The Raft (Stephen King)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the Marvel comic book prison of the same name see The Raft (comics)

"The Raft" is a horror short story by Stephen King first published in Gallery in 1982, and collected in the 1985 Skeleton Crew anthology.

[edit] Plot summary

The Raft is about four college students, two young men and two young women, who go out to swim in a Pennsylvania lake during the autumn, when nobody is around. After they swim out onto a raft, a mysterious oil slick-like entity appears in the water beneath them, and consumes them one by one in an extremely gruesome manner, stranding the remaining ones on the raft.

[edit] Adaptation

"The Raft" was adapted to film as a segment of the 1987 horror anthology movie Creepshow 2, directed by Michael Gornick with a screenplay by George Romero.

[edit] Background

In the afterword to the book Skeleton Crew, King relates an anecdote about the story's possible 1969 publication in Adam magazine in different form, under the title "The Float". He explains that the story was accepted for publication by Adam magazine. A short time after that King was arrested in the town of Orono, Maine for removing a number of traffic cones from the street after one of them had damaged his car. He was unable to pay the two hundred and fifty dollar fine handed down by the court and was about to be jailed for thirty days when the payment check for "The Float" arrived in the mail, an event King referred to as akin to "having someone send you a real Get Out Of Jail Free Card." Despite the fact that King received payment for the story he has never been able to locate a copy of the magazine with the published story in it.