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September 3 - October 15, 2025
I’ve often said that Stephen King was the narrative voice of my youth, that when I think back on my childhood, the tone of those memories is colored by his storytelling style. That’s certainly true, and so many of his stories and novels have stayed with me all my life, and are part of my personal story. But The Stand is my desert island book. Readers don’t simply turn the pages—we inhabit the story, and I knew if I felt that way, a lot of other writers must as well.
The Bridges of Madison County.
Bad things were good and unifying, like the way his mom used to talk about the day JFK was shot, how everyone would never forget where they were when they found out, how JFK’s death made you feel like the world was a terrible place, but a soft one, too, with strangers hugging.
She tilted her head. “Are you married?” He wanted to have things in common with Mrs. Blanchard. He wished he, too, had bruises, a spouse, a baby. “No, ma’am.” She pulled back, just enough where he knew that he got that stink on, that loneliness. He was doing it again, building bridges to places that didn’t exist, wanting it all too much, too openly.
Listen good, he’d say. You can’t trust anyone whose hot parts are on the inside hiding. That’s why you treat them like they’re just as good as us. And then he’d adjust his tie and sidle up to that pulpit and preach like everything he said in private was a lie. Abel never knew which one was real.
Abel didn’t like this feeling, the sense that Kip had his upsides. Smart and protective. But then look at her arms. Look at the ring on her finger, the little nipper on her lap. Abel didn’t know that he had that in him, the violence, and sometimes it felt like women only wanted men who did, like they couldn’t help it.
‘He who dies with the most toys wins.’ Well, keeping score with toys ain’t fun anymore. Makes her angry.” She pursed her lips. “The world burned, but she didn’t light the match, and that makes her angry, too. She don’t create—she inflicts. That’s what she wants.” Dani stilled. “Sounds like you know who she is.” “I’m a juvenile court clerk. She made multiple appearances.” Dani urged Mollie to go find comic books and paperbacks. She edged closer to Eleanor. “Theft? Prostitution?” “She’s a rich girl, not a street kid. She pulled the claws out of a kitten with pliers. Threw muriatic acid on a girl
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when he slept at night, the real nightmares came, repeatedly taunting him with unnerving visions of a dark man, a strange, evil sorcerer of some type with an all-seeing red eye. The feeling of foreboding the visions elicited was only marginally counterbalanced by the foggier dreams of the old woman in Nebraska.
They weren’t just losing people. They were losing all the things that had enriched everyone’s lives and made existence less tedious. There’d never be any new books, movies, video games, or metal albums. All of which were things some might view as trivial compared to the massive loss of life, but Corey didn’t think they were trivial at all. Even if he never contracted the superflu, the world would be a gray, dismal place. Would it even be worth surviving in a place like that?
Corey’s moment of self-annihilation was perhaps just one more second away when he felt the dog’s tongue lap against the back of his hand, conveying an insistent urgency tinged with desperation. When he opened his eyes, the dog lifted a paw and placed it lightly against his arm. Corey eased the gun out of his mouth and stared at the ugly lump of metal. He looked at the dog again and said, “You know what, buddy? Fuck this. Fuck all of it, actually. The fucked-up mind games. The dreams. Even the guilt. Every goddamn bit of it.” Corey got to his feet and so did the dog, the animal turning in
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All your life and accomplishments of no more importance than shit flushed down a toilet. Slight variations on a theme. But in the end, all the same. Life didn’t give awards or medals in the end. It was just the end.
Nothing reveals the uselessness of words quite like the presence of Death, riding its black horse silently down your street with its scythe at the ready.
Sandra cried and prayed and held her mother’s rosary against her daughter’s bloated face, but God was tending to the apocalypse and her prayers went unanswered.
When pain and grief pile on top of more pain and grief, sometimes the only coping mechanism left is to welcome a deep sense of numbness and concentrate on breathing, on surviving one more minute even if we’re not sure why we want to stay alive.
Roosevelt was a certified ghost town long before Captain Trips paid it a visit. It was one of the places you would expect to see Trips last, if at all. Just shy of one hundred people lived on the swaths of land that flanked both sides of Interstate 10 on the long, flat stretch of road smack in the middle of an eight-hour drive from San Antonio to El Paso. What had started as a mining community had faltered, contracted, and become more of a glorified truck stop than a town. It was home to two sorts of people—those that owned or worked the handful of vast ranches, and those that served the
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Toquerville
There was a lot that could be said about Alan and Derek, and even as small as the town had been, a lot had been.
“I know I didn’t say I was comin down, I know you didn’t know I was here in town, But bay-yay-yaby you can tell me if anyone can…” The song was called “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” by some guy named Larry Underwood, and in the days before the radio stations went dark, it was all the rage and climbing the charts. It wasn’t exactly the Beatles or the Stones, but it did have a catchy hook. For some reason, Tommy hadn’t been able to get it out of his head. He began to sing louder. “Baby, can you dig your man? He’s a righteous man, Tell me baby, can you dig your man?”
Ee Eee and Tak Tak Tak
“I thought they loved their pets,” I say. “These days everyone kills what they love,” she says. “To prove they’re not afraid.”
They forgot that we are not dogs. We are Lycaon pictus and we were eating the VISITORS thousands of years ago, long before they learned to put us in cages. The sickness does not get us because we are not dog or human, and we will live a long time, while their lungs turn to liquid and their eyes lose their light.
