. Like the time on the L platform in Chicago, when a thunderstorm was brewing, and there was purple lightning, and I know I was really really sad about something – although I can’t remember what – and there were 2 little kids blowing bubbles nearby and so the translucent bubbles filled the air, gyrating around my head because of the wind. I don’t remember the BIG things surrounding that moment … but the sensory details are intact. And that means something to me. I don’t discount the importance of such moments, even though they do not change the world.
That’s what King is describing here. LOVE it.
EXCERPT FROM Different Seasons (Signet)
The others slept heavily through the rest of the night. I was in and out, dozing, waking, dozing again. The night was far from silent; I heard the triumphant screech-squawk of a pouncing owl, the tiny cry of some small animal perhaps about to be eaten, a larger something blundering wildly through the undergrowth. Under all of this, a steady tone, were the crickets. There were no more screams. I doze and woke, woke and dozed, and I suppose if I had been discovered standing such a slipshod watch in Le Dio, I probably would have been courtmartialed and shot.
I snapped more solidly out of my last doze and became aware that something was different It took a moment or two to figure it out: although the moon was down, I could see my hands resting on my jeans. My watch said quarter to five. It was dawn.
I stood, hearing my spine crackle, walked two dozen feet away from the limped-together bodies of my friends, and pissed into a clump of sumac. I was starting to shake the night-willies; I could feel them sliding away. It was a fine feeling.
I scrambled up the cinders to the railroad tracks and sat on one of the rails, idly chucking cinders between my feet, in no hurry to wake the others. At that precise moment the new day felt too good to share.
Morning came on apace. The noise of the crickets began to drop, and the shadows under the trees and bushes evaporated like puddles after a shower. The air had that peculiar lack of taste that presages the latest hot day in a famous series of hot days. Birds that had maybe cowered all night just as we had done now began to twitter self-importantly. A wren landed on top of the deadfall from which we had taken our firewood, preened itself, and then flew off.
I don’t know how long I sat there on the rail, watching the purple steal out of the sky as noiselessly as it had stolen in the evening before. Long enough for my butt to start complaining anyway. I was about to get up when I looked to my right and saw a deer standing in the railroad bed not ten yards from me.
My heart went up into my throat so high that I think I could have put my hand in my mouth and touched it. My stomach and genitals filled with a hot dry excitement. I didn’t move. I couldn’t have moved if I had wanted to. Her eyes weren’t brown, but a dark, dusty black – the kind of velvet you see backgrounding jewelry displays. Her small ears were scuffed suede. She looked serenely at me, head slightly lowered in what I took for curiosity, seeing a kid with his hair in a sleep-scarecrow of whirls and many-tined cowlicks, wearing jeans with cuff and a brown khaki shirt with the elbows mended and the collar turned up in the hoody tradition of the day. What I was seeing was some sort of gift, something given with a carelessness that was appalling.
We looked at each other for a long time … I think it was a long time. Then she turned and walked off to the other side of the tracks, white bobtail flipping insouciantly. She found grass and began to crop. I couldn’t believe it. She had begun to crop. She didn’t look back at me and didn’t need to; I was frozen solid.
Then the rail started to thrum under my ass and bare seconds later the doe’s head came up, cocked back toward Castle Rock. She stood there, her branch-black nose working on the air, coaxing it a little. Then she was gone in three gangling leaps, vanishing into the woods with no sound but one rotted branch, which broke with a sound like a track ref’s starter-gun.
I sat there, looking mesmerized at the spot where she had been, until the actual sound of the freight came up through the stillness. Then I skidded back down the bank to where the others were sleeping.
The freighter’s slow, loud passage woke them up, yawning and scratching. There was some funny, nervous talk about “the case of the screaming ghost,” as Chris called it, but not as much as you might imagine. In daylight it seemed more foolish than interesting – almost embarrassing. Best forgotten.
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell them about the deer, but I ended up not doing it. That was one thing I kept to myself. I’ve never spoken or written of it until just now, today. And I have to tell you that it seems a lesser thing written down, damn near inconsequential. But for me it was the best part of that trip, the cleanest part, and it was a moment I found myself returning to, almost helplessly, when there was trouble in my life – my first day in the bush in Vietnam, and this fellow walked into the clearing where we were with his hand over his nose and when he took his hand away there was no nose there because it had been shot off; the time the doctor told us our youngest son might be hydrocephalic (he turned out just to have an oversized head, thank God); the long, crazy weeks before my mother died. I would find my thoughts turning back to that morning, the scuffed suede of her ears, the white flash of her tail. But eight hundred million Red Chinese don’t give a shit, right? The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them. It’s hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life.
