Some final thoughts on Stephen King’s The Stand

Warning: Minor spoilers

I’m done with the re-read, and had a few final thoughts on this very big book.

Where does Stephen King stand (ahem) on the big questions? The existence of God? Fate vs. free will? 

We can’t say for certain from reading The Stand in isolation. It is an error to think that an author’s depiction of anything in a work of fiction must be what he/she believes. It is also an error to think that a work conceived in 1978, and updated for an uncut 1988 re-release, is a still-living author’s last word. I have not read much of recent King; I have not read what most consider his magnum opus, The Dark Tower, for example. Any of these works surely may reveal a very different take on these sizable questions.

But, is interesting how much of a moral universe we get in The Stand … and how closely it aligns with that of J.R.R. Tolkien.

We may be able to attribute this to a simple cause. Stephen King was heavily influenced by The Lord of the Rings at the time he wrote The Stand. So much that not just its trappings—dark lords and epic quests and character echoes—but Tolkien’s themes and worldview permeate its pages.

These might be King’s too, or King circa1978.

A few examples.

Stephen King is not a fan of the state. By the end of the book people are leaving even the seemingly idyllic Free State of Boulder because too many cooks leads to conflict, and corruption. As Glen Bateman (perhaps the closest we get to a stand-in for King) says: “Show me a man or a woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call ‘society’. Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.” This is a Howardian theme, too. And Moorcockian… the quest for Tanelorn continues.

King believes in good and evil. There are evil forces at work in the world in tangible, Manichean form, but also in the hearts of the characters. There is objective right and wrong, and there is temptation that makes the struggle difficult and complex.

King believes in free will of some sort. Harold Lauder had chances to turn back. Reading Fran’s diary was a choice, as was his choice to take in Nadine and commit the ultimate act of sabotage. Each time his choices escalated until he hit a point of no return. But, King offers complexity. Making a choice is easier for some. Harold was bullied as a child. He did not have his sister’s social savvy or good looks. His choices were therefore going to be harder, and influenced. Biological determinism and environmental factors play a part, fate plays a part… but ultimately we have a choice (I think this is where The Stand gets its name).

King shows us that evil is a destroyer, not a creator. Randall Flagg is a demonic-like force, the equivalent of Sauron, or if not quite that powerful, some combination of Balrog and Ringwraith. But while the forces of good set about rebuilding, Flagg puts his followers to work reactivating the machinery of war. His true power is in fear and manipulation and preying on people’s weakness, destroying them from within.

Returning to the mistake of equating fictional story with authorial belief, if you read all of this in a vacuum you might conclude that King = conservative Catholic. We know this not to be true. But I think party affiliation is a very crude and incomplete tool for understanding a human being. We share more in common than we think.

Likewise I think The Stand has something for everyone.

If you had a bad experience with King reading the inevitable clunker somewhere in his vast corpus, I will wholeheartedly recommend it. It is perhaps his magnum opus (even considering The Dark Tower and IT). It offers a grand adventure. And even though it is clearly Tolkien inspired, it is a model of how an author can wear his/her Tolkien influence on their sleeve while still creating something new. Set in the modern era, after the fallout of plague virus, a myth for America instead of England, The Stand qualifies. It is no Lord of the Rings, but so what? No other work is either. 

So it begins... a final big push

A few items of note.

Arcane Arts: Dispatches from the Silver Key went out yesterday, covering heavy metal, sword-and-sorcery (including Karl Edward Wagner's Kane, a cool fanzine I'm a part of, and an academic panel on REH I'll be speaking on). 

Remember to sign up if you haven't already. It's a free email and covers stuff I don't cover here. 

It also included something important I want to talk about in a bit more detail: The heavy metal memoir.

The Silver Key went dormant from 2013-2019, not coincidentally the same time I went to work on Flame and Crimson.

The good news is: That's not going to happen with the latest WIP. It's fully written, reviewed by a couple close friends and my wife who all appear in it. I rewrote it until I couldn't look at it anyore.

But on Friday/Saturday it came back from a contracted line editor. And, I have some work to do.

I plan to have it done by July-early August. I need to have it done by then. I’m giving myself a little wiggle room, but not much.  I’m hosting a heavy metal party with a live band in mid-Septemer, at which I’m handing out a few free copies of the book.

It must be done by then. And so the big, difficult, final push is on.

Posting here will be less frequent and less substantive. 

Stephen King on REH

Stephen King had … things to say about Robert E. Howard and sword-and-sorcery.  He mostly liked the former … not so much the latter.

If you own a copy of the Del Reys and their pure Howard texts, you've probably seen this positive, forceful quote placed prominently on display:

“In his best work, Howard's writing seems so highly charged with energy that it nearly gives off sparks.”

This is an excerpt from King's1981 survey of horror and dark fantasy Danse Macabre. In it King references Howard with praise, though has no use for the subgenre he spawned. 

