Thread by @HunterFelt

Okay, it's official. I will be livetweeting my re-read of "The Stand" here off and on here. Feel free to mute this thread. #TheStand

We are going to meet an insane amount of people here and pretty much every single one of them gets a backstory, whether it's relevant or not and it's usually not. Here we have Campion, our Patient Zero, taking the superflu out into the world #TheStand

One of the best gags in the book is here at the beginning. When Campion's car crashes into the gas station the Arnett residents remark about how they got lucky and managed to shut off the gas pumps before the crash, because otherwise they'd all be dead.

Not so fast, my friend

This is Stephen King at his most Garth Marenghi:
"but the smell that was issuing from the car, a sick stench compounded of blood, fecal matter, vomit, and human decay. It was a ghastly rich sick-dead smell."

My version of The Stand had the Bernie Wrightson illustrations which were really quite horrific.

And we get our first appearance of "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" by Larry Underwood. Even though the reader can't hear it, they know just by the lyrics that it's really not good.

I don't think we ever got a full version of this song, but "The Stand" miniseries took a stab at it.

And at least one music act took a stab at making it a real song... for what that's worth.

The main character of the first part of The Stand is a virus and King takes an almost sadistic pleasure in describing how it passes from person to person, giving us entire backstories of characters whose only purpose in the novel is to get sick and die.

The human brain cannot comprehend massive death tolls, they just become numbers, what King does is give faces and backstories to all of these random people so you get a sense of all these lives being cut down at once.

When last I read "The Stand" I was a little incredulous at the idea of the government's main priority not being the outbreak but trying to cover up how serious it was. But, well... (gestures towards Washington)

This passage narrated in the POV of one of the disease's first victims is one of the most horrifying things he's ever written because, in reality, this is a way many of us will die: not quite understanding what's going on, in a hospital, connected to all sorts of tubes.

This is actually the reason that the first section of "The Stand" holds up where most of King's stuff hasn't: demonic clowns, sentient cars, ghosts, monsters... those are spooky, but this real world shit here, as we are finding out now.

I'd complain about one of the survivors of the superflu being one of six people to witness the plague's inciting event but since the whole point of the book is that everything has been preordained by God himself, there are no coincidences in this novel.

Pretty much every major character's backstory here is already littered with tragic early deaths, which might be a purposeful move on King's part: the survivors are the ones who have known terrible loss before.

And another shoutout to the Stand miniseries for casting the late Max Wright, of ALF fame, as Dr. Denniger. He's exactly the kind of a laconic bureaucrat that King describes here.

This scene I'm reading now, where the father is complaining about this sudden cold interrupting his Disney World vacation plans having no clue about the magnitude of what was going on? That's right about where we are today, more or less.

There's a scene later on where the radio talk show host opens his show by saying "I guess there's only one thing to call about, isn't there?" Well, that's also where we are at now.

Okay. I totally forgot this part where Frannie's dad slaps his wife and Stephen King frames him as the good guy: "I
don't hold with hitting women. I still don't. But when a person-man or woman turns into a dog and begins to bite, someone has to shy it of." This is... not great.

More Stand-related music. Anthrax's "Among The Living." I might start compiling a playlist as we make our way through "The Stand."

The thing that strikes me on this re-read is just the sheer logistics of stopping the spread of the virus: "On this one the responsibility spreads in so many directions that it's invisible. It was an accident. It could have happened in any number of other ways."

Oh and I think we have the first "man with no face" reference of the novel. Our villain is starting to make himself known.

I'll be referencing the TV miniseries a lot but I want to be very clear that they absolutely nail the opening.

Deitz's audio-diary, one of my favorite parts of the Stand as it gives us a sense of what we're dealing with. It's a bit odd reading about the fictional virus and reading about the real-world one and trying not to mix the two up.

Okay, Stu Redman's just 30 years old. Seemed super-adult to me then. Sounds young to me now. Disease definitely makes you separate people into age-groups.

Okay, here's the thing about "The Stand" there's a lot of shooting here and pretty much all of it is unnecessary: Pokey and Lloyd go spree-killing for no real reason, the US government implements a "just shoot everybody" plan to keep their secrets.

There's definitely a very 1980's vibe here, like the government is going all Rambo, with bullets flying everywhere. Meanwhile, the thing that's killing everybody is just a cold. All of that ammo, guns, nuclear weapons? Utterly useless.

The development of Nick Andros from homeless mute drifter to maybe the most savvy of the Boulder survivor leadership is maybe the best character arc in the novel (worst: Nadine Cross WHO MAKES NO SENSE AS A CHARACTER)

Re-reading a book just describing characters dying of the flu for like 200 or so pages sounded like more of a lark a week or so ago. Now it's just kinda grim as hell.

