The Bone Church

"The Bone Church" is a narrative poem by Stephen King, first published in the November 2009 issue of Playboy, where it was illustrated by Phil Hale. It has since been collected and re-introduced in the November 3, 2015 anthology The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. In that introduction, King reveals that the poem is a revision of one he remembers writing in the late 1960s, which was performed by a friend at a University of Maine gathering.

The poem's narrative is told in the first-person vernacular of a bar patron, who, in exchange for memories, demands drinks of his unidentified listener. He describes a doomed expedition through the jungles of an unnamed land, at the end of which only a few of the once-large party have survived. Awaiting the survivors is a dark, mystical experience.