King calls sword-and-sorcery a mediocre branch of fantasy that catered tales of power and wish-fulfillment for the powerless, “stories of strong-thewed barbarians whose extraordinary prowess at fighting is only excelled by their extraordinary prowess at fucking.” Added King, “This sort of fiction, commonly called ‘sword and sorcery’ by its fans, is not fantasy at its lowest, but it still has a pretty tacky feel; mostly it’s the Hardy Boys dressed up in animal skins and rated R.”  King mentions no individual works or authors of sword-and-sorcery in his savage broadside, save Howard, who he also praises as “the only writer who really got away with this stuff. … Howard overcame the limitations of his puerile material by the force and fury of his writing and by his imagination.” 

You can find more King commentary on REH here on the blog of Gary Romeo, who examines a flawed piece from King that appeared in the Jan. 1978 issue of the men’s magazine Oui. Though I must say King’s “mama’s boy” commentary sounds suspiciously like something he would have picked up from a DeCamp intro. Romeo gives us the full Danse Macabre quote from King, which is decidedly more of a mixed opinion of Howard:

 “In his best work, Howard’s writing seems so highly charged with energy that it nearly gives off sparks. Stories such as “The People of the Black Circle” glow with the fierce and eldritch light of his frenzied intensity. At his best, Howard was the Thomas Wolfe of fantasy, and most of his Conan tales seem to almost fall over themselves in their need to get out. Yet his other work was either unremarkable or just abysmal….The word will hurt and anger his legion of fans, but I don’t believe any other word fits.”

All this comes up here because as I continue to work my way through the The Stand I’ve encountered another REH reference. Harold Lauder, a troubled Gollum-like figure who hovered on the edge of “good” and might still have become that way, is jilted by Frances Goldsmith, gives in to his worst adolescent impulses, and ultimately throws his lot in with Vegas and Flagg and the wicked West.

Pre-superflu Lauder was once a reader of adventure fiction … then gave it up for the (imagined) company of girls:

At age sixteen he had given up Burroughs and Stevenson and Robert Howard in favor of other fantasies, fantasies that were both well loved and much hated—not of rockets or pirates but of girls in silk see-through pajamas kneeling before him on satin pillows while Harold the Great lolled naked on his throne, ready to chastise them with small leather whips, with silver-headed canes. They were bitter fantasies through which every pretty girl at Ogunquit High School had strolled one time or another.

Ah Harold, you shouldn’t have read Frannie’s diary…no turning back from that.

King is a king of pop culture references. Howard-heads, are you aware of any other REH references?

Anyway, well past the halfway mark of The Stand.

Arcane Arts #11

Has just published. More thoughts on The Stand, and S&S, and Dokken. If you happen to like these things: https://brian-murphy.kit.com/posts/arcane-arts-dispatches-from-the-silver-key-8 

Please subscribe! Email is probably the only reliable way of keeping in touch with the blog and my writings.

Returning to The Stand, and its comforts

I find Stephen King’s The Stand to be comfort food. I’m not sure what that says about me … but there it is.

A devastating plague accidently leaks from a top-secret U.S. Department of Defense biological weapons laboratory located under the California Mojave Desert. Extremely contagious and extraordinarily deadly, the plague, nicknamed Captain Trips (also Tube Neck and the choking sickness) suffocates its hosts in pleurisy and mucous, eliminating most of the world’s population.

There are survivors but many suffer far worse fates.

Unimaginable horror … but comforting to me, nonetheless. Perhaps because there is something of The Lord of the Rings in it, a novel to which I also return to again and again for familiarity and relief. King has stated on a few occasions that he was attempting with The Stand to write an American Lord of the Rings, and all the broad strokes are there: troupe of heroes banding together, an epic quest of good vs. evil that stretches from coast-to-coast in which Boulder serves as Minas Tirith and Vegas, Mordor. Maine is a sort of Rivendell. 

Randall Flagg, the Walking Dude, an American dark lord.

The second way in which I find The Stand comforting is its nostalgia. It takes me back to a different time and place in my life, enveloping me like a warm blanket. I think I read the original 1978 version sometime in the late 80s, when my King obsession was in full swing. I used to own this version, and was a fan of the depiction of Flagg’s cold and menacing eyes. I’m saddened to learn that at some point I parted ways with it.

When The Stand was re-released in 1991 for the first time complete and uncut, I bought the first edition Signet paperback, which I still own, and read it voraciously. Here it is.

My cherished, first edition paperback.

I graduated high school in ’91 and at the time my buddies and I were all mainlining thrash metal. Anthrax’s “Among the Living” (song and album) was the ultimate complement to this re-released uncut version of The Stand, which several of us read and chatted about. It was a glorious time. The period in which the events of the original novel is set--the late 70s--is the time of my early youth.

It's a vibe man, one I dig.

Like LOTR The Stand is about loss and the Fall. King says in Danse Macabre that he was inspired to write the book after America’s early 1970s backslide—the disgrace and resignation of Richard Nixon, the divisive and fruitless Vietnam War, inflation, and the 1970s energy crisis. “The America I had grown up in seemed to be crumbling beneath my feet,” King said. “It began to seem like an elaborate castle of sand and unfortunately built well below the high tide line.”