"What kind of goddam hospital was that, where you got a fucking recorded announcement when your mother was dying? What was going on there?" This part seemed like an outrageous exaggeration back in the day, but we're probably headed right here if Italy's any indication.

""Flu made who," Fran said bleakly."

WE GET IT STEPHEN, YOU HIRED AC/DC FOR A MOVIE SOUNDTRACK.

Something that's easy to miss on first read: Starkey deliberately unleashes the superflu in various foreign countries just to speed things up. Like "if we're going down, they are too." King once said that the moral of "The Stand" is the U.S. government wants everybody dead.

"The beast is on its way," Starkey said, turning around. He was weeping and grinning. "It's on its way, and it's a good deal rougher than that fellow Yeets ever could have imagined. Things are falling apart. The job is to hold as much as we can for as long as we can."

Unlike in "The Stand," the U.S. isn't responsible for this particular beast but god-damn if they haven't done their best to ensure that it's going to fuck over as many as possible as it stampedes its way across this country.

And even Starkey, the biggest human villain in the entire book (and honestly worse than Flagg, who is ultimately a putz) gets a grace note, freeing Frank D. Bruce from the hideous purgatory of spending eternity with his face in a bowl of soup.

And as soon as Starkey dies we see Flagg for the first time. King's go-to boogeyman and his introduction might be the most beautiful prose in all of the King I've read.

"Randall Flagg, the dark man, strode south on US 51, listening to the nightsounds that pressed close on both sides of this narrow road that would take him sooner or later out of Idaho and into Nevada. From Nevada he might go anywhere..."

"From New Orleans to Nogales, from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine, it was his country, and none knew or loved it better. He knew where the roads went, and he walked them at night..."

"Now, an hour before dawn, he was somewhere between Grasmere and Riddle, west of Twin Falls, still north of the
Duck Valley Reservation that spreads across two states.

And wasn't it *fine?*"

"And in Mountain City there was a man named Christopher Bradenton who would see that he had a clean car and some clean papers and then the country would *come alive* in all its glorious possibilities..".

".....It was almost time to be reborn. He knew.

WHY ELSE COULD HE SUDDENLY DO MAGIC?"

The trick about "The Stand" is that there's something gloriously exciting in seeing American society crumble, and that's why Flagg is introduced in almost heroic terms, he's all possibility. This is King at is most lyrical, capital-R Romantic, an ode to destruction and decay

King describes writing the first part of The Stand as intoxicating. A sick part of him *enjoyed* killing everybody off, it's why this section contains his best writing (and why the part where they rebuild society becomes soul-crushingly boring at times)

I keep this in mind as our current pandemic spreads across the country, there's a part of me that has a grotesque fascination of just how bad it's going to get. In some respects that dark side of me is what Flagg appeals to, the part of us that can blot out human suffering.

A rare podcast appearance from King specifically about the 1990s Stand miniseries, but he breaks down the original novel as well. deadentertainment.com/2019/05/08/the…

Lloyd's lawyer is one of my favorite one-scene wonders here. I also love the irony that Lloyd is looking at a potential death sentence and he ends up being the only one in his general vicinity who ends up living.

"Poor Nick. Poor me. Poor everybody." And the deaths are starting to pile up in the world of "The Stand." And the real world too, as it turns out.

The reality is settling in that pretty much all of us are going to know somebody who doesn't survive this thing.

I am worried about my parents now. And my older roommate who was telling me earlier this week that she had gone through respiratory issues and illnesses. And I'm worried about what will happen if I need a ventilator. And I'm worried about a heck of a lot of you.

This feels familiar: "...but the newscasters on both stations said it was being brought under control... In some areas, the
newscaster went on, public gatherings had been canceled temporarily.

In Shoyo, Nick thought, the entire town had been canceled. Who was kidding who?"

And finally we get a scene in WBZ-TV in Boston where the newscasters rebel against the soldiers forcing them to read propaganda.

This of course is a fantasy where the news would have to be pressured to repeat the government's lies rather than just lazily passing them on.

And the old union defender spending his last hours on Earth deliver his self-published paper, "Citizens, this is more than a disaster or a tragedy; it is the end of all hope in our government..." Finally some acts of futile but somehow inspiring heroic truthtelling.

And then the soldiers start shooting *each other* which is really when this thing starts to totally go off the rails.

And our first scenes in Boulder where a mass exodus based on a false rumor clears the stage for what ends up being the re-birthplace of civilization. But that's some... 350 pages in the future?

"Now it looks like the soldiers are shooting each
other. I don't know who's winning, and I don't care. Whoever it is will probably start on us next. When those of us who can get back do get back."

And we have the most horrifying scene in the goddamn book (and the most overtly racist one) where the black soldiers all go AWOL and start executing their former colleagues on live television. In retrospect, stoking the fears of an outright race war probably not King's best look.

