There are two basic reactions to the coronavirus crisis that’s swept the world; look full into the horror, or escape any way you can. Some people have chosen to dive head first into one approach or the other, and some people have had no choice but to confront the horror and keep confronting it. I’ve spent my time on furlough swinging between the two extremes depending on my mood when I wake up. I’ll either spend twelve hours playing World of Warcraft or twelve hours refreshing the news. I’ve never been good at finding balance. I do generally find it more comforting to learn as much as I can and think through things that are going on in the world, and on that note, I decided to pick Stephen King’s The Stand back up. I’ve always had an interest in SF and post-apocalyptic literature but I’d bounced off The Stand a couple of times before; I think partly because of the intimidating length and because it does take about two hundred pages setting up its large cast of characters. Nothing wrong with that, but I wasn’t jiving with it. Now seemed like a good time to give it another go, with the theme more relevant than ever and me with more time on my hands than I will ever have again.
I’ve mentioned staring right at the horror. I found reading The Stand comforting because it was an apocalyptic worst case scenario. Like, only an alien invasion could make what happens in The Stand worse. What’s going on in the world today is awful and it isn’t over by any means, with what I am sure will be many unforeseen consequences to boot, but so far, it’s not as bad as all that. Things could be worse.
I read the complete edition published in 1990 that included material cut from the original novel, shifted the timeframe, and updated some references to match. It also included some excellent illustrations by Bernie Wrightson that you can see here. Clocking in at 1422 pages, this was the longest novel I have ever read by quite a ways. It did not feel like a novel that was that long. King’s style is like a really awful looking milkshake that you can barely look at but when you do give it a go, it has a great taste and a smooth texture. And it’s supposed to look that way, anyway. I’ve read novels that are ten times shorter that felt ten times longer. It is a testament to King’s style that a man who regularly writes thousand page novels makes as much money as he does, and once I got invested in to a couple of the characters, the book read itself.
It is a great cast of characters that gets set up to ask all the right questions. Stu’s your everyman and is at the centre of a lot of the plot. Larry is your person who might have every reason to want to go back to the old world. Harold hated the old world and gets a chance to be born again. Frannie is anything good that might happen and our hope for the future. Glenn is King’s mouthpiece and he does a very good job of making pages of exposition on social theories palatable. They all have their own ideas about what the future should look like and a lot of the fun of the novel is watching them bounce off each other. Even in a world in which 99.99% of the population has died, a little cooperation goes a long way. Or at least, that’s what one of the poles of this novel would have you think. At its core, The Stand is a tale of good vs evil told in a very straightforward way. Mother Abigail and her followers are good and Randall Flagg and his followers are evil.
That isn’t the only dichotomy though. Abigail’s followers squabble, form committees, and hold votes. They ratify the constitution. In short, they start going down a well-trodden path that gets them nowhere quickly. Flagg wastes no time. He bends others to his will, he gathers weapons, and he plots. The constitution isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. King leans right but does a good job of writing a novel about politics that doesn’t get screechy and presents both sides as having good reasons for doing what they’re doing. And as the ending points out, this has all happened before, and will all happen again. I was not expecting King to be Nietzschean as all that, and those last few pages that detail Flagg’s washing up on an island and corrupting the natives do a lot of heavy lifting in stopping The Stand from being a straightforward story about the people of God triumphing.
The Stand is one of those novels that, I know I say this a lot, makes me wish I had a better understanding of the Bible. Even apart from Abigail’s quoting of chapter and verse there are plenty of references, and there’s a lot of visions and wandering in the desert. King isn’t the first guy to do fantasy story as religious allegory and he won’t be the last, but he wins points in my book for having God nuke Las Vegas, for He does work in mysterious ways. It is almost a story of faith playing out large. Believing in God is a challenge for the people in this novel. He asks for things that make no sense and he talks through people you wouldn’t normally pay much attention to. He never tells you why. Flagg is very straightforward, tells you exactly what he wants, and exactly what he aims to do about the other side while Abigail’s people sit there over the Rockies wondering whether Flagg even exists, and if he does, whether he’s gonna bomb them and end it all now.
I loved the setting. A lot of The Stand is a travel narrative and King’s descriptions of an emptied out USA are very pretty and very sad, and I have always liked the USA as a setting for post-apocalyptic story. The Stand reminds me at times of my favourite post-apocalyptic stories, namely the ones in the Fallout universe. The worlds might end differently but some of the same things happen. I am sure the writers of Fallout must have read The Stand along with watching Mad Max. Fallout: New Vegas seemed to line up particularly, seeing as a lot of the story takes place in Vegas and its surrounding deserts, and one of the main conflicts of the novel is between a burgeoning social-democratic state clinging to a constitution, and an authoritarian one run by older, more brutal rules, a conflict that reminds me of the NCR and the Legion.
(Videogames are art just like comic books, sorry. And New Vegas is my favourite game by a long, long way.)
This review is getting almost as long as the novel. A couple more points. Harold scared me. I don’t know what it is that makes King so good at writing sad, lonely men with bad ideas, but Harold is his masterpiece in that respect and is by far the most prescient aspect of this novel; way more prescient that the viral outbreak. Harold is your Trumpist incel forty odd years before those words would make any sense and King works wonders humanising him without excusing any of his actions, a feat of high-wire daring that makes me really look forward to reading Rage. Harold is way scarier than Flagg. Scarier and sadder. You probably know a man like Harold, for a start. The passage where Harold realises that he could be a real asset to the burgeoning community in Boulder, and resolves to try burn it down anyway, breaks my heart.
This is a bit of a tangent, but I don’t want to not mention it because it amused the hell out of me as I read it. King, like any writer, has his little ideas, themes, and motifs that pop up constantly throughout his work. His, preoccupations, as you might say. King spends a lot of The Stand writing about semen. It comes up an awful lot and in many different contexts. Partly this is him examining sexuality during this crisis, and that’s an interesting angle to examine, but the way he uses semen as pathetic fallacy (fnar fnar) is incredible. Harold has a bad mental health day and consequently his semen is thin and bitter. Flagg, by contrast, has semen like molten lead. It’s… really odd. I guess if you wanna dive in to the symbolism of the novel, then there should probably be liberal seminal fluid present during the conception of a new world, but yeah. Make of it what you will.
I recommend The Stand thoroughly to anyone who likes post-apocalyptic fiction, or fantasy/SF in general. King fans have probably already read it but should give it a go if they haven’t because it is him letting a lot of his main concerns as a writer get written as large as they’ll go. King’s supremely easy style means that this 1422 page novel doesn’t feel like one, and for that he should be applauded if nothing else. It is also prescient in more ways than you might expect, and King’s portrayal of the better parts of humanity and the sacrifices they might make for the good of all meant that this was a much more comforting read than I was expecting at the moment.
James Farson 
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