The Stand is absolutely fantastic in its depiction of rapid societal collapse. If we had any doubt how quickly our own bindings could come undone the events of 2020 made that clear. We disintegrated pretty damned quick. Rather than rally together the pandemic and its response drove a wedge in this country.

The Stand is entirely reframed post-COVID-19. It no longer feels so fantastic. Though we don’t know (and may never know) its ultimate origins, Covid probably escaped from a Wuhan Lab; perhaps an infected Chinese scientist escaped quarantine and went on the run with his family before the outbreak could be contained. 

Let’s hope we’ve seen the worst and will be better prepared next time. Maybe we should all read The Stand and remember what is at stake.

Postapocalyptic novels offer clarity and simplification. Office politics and tax rates and school budgets are wiped away, replaced by simple survival. With fewer choices, our minds are unburdened. We imagine how we’d do in that situation.

We hope good people would still come together in the end. 

King is in a very small handful of the most recognizable and read authors of our generation, and not without cause. Re-reading The Stand (I’m on page 272 of this 1,141 page monster) I’m reminded why. 

He’s a creative genius.

I haven’t read The Stand in perhaps 20 years and as I revisit it now I'm finding the number of small strokes of imaginative detail staggering. The cold-blooded Elder, an icy-eyed assassin in a hazmat suit who at the last hour will make sure Stu Redman doesn't survive to tell the tale. The wild-eyed Monster Shouter, a mad prophet who roams a barren New York landscape declaring that the monsters are returning. He's right.

King’s second authorial gift is bringing characters to life. The Stand introduces us to an broad and diverse cast, yet King renders each uniquely memorable. At this point in the book I’ve been reacquainted with the deaf-mute Nick Andros, laconic, blue-collar Stu Redman, troubled, budding rock star Larry Underwood, pregnant and free-spirited Frannie Goldsmith, petty crook Lloyd Henreid, and the creepy and nerdily awkward Harold Lauder. Each time it’s like meeting an old friend.

And then there’s Randall Flagg, the Dark Man, a half-man, half-demon, charismatic, mad, and full of evil design. 

King’s third gift is his ability scare the shit out of you. You don’t forget Underwood’s crawl for freedom through the Lincoln Tunnel in a terrifying, pitch-black sequence. Or the cool hand that slides out and around Stu’s ankle in the dark stairwell in his final escape from a Vermont CDC lab. Come down and eat chicken with me, beautiful…

Imagination, characterization, fear… The Stand combines all this with an epic storyline and so is one of King’s best. I’m not sure if it’s his best book—take your pick of IT, The Shining, Pet Sematary, 11/22/63, Salem’s Lot, Misery, a few others—but The Stand is in that conversation.

The Stand has been adapted for television twice, as recently as 2021, which I haven't seen, and apparently is not very good.

I watched the 1994 miniseries at college when it debuted and enjoyed it for the most part, though it still fell far short of the high bar set by the book. The opening sequence remains effective; I can no longer hear Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” without thinking of dead scientists in lab coats slumped over lunch tables.

I’m sure I’ll share a few more thoughts as I finish, but it’s a long way to Vegas. Better get on my walking boots.

Don't Break My Heart Again, Whitesnake

This is a great fucking song. 

Let's get that out of the way first. If you only know Whitesnake from "Still of the Night" or "Here I Go Again," here's one to broaden your horizons. It's a deep-ish cut, very early 80s, with a bit of 70s keyboard hangover clinging on. 

Which is great.

I am tired of conversations about genre. I shouldn't be I suppose, considering I wrote a book about one ... but I am. I just can't wade into anymore conversations about what is or isn't sword-and-sorcery.

This song is something of the reason why.

Is Whitesnake heavy metal? I mean, maybe? Maybe not?

It doesn't matter. 

What matters is, is the song good. Does it rock? Does it get your head nodding? 

Answer--yes. David Coverdale is killing it.

What matters about a story is, is the story good? Does it move you and keep the pages turning? Get that down first, let geeks like me sort out where it falls. 

Genre is a vague signpost. If someone is a Bon Jovi fan or a Scorpions fan, Whitesnake is pretty dialed in to that. Very safe referral. 

But even for Maiden and Priest fans like me, this is awesome. Which means, don't write to genre spec. Because you never know what genre fans will fall in love with. Throw in some science. Take out the bruising barbarian. Be an artist, not a paint-by-numbers follower.

Happy Metal and Hard Rock Friday.

Latest issue of Arcane Arts is out

Issue no. 10 of Arcane Arts hit inboxes this AM. I've been nailing this every week, like clockwork on Wednesday morning, though as noted in this week's issue next week might end my streak (I have to travel to Chicago on business).

This week we covered:

• The holy grail
• Robert Plant
• My new author page on Facebook
• L. Sprague de Camp controversy
• Poul Anderson's The Last Viking

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