And we get to the president's speech where he completely and not-very-convincingly attempts to reassure a mostly-dead public. It is pretty much close to word-to-word to Trump's speech before his party's extremely public U-turn.

"This is a moderately serious outbreak of
influenza, no more and no less. We have reports tonight of outbreaks in a score of other countries, including Russia and Red China. Therefore we--"

"Graffito written on the front of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta...: 'Dear Jesus. I will see you soon. Your friend, America. PS. I hope you will still have some vacancies by the end of the week.'"

And we come to the end of the first, and greatest, section of "The Stand."

The next section, when our cast starts to assemble itself and hit the road, ("The Lord of the Rings" part, as King would describe it) is nearly as good but the visceral horror of the spread of the disease proved impossible to top. It mutates into a, well, an adventure story.

Compare to:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1237027356314869761

Alright, the second section starts with Larry Underwood in a shutdown New York. I didn't catch this the first time, but this could be inspired by the great New York Blackout of 1977 (not sure where this fits in with the writing timeline, as the book was first published in 78)

And we have Rita Blakemoor who is a figure we don't see often enough in post-apocalyptic fiction: the survivor who just isn't built to live in the New Reality. We all want to think we'd be Stu Redman, but I think most of us are Rita's. I know that's who'd I'd be.

I mean, my self-destructive tendencies are always threatening to return even in the best of times. Goodness knows that watching 99%+ of the population die wouldn't help.

And we have the first mention of Harold Lauder who is (unfortunately) the most realistic character in the whole novel. Harold is the Incel's Incel. Every single one of his odious traits can be found in your average sexist Reddit troll who thinks he's a genius.

Needless to say, when I read this in middle school, as the nerdiest outcast possible who was developing his own burgeoning issue with women, I 100% identified with him and kept rooting on him to change and get better.

Spoiler alert no he doesn't.

The irony of Harold & Fran being forced together is too much:

Fran is trapped with a guy with severe issues who is creepily obsessed with here because everybody else is dead and Harold realizes the girl he loves literally won't touch him if he's the last man on earth.

I don't want to feel any sympathy for Harold, who (in the book's most realistic development) attempts to kill Fran (and murders others) after she rejects him, but it's easy to pity him in these early chapters.

I found it funny in that podcast interview I posted earlier this week that Stephen King desperately hopes that there's nothing in him with Harold yet overweight, nerdy Harold who dreams of being a famous writer is the *obvious* Stephen King stand-in here.

Annoyingly, Harold, like the asshole in every horror movie, is often *RIGHT*: "One day some well-paid toady said, `Look what I made. It kills almost everybody. Isn't it great?' And they gave him a medal, and a pay-raise, and a time-sharing condo, and then somebody spilled it."

On to the "Stu makes his daring escape" scene. I'm wondering if the hand-written sign here that says "Closed un'til further notice Randall is another premonition of Randall Flagg but it's hard to see how.

The dying man saying "Come down and eat chicken with me beautiful, it's sooo dark" is one of the spookiest damn details in this entire book. And what exactly is dark? The chicken or the general environs?

Everybody talks about Larry & Rita in the Tunnel as the scariest passage in The Stand but tbh that section bores the goddamn hell out of me. The really horrifying section is the one with a starving Lloyd trying to survive in that cell after everybody else dies.

It's the scene where Lloyd goes from an unrepentant and, frankly, stupid petty and violent crook to someone the reader ends up having a weird sort of sympathy for. Miguel Ferrer, in the miniseries, gives the character a weird kind of dignity that isn't entirely on the page.

TRASHCAN MAN! Absolutely one of my favorite King characters ever. Matt Frewer was great as him in the 1990s mini-series and I think Marilyn Manson is perfect casting for the new one, if they ever end up airing it (current events might cause it to be delayed)

"It was a world that deserved to burn, that was what." Again there's an undercurrent here: maybe this world deserved to go into ruins. It explains why God, who very much is real and a character in this, allows the plague to spread in this novel.

Also, characters with guns end up not faring well here: Elder loses his to Stu, Nick shoots both his assailant and accidentally grazes himself, Trashcan Man's fire has his gun go off in his hands. There's an anti-gun theme throughout this whole thing.

Alright, time for the famed Tunnel Sequence where Larry Underwood has to go through the pitch dark Lincoln Tunnel, full of cars full of corpses. The ultimate irony of "The Stand" is that everyone in America is dead, yet there is still traffic.

I've read some accounts of those who got out of the WTC, having to step over dead bodies, and there's definitely some parallels here of what Larry & Rita go through. Just what you have to shut your mind to in order to survive horrible circumstances.

Of course nothing prepares the reader for the true horror of Harold Lauder mowing his parents lawn in swimming trunks.

Okay (sigh) here's my defense of Harold: he pushes the plot forward, he gets Fran to get on the road, he's actually pretty smart and knows things. There's a version of Harold that could grow into a decent person, he very explicitly decides not to because of his grievances.

