The Paper Boy is the nostalgia for the best and worst of our childhood. It is relentlessly traveling to Devil’s Tower in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounter of the Third Kind. It is an ominous carnival in Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. It is a ghoulish clown named Pennywise in Stephen King’s It.

1996: Daniel is a mostly normal middle schooler, except he is obsessed with comic books and movies and secretly still plays with toys. Not cool in his world. A boy on the verge of a manhood he wants nothing to do with, every day he crosses the railroad tracks and delivers the newspaper. One day after an assault of verbal and actual stones from the trailer park bullies, Daniel abandons his newspaperly duties and flees into the forest. There a storm imposes it’s will upon him just as he comes upon a most horrific scene. Hanging from a tree is the corpse of a small boy. That night, water-logged and mud covered, Daniel can’t sleep. The corpse boy is sitting atop his Nintendo toy chest.