Indeed, “The Raft” reminds me why I have a deep and abiding interest in the horror genre: there are very few ideas about the world and about humans that aren’t to be found somewhere in a horror film. This simple story, rendered very faithfully in Creepshow 2, is actually, I think, saying some complex things about our relation to our environment. In streaks and big smears.” He insists it did not look like the shape that is lurking on the lake: “It wasn’t, you know, compact.” This strange mass, which seems to sense their movements and their vulnerabilities, is a dense blackness-and the story tells of its relentlessly oozing over the teens, one by one, dissolving their flesh, pulling it off their bones, until only Randy is left.

Randy tells his friends that the one oil slick he has seen was “just this big sticky mess all over the water. Once they’ve all reached the raft, Randy sees a strange black shape in the water: it looks like oil-an oil slick is the closest he can come to naming it-but it’s not an oil slick it’s too perfectly formed. Near the end of October, four teens-Deke, Randy, LaVerne, and Rachel-have a few drinks, smoke some pot, and decide to swim out to a raft in the middle of a deserted lake. Stephen King’s story “The Raft,” published in Skeleton Crew in 1985 and part of the horror anthology Creepshow 2 (Michael Gornick, 1987), is deceptively straightforward.

Stephen king in creepshow 2