Uncle Otto's Truck

"Uncle Otto's Truck"
Short story by Stephen King
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Horror short story
Publication
Published in	Yankee (1st release), Skeleton Crew
Publication type	Magazine
Media type	Print (Periodical, Paperback)
Publication date	1983

Uncle Otto's Truck is a short horror story by Stephen King, first published in Yankee in 1983, and collected in King's 1985 collection Skeleton Crew.

Plot summary

The story concerns a wrecked and abandoned truck owned by Otto Schenck and George McCutcheon, wealthy Castle Rock businessmen in the post-depression era. After George is deliberately crushed beneath his derelict vehicle by Otto, the murderer becomes fixated on the truck, insisting it is not only moving of its own accord, but coming to kill him. At the same time he also becomes a social recluse, living in the house he once built across from the truck itself, and generally does begin to lose his sanity. His nephew, who tells the story, finally finds him dead - the corpse has been drowned with oil and there is a spark plug rammed down his throat.

The nephew goes on to describe how, on the day he found his uncle dead, he had begun to see strange happenings with the truck himself, and he could only dismiss his uncle's death as suicide as there was no jug near the body with which Otto could have fed himself the oil. The nephew's encounter would only be dismissed by himself as an hallucination, were it not for the derelict sparkplug he had taken away from the corpse and kept, as a reminder that what had happened was real.

Adaptations

"Uncle Otto's Truck" has been adapted by artist Glenn Chadbourne for the book The Secretary of Dreams, a collection of comics based on King's short fiction released by Cemetery Dance in December 2006.