Description

If the trials of childhood form the adult, then Stanley Newberry is growing into a grotesquely misshapen lump of a thing. All the popular people tell him so. Since he first met his classmates in grade school, Fat Stanley has singly borne the brunt of their endless insults, taunts and abuses. Passing from eighth grade to their first year in high school, purple-nurples and Indian-burns have long since given way to chocolate-swirlies and blackened eyes, but Fat Stanley has grown wiser and warier, too.

Bastard twins born of terror and torment, fear and cynicism render him increasingly aware of their malicious overtures. Each year, his tormentors must develop evermore elaborate pretexts to draw the fat kid out of his shell, but each summer also returns him to their academic fold, fatter, uglier and weirder than the season gone before. This school year, his dedicated torturers have fabricated their most elaborate ruse to date. Fat Stanley will not survive it and in the aftermath a guilty few will envy the dead.