Tracing The Trails Of The King : The Stand
FAIR WARNING – if you have not read this book, there will likely be spoilers contained within this essay. This is the fourth essay in my ongoing series on Stephen King, and is intended to be a free discussion of the book. I cannot be held responsible if I inadvertently ruin the ending for you, so if you think this might apply to you, I would encourage you to turn back now.
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“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.”
-Stephen King, The Stand
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There come moments in the career of an artist, a writer, a band, a director, where they put out a project that completely blows everything out of the water 
that came before it. Even for artists who had previously put out a solid library of material, there comes that one amazing piece of work that manages to put all of that to shame and serves forever from that point forward as a benchmark for all future work.
I’m willing to bet that you can guess what book I’m referring to right now.
It’s a masterpiece. It’s his fifth symphony. It’s his Abbey Road, his Hamlet. I can’t say enough about how much I have enjoyed this book, every time I have read it, and how much I learned about the process of layering a story and developing characters. There’s so much I could say about the book, that this essay really is going to brush the surface but I’ll do my best to be somewhat structured and organized.
I read this at a fairly young age. I don’t remember precisely, but I want to say that it was either late Junior High or early High School. King had just released the newly unabridged version of the story, expanding an already long book by several hundred pages. So I suppose, in a way, I’m reading this out of order as it is not the version that was originally published. This will not be the only time I will deal with this issue, and as you will find when you get to my essay on The Gunslinger, I did the exact opposite in that case, so I know I’m not being consistent. Regardless, I’m choosing to read this version now, because it is the only one I have ever read. I didn’t read the original release and as King suggests in the forward to the book, this is always the story that he had intended to tell. Now I think he did cheat a little bit in that the book is clearly updated to be taking place in the year it was released. He also places a reference to Tommyknockers, which hadn’t been written at the time The Stand was originally published. Still, I feel like I am being true to the spirit of his intent at the time.
Post apocalyptic fiction has become extremely popular, often linked with the zombie genre as well. Personally, I think that if anyone has any interest in writing this type of story, this book should be your first natural starting point. If you want to know how to tell a story about the end of the world, this book is a master class on the genre. Say what you will about King, this book is genius. Simple as that. It isn’t my absolute favorite King book, it’s not the one book I could choose to take with me if I was going to be stranded on a desert island, but if I was going to be able to pick two books to take with me, this would probably be the second.
The book can be broken up into two main parts. You start with the world as it is, just before and then during the collapse. Following this, you have the world, or whatever is left of it, in the aftermath.
I have always preferred the first half of the book. The scenario that he lays out, describing the slow burn before everything falls apart is chilling to behold and I challenge anyone to put in a good, long marathon, reading this while they have a really bad cold. The beginning of the end is quiet and simple. Maybe a dropped test tube. Possibly a rip in someone’s containment suit. Whatever the cause, an outbreak takes place at a secret government lab who evidently is developing a weaponized version of a deadly virus. A guard at the facility spots what is happening, and manages to escape with his wife and child, moments before the facility is shut down.
Like so many other times, the fate of so many is decided in the span of a moment that literally takes seconds. A random string of improbabilities can create some of the most terrifying of scenarios to unfold. The guard gets free and along with him, is a silent hitchhiker who will spell death for almost every man, woman and child in the country, possibly the world.
Of course, no one actually knows this yet.
One of King’s strongest areas is in the creation of characters who are three dimensional. These feel like real people on the page and somehow, universally likable. This is difficult enough as it is but in this book, King increases the stakes and difficulty even more by creating a cast of characters, disparate people who are eventually drawn together under in spirit of common purpose and morality. Somehow, he manages to keep all of this in the air and present any number of different actors to the play that are all captivating and interesting in their own ways. Often in books, I find that if I latch onto a particular character, I tend to skim over parts of the book where that person might be absent, but in this case, pretty much every character is someone who I want to follow and pay attention to.
The protagonists of the book all have their own story arcs that unfold but one thing that seems to draw them all together is their dreams. They all dream of an old woman who tells them that they need to come and find her and en masse, from separate parts of the country, they all begin making their way towards her home in Nebraska. Through the chaos of a society falling to pieces, these people turn to their faith in this woman whom they have never met, and before long they are together, living as a community under the guidance of Mother Abigail, the spiritual leader of the group that ultimately ends up settling down in Boulder, Colorado.
Appearing for the first time in The Stand is one of King’s most enduring and popular and villains, Randall Flagg, the walking dude. It isn’t clear if he isresponsible for the outbreak of disease or if he is merely using events to his advantage, but he serves as a dark presence in the story, a force that exists among the death and destruction, a counterpoint to the hope embodied in Mother Abigail. Anyone who is a fan of the Dark Tower series knows Randall Flagg quite well, and this book serves as an effective introduction to the character. He stands as the magnetic center that draws the worst out of people and the people who exhibit the worst kind of tendencies. They are drawn to Flagg in the same, inexorable way as the other characters of the book are drawn to Mother Abigail.
This is the basic setup of the book, the ultimate faceoff of good against evil or at least, the good and evil that people perceive in each other. I think that The Stand offers in interesting look at how people can be controlled by information or, a lack of information and how their fears can influence everything. The people of Boulder often live under the fear of Flagg as the ultimate bogeyman with the people under him as the worst, bloodthirsty type. Later in the book, when we get to meet some of the people under Flagg’s control, we find out that a lot of them are just normal people as well, who have simply found themselves under the leadership of the wrong person. They seem to be just as afraid of the intentions of the people in Boulder as the other way around, mostly driven by lies told to them by Flagg, himself.
One of the biggest tragedies of the story falls largely to who you trust and who you put your faith in. I suppose that it speaks somewhat to the notion of religious fanaticism and whether or not that level of devotion is justified or dangerous. Nadine Cross certainly deifies Flagg to a remarkable extent, convincing herself that she will achieve glory as his wife-to-be. She sees herself as his property to direct as he sees fit, and despite the awful things she ends up doing, by the end of the book, it’s hard to not feel sympathy for her as she is reduced down to an empty shell, ruined by the one person who she thought was going to be her savior. Characters survive and become parts of each others lives and many of them still end up dying, the ruthless nature of the universe of the book expertly laid out without apology. One of my favorite chapters (unique to the expanded edition) is devoted to tiny little vignettes, showing people who managed to survive the plague but still end up dying from some random turn of chance. It was such a brilliant way of showing how tenuous things have become in the lives of these characters.
This book is a journey. It isn’t just a simple story, told and wrapped up within a few hundred pages. It’s an emotional roller coaster and one that I have taken many times over. It’s fascinating to watch a society completely fall apart, break down to its bare, base elements and then to watch a new society build from that rubble. Those elements begin to coexist and meld, reforming civilization in a slightly more enlightened mindset but also making some of the same mistakes. The Stand is a brilliantly plotted novel but really it’s about the characters and marking their experiences of having everything they care about disintegrate around them and trying to go on with life, in the absence of everything they once had used to define themselves.
This is a monster of a book. If you haven’t read it, you should read it. If you have read it, you should read it again.
My name is Chad Clark, and I am proud to be a Constant Reader.
