Castle Rock, Maine, 1960. Gordie LaChance and his three friends hang out in this hot summer, waiting for the school year to start. Not far from where they live, a boy their age, 12 years old, has disappeared. The eldest brother of one of these boys has seen this child’s body, dead, near the railway tracks. The four friends decide to go on an excursion to find this body. When they finally get there, they will have to confront the older, tougher boys of their town, as suddenly, everyone wants to claim having found this dead boy. I was a little afraid of reading Stephen King because I had nightmares after reading “Shining,” but this one was not spooky. An ordinary story of ordinary boys in a little town lost in the middle of the US. A story about finding one’s place in a society that condemns quickly those that don’t walk straight.
“Even if I’d known the right thing to say, I probably couldn’t have said it. Speech destroys the functions of love, I think that’s a hell of a thing for a writer to say, I guess, but I believe it to be true. If you speak to tell a deer you mean it no harm, it glides away with a single flip of its tail. The word is the harm. Love isn’t what these asshole poets like McKuen want you to think it is. Love has teeth; they bite; the wounds never close. No word, no combination of words, can close those lovebites. It’s the other way around, that’s the joke. If those wounds dry up, the words die with them. Take it from me. I’ve made my life from the words, and I know that is so.”