Project Arrowhead
the mist, thinnies, todash space
“It’s more than the old woman… People dreamt about someone else, too. A man. Those dreams weren’t so pleasant.” He drew a strand of her hair through his fingers dreamily. He’d told her that he loved her hair because it was so silky. “They call him the Walkin Dude. It was like he was calling people to mayhem. To chaos.”
Things in your life can change so fast, the night taking away all you love, replacing their voices with hacking coughs, their kisses with thick green mucus, and their hugs with bloated bodies.
Carlo’s eyes were wide as he held up his United States history book. I always thought it was funny we had to read so much about U.S. history and so little about Puerto Rican history. It’s like we were supposed to learn about and love someplace most of us would never visit, but completely ignore where we lived.
Joshua was just like his mother and that meant they couldn’t set horses for nothing.
Sometimes hope was just a life raft in the middle of a hurricane, but it was better than drowning.
“He’s a liar. The hoary cripple with the malicious eye,”
"My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye" Robert Browning, Childers Roland to the Dark Tower came
the driver: a crow-headed thing with pale blue eyes and tattooed arms. The car’s interior was too dark see anything, though. It was like staring into a well.
Tah'heen
low men in yellow coats
hearts in Atlantis
They got going again, crossed Interstate 10 at Tonopah,
Zwazo pose sou tout branch,
Marie reached into her wagon to grab the weapon she had chosen for this mission: Granpè Jean’s machete, which he’d kept sharp in the hurricane supply closet. Granpè Jean had warned her that people would swarm over the weak and timid like locusts, given half an excuse.
Agree-mumbling even when he didn’t want to agree was his default setting.
One tale featured a two-year-old Art somehow scaling more than halfway up the length of a curtain. Another detailed Art’s brief phase of barging into the bathroom when either one of his parents were using the toilet, and he would point and laugh-shout, “Pew!” while doing a special bathroom dance. Art wished he could remember those stories from the point of view of toddler-Art, but he only remembered what his parents had told him. When his parents died, would those foundational stories of who Art once was die, too?
“Salam’o-Laikum, bhai-jaan,”
peace be unto you dear brother
We stop, the world doesn’t stop,
To the place that continues to steal into my dreams.”
He reached over and pressed the girl’s hand. They smiled at each other, and again there was that feeling. That depth, that veil—as if she said less than she knew. As if the world itself was a mirage only her green gaze could pierce.
The veils of Maya
Mayaparisatya
smokeless fire
Djinn are made of smokeless fire according to the Quran and older Arabic text
Surah ar-Rahman’s 15th verse (55:15):
"And He created the jinn from a smokeless flame of fire." mārijin [مَّارِجٍۢ]
“Iffen you’re fighting to be free every time you walk out the door, you ain’t promised to return,” Abagail said.
Lex talionis. The law of retribution. Justice.”
Hamarabi
“God answered my prayers.” “Our rifles helped.
“Remember well,” Hattie said. “They don’t want us to learn history so that we won’t recognize when the Devil tries to play the same ol’ tricks.”
“When I liberate myself, I liberate you.”
“I ain’t never been one to cry for too long. And I’m all out o’ tears.” The best way to escape despair is to get back to the work.
“It was my first novel,” he said. “I woke up from a nap one afternoon with the sentences burning in my brain. I went to my typewriter and it was like the words were burning through my fingertips, too. I wrote furiously over a few months’ time. It felt like I was channeling some divine intercept, a language from another world.” “From God?”
Maturing, Said King, The dark tower Song of Susanah
“What happens when you make a story?” Roland inquired. “My story, for instance?” “It just comes,” King said. His voice had grown faint. Bemused. “It blows into me—that’s the good part—and then it comes out when I move my fingers. Never from the head. Comes out the navel, or somewhere. There was an editor . . . I think it was Maxwell Perkins . . . who called Thomas Wolfe—” Eddie knew what Roland was doing and knew it was probably a bad idea to interrupt, but he couldn’t help it. “A rose,” he said. “A rose, a stone, an unfound door.” -Song of Susannah
“It’s the tool by which your supposed savior was brutally murdered. That’s like having a loved one beaten to death with a hammer, only to kneel and pray to the hammer.” The look on Zarah’s face told him he had once again gone too far.
“It was frightening,” he confessed. “The book was published about two weeks after Captain Trips escaped that Department of Defense facility in the desert. I started seeing it in bookstore windows just as the news began to report cases of the superflu. I watched at first as polite society began to grind to a halt, and then watched further as things collapsed all around me. The death rate in my novel—from my visions—was a staggering ninety-nine-point-four, which was the exact number both the CDC and the WHO claimed as the death rate for Captain Trips. I was living in New York at the time, and
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he wrote "The Stand" in The Stand lol
She lit a kerosene lantern and led Cree out into the back field. It was fully dark now, the three-quarter moon partially hidden behind a strand of gossamer clouds. He paused in mid-stride to glance up at the sky, and in a monotone voice, said, “M-O-O-N.” Then he smiled sadly at Zarah. “One of the characters in my novel spells everything as—” “Yes, I’ve read the book.”
M-O-O-N, that spells Meta
but sometimes in the darkest hours, it was comforting to cling to seemingly silly things.
When survivors began seeking him out and asking him to visit their villages, he’d felt like Christ among the Nephites.
someones mormon. is this Brando Sando?
