The Body of Christopher Creed is a complete rip off of Stephan King's, Diffrent Seasons (the Body). Everything is practically the same except Torey Adams and the rest accomplish nothing except almost going crazy. While in the Body the young boys manage to find the body of the missing classmate. Also one of the young boys manages to become an author while Torey Adams is stuck at bording school, trying to cope with Christopher still missing. Overall, the book surprised me by not accomplishing anything, but it was still a fun read.

This book is probably one of the best, if not the best, that I have read in a few years. I can personally identify with Ucci's Torey Adams, and the fact that he has come to the realization that things are never as black and white as we make them, and in order to see past that, we have to be willing to look through the glossy surface we sometimes paste over complicated or uncomfortable truths. The element of mystery was a nice addition to the novel, but what held me was Torey's psychological transformation, his questioning what it perceived to be truth. In a sometimes very disconcerting way, Ucci brought forth the idea that people will indeed cling to false truths to help them survive. This story gave me shivers to the depths of my soul until the last page1 I loved it!

Two minutes ago I finished reading "the Body of Christopher Creed" for the second time. Even without the element of surprise at the ending that I had the first time around, it still made me want to cry and cry. I have yet to discover if it has a technical literary term attached to it, but what moves me more than anything about literature is the way some books have of coming full circle, of building up to a conclusion that you know is coming without being aware of it. From the beginning I wanted to believe that Chris was alive, but like Torey I got caught up in the layers of complexity; the lies, the doubts, the horror of the cave. Maybe it has to do with Tolkien's theory of the "eucatastrophe"; the beauty of the story is that somehow deep inside, we always knew that hope had to endure somehow.
The author's background in journalism serves her very well; this is a textbook example of all the different ways an author can write about a character based solely on indirect sources. I think that it's an incredible accomplishment, especially for a first novel, to create such an epic, yet intimately real character without actually introducing us to him.
I'm torn between analyzing the the reasoning behind the parallel to the story of Jesus and just accepting it as an intelligent and powerful element of the storytelling. To me, this was subtle enough that I didn't really notice it until I had finished my first reading of the book. For now I'm gonna lay off the analysis and say that the parallel is one of my favorite parts of this book simply for the fact that it haunts me, which is the mark of true writing for me.