A Cult of Fat Stanley — Stephen Donald Huff

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. Thus, when eventual bouts of suburban boredom inevitably turn their heads, Fat Stanley will always be his classmates' most fascinating social obsession and their greatest sadistic challenge.This school year, his dedicated torturers have fabricated their most elaborate ruse to date. Epic in its scope and intended effects, Fat Stanley's detractors will relentlessly promote and prosecute their malign project through the course of the fall, and then long into winter. Each progressively humiliating and destructive prank will build to the next, until the entire community ultimately reels from its bloody climax. Fat Stanley will not survive it and, in the aftermath, a guilty few will envy the dead.