10 Best Non-Horror Stephen King Stories You Must Read

Death! Grief! Neglect! Mental illness! Not the most upbeat collection of themes. But somehow, The Body has its fair share of optimism, even if it is bittersweet. You probably know this story as the movie Stand By Me, released in 1986, four years after The Body was published in 1982 as part of the Different Seasons collection of novellas.

It's 1960. A young boy named Ray Brower has gone missing in the town of Castle Rock, Maine. Best friends Gordie, Chris, Vern, and Teddy set out to find the body under the guise of camping out in the woods so that their families don't become suspicious. Perhaps they wouldn't care if they knew the truth, since each boy comes from a broken home.

For everyone besides Gordie, the journey they go on, with the hope of find Brower's body at the end of, seems to be an just adventure, a last hurrah before they inevitably go to middle school and drift apart. For Gordie, it's something more. His older brother, Dennis, recently died in a car accident. Finding the body seems to be a way of both coming to peace with his loss and confirming the tangibility of death, that it's a real thing, not some abstract concept.

If read when young, the tale is a mostly upbeat adventure with a dour ending. If read when older, especially post-childhood, its a melancholic meditation on the power of friendship as a child and nature of change.

Despite being published and adapted for film in the 1980s and set in 1960, the story still works because its themes of the death of childhood and the end of innocence are timeless and resonate with people of all ages.