Uncle Otto's Truck

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 Otto deliberately crushes George beneath the derelict vehicle, 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 a house he built across from the truck itself, and generally begins 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 began to see strange happenings with the truck himself, and he could not accept 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 would dismiss what he has seen as a hallucination, were it not for the derelict sparkplug he took away from the corpse and kept as a reminder.

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.