Also titled as "The Body." What of Stephen King and the plots around kids or teenagers is a recurring theme. I don't know, it seems as if the author seeks an empathy with that young soul that once occupied us. A spirit open to fantasy or fear, an age capable of venturing and still being surprised. A kind of target or perfect target for many of the casts of characters in the King novels.
As already happened in the first short novel of the volume, Hope, eternal spring, a narrator plunges us into the past where the events take place, with that touch of evocation of the past, which always arouses doubt about what is true and what is disturbed by memory.
Gordie Lechance tells us about the group of four 12-year-old friends who come across a dead child in the woods. The shock of the most extreme crude reality marks that drastic abandonment of innocence, as a perverse metaphor of what life is and of, at times, no less shocking discovery of the reality of our world.
A novel that, although it addresses sinister aspects regarding the case of the dead child, also serves to awaken a brilliant contrast with respect to those childhood friendships, sealed with blood and understood as eternal from the short perspective of a time that seems endless.
Only the four boys together will be able to overcome the macabre discovery and the subsequent vital drift that is linking with the particular casuistry of each of them.
Considered an autobiographical novel in certain aspects of that childhood, the notion of the older boy and narrator of the events, Gordie Lechance represents himself Stephen King, leading us to the idea of what it means to revisit old paths that, although they could be darkened at times, could always find a better way out in the childhood years, together with some friends dedicated to the cause of continuing to maintain indestructible bonds, no matter how terrifying they may be. could be the problem.
A novel that prolongs that idea of accessing the depths of the soul, where the badly asleep can be found, as was the case in the previous short novel Summer of Corruption, the terror but also the raging vitality of survival, love and friendship.
You can find the short novel The Autumn of Innocence: The Body, in the volume of The Four Seasons II, here: