Stephen King · 1982 · overland

Stephen King's 1982 novella, filmed as Stand by Me, a coming-of-age story narrated by a writer remembering the summer he was twelve. Over a long weekend in 1960 he and three friends walk the railroad tracks out of the Maine town of Castle Rock to find a dead boy, and walk back changed. Tender, funny and unsparing about boyhood, poverty and grief, it is King far from horror, at his most humane.

1. 1
   Castle Rock

   Labor Day weekend, 1960. Four boys from Castle Rock, Maine, set off down the railroad tracks on a two-day hike to find the body of a boy their own age, missing and presumed dead.

2. 2
   Castle River Trestle

   Halfway there, the long railway trestle over the Castle River, and the freight train that nearly catches them on it, the most alive any of them has ever felt.

3. 3
   Back Harlow Road

   Out near the Back Harlow Road they find what they came for, and learn something about death and friendship that will mark the rest of their lives.