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At that precise moment the new day felt too good to share.
What a great line. There are weekends when I get up early and still have that selfish feeling.
Red, it’s official. I can’t take any more of these teasers – I’ve just ordered the book. You ought to get a royalty on the sale! ;-)
“I hereby declare this contest a draw.” ;-)
Definately, my favorite of the four novellas. I’ve actually had similar experiences as the passage discussed while sitting in a deer stand at my wife’s country house… No gun, many times just a camera… You have to be really patient and many times you only hear squirrels, but the time you see, say a group of wild turkeys followed a few minutes by a large red fox, it makes it worthwhile.
JFH – i was up at dawn when I was camping in Minnesota, I think – and had a communing moment with a mother and baby deer. They let me be, I let them be. It was awesome.
And “no gun, just a camera”. Yeah, if you fucking SHOOT the deer, methinks you miss the whole goddamn point.
Iain – Yay! You know, I keep meaning to set up an affiliate program with Amazon so I could at least get a couple cents thrown my way when someone buys cause I tell them to. hahaha
Anyway: enjoy!
And totally agreed about that life “being too good to share” comment. So so true – there’s a fragility to that kind of perfection … and telling about it, merely telling about it … can ruin it.
That’s why I keep 90% of my life off my blog and I only write about something when I’m damn good and ready – and know that nothing anyone will say will “ruin” my experience.
Oh, and I tried to read the last story in the collection, but never could get thru it. It bored me to tears. And I tried to read it again last night, and it still bored me to tears. So I’m moving on.
So this is it for Different Seasons – on to another King book now!!
great moment! my favorite passage is his description of the body itself — how he uses the shoes to represent the life knocked out of the body. i think it cuts to the deepest mystery about death: the body is THERE, all the parts are intact, but there’s absolutely nothing left of the person that was. that paragraph is one of those places in fiction where a deliberate, self-conscious use of words and punctuation just plain works. it gets me every time.
for me, the story is not about childhood or friendship so much as it’s the story of a writer’s journey. it’s how a boy became a writer. as much as i do like the movie, and as faithful as the movie is, it’s not the same story to me.
This one’s definitely one of King’s best. It’s a favorite. And for me, the only story in the collection that really stands out for me. It’s also one of the earliest King stories I’d ever read…maybe the second or third, ever.
What you mention as the children’s point of view, which works so incredibly in this, in It, for Jake in the early Dark Tower books and even to a degree in The Shining….juxtaposed with some of the same points-of-view in later works, there’s a gap.
I’m a big fan of King’s earlier work…but there are only a couple written after 93 or so that really ring out as really good, for me. But the ones that ring out as really bad (like Dreamcatcher) do so because they seem to grasp at some of that magical point-of-view that he captured for this story, for It and all those others….
There are other gulfs, but I’d never put a finger on that one, and never figured out why Dreamcatcher irritated me so much. I think I just did.
Thanks, Red.
Hmm… I remember liking the fourth story. But, I don’t have this book here so have to pick it up and read it again. I can’t read Apt Pupli unless I’m in just the right mood- it creeps me out too badly. But I love The Body (almost as much as I love Shawshank Redemption….)
otherstevie – yes, I totally love how it’s the story of a writer, learning how to use the stuff of his own life – for his craft. Very moving. I should read the whole story again – it’s been a long time. I forgot the moment where they see the body – and the sneaker image you describe.
I think King alludes to another interesting point about being a writer, about knowing what one wants to do (and when to listen and whom to listen to). I remember one of the other boys, can’t remember which one, encouraging him to write more stories like “The Revenge of Lard-Ass Hogan” when the rest of them just wanted more Le Dio stories.
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I was just wondering if you happen to remember what page the line “The noise of the crickets began to drop, and the shadows under the trees and bushes evaporated like puddles after a shower.” is on, I can’t seem to find it and I would like to mark it in my copy, it’s such a stunning description.