He's contrasted with Larry, who begins the story as an absolute prick and womanizer who slowly starts to figure out how to be a human being, which makes it funny that Larry comes to admire an imaginary, idealized version of Harold in his head.

Oh hey finally Glen Bateman. If Harold represents who teenage me would have become during a crisis, Glen is who I would be now. I hope. Cynical and pessimistic as hell, the most intellectual man left standing, but secretly a humanist underneath his contempt for society at large.

He is, however, a dog person. Oh well, in "Cell," King's late-period post-apocalyptic novel, he finally gives us a cat-loving survivor in Tom McCourt. Of course, cats will make do without owners in the apocalypse much better than dogs.

"I hope you don't feel that I'm dancing on the grave of the world, so to speak." I feel like I should put this in the bio. There's a part of Glen that's happy that the old order is kaput and man I can't help but feel him about this.

You forget it all by the time the main plot finally 100s of pages later, Bateman spoils the rest of the book, even the ending. ""If it was me, I wouldn't bother with a missile. I'd just try to figure out how to detach the warhead, then drive it to Boston in a station wagon."

"I'm fundamentally a cheerful man. Maybe
because I have a low threshold of satisfaction... I talk too much.. I used to be terribly unwise with money... But I never really let it get me down, Stu. Eccentric but cheerful, that's me. The only bane of my life has been my dreams."

Yeah this is very much how I would describe myself. As bitter and sarcastic as I appear to be, and goodness knows I've had my dark periods, I've grown to be happy with my lot in life and it's probably because I had such low expectations.

If my life should come to an end in the midst of this, I want it on the record that I've had a good life and that I can't complain about the lot that I've received. Even though all I do is complain: that's what gives me joy in life. It's the lot of being a born critic.

I love my dreams. What's the Belle & Sebastian line? "Judy never felt so good except when she's sleeping." My dreams are more vivid and wonderful and real than anything in my waking life and if there's any disappointment in my life it's that I'm constantly chasing them.

And maybe that's why Glen paints even though he's not any good at it. He's trying to capture his imagination. I feel like that's part of what keeps me writing, like eventually I'll hit the right combination of words and I'll be able to express this world inside me.

And we reach the best chapter in the whole book, the chapter that most post-apocalyptic novels skip: the one where those of us (let's face it, it'd be us) who would survive the disaster but off ourselves in stupid, preventable ways immediately afterward without any supervision.

We have Irma here who is so convinced about everybody else being a sinner that she flatly attempts to murder the first survivor she sees and (as tends to happen with people and guns in this book) it backfires and kills her instantly.

Oh hey we will finally get one of our first black characters... oh he's an addict from Detroit who King has call heroin "hehrawn." He overdoses quickly and his death is dismissed as "no great loss."

Did I mention that this book gets super-racist? Because it totally does.

And we return to Lloyd starving in his cell. This sequence is a companion piece to King's "Survivor Type" about the doctor on the deserted island reduced to eating himself. Lloyd even speculates about his old pet rabbit possibly being reduced to self-cannibalism at one point.

And, sigh, here we have Mother Abigail, appearing to Nick in the dream. As much as King would (and has) argued against this: she is pretty much the gold standard as far as the Magic Negro stereotype: well-intentioned but really, really, really regrettable.

Here's the thing: the rest of the novel is so white, that Mother Abigail comes in to be the savior figure, and she also represents the person who remembers the original sin of American slavery and she also has magic powers and she's also a 100 year old black woman.

She has to do a million different things, she's an impossible character for pretty much anybody to write and certainly Stephen King circa the 1970s has no business trying to make sense of all this. It's like watching George Romero try to film "Beloved."

The best parts of Mother Abigail is when she stops being the comforting great-grandma type that is treated like a holy figure and just puts all the other characters in their places. The one that has no time for their BS. There's something resembling a real person there.

The legendary Ruby Dee does her best to make her a character in the (not entirely perfectly cast) 90's mini-series. We'll see what Whoopi Goldberg does with the role in the upcoming new version.

There could be an essay about how the Survivors flocking to
Mother Abigail in The Stand is a symbol of those of us venerate older, African-American figures while also not, actually listening and fully understanding the challenging truths that they have to say.

I am not sure that this is intentional at all, of course. (Could I also mention that it's weird to analyze literature here on a website where the actual author could literally pop up and say "you know nothing of my work" like McLuhan in "Annie Hall." at any time.

There's something about the positioning of Mother Abigail here is like when I post clips of Sister Rosetta Tharpe and think I'm doing a good deed. The self-congratulatory "Green Book" sort of thing.

And we've reached the end of Rita, dead of a semi-accidental overdose. A shame, she was actually one of the better rendered female characters here.

Oh hey. We're over 200 pages into the book and it wasn't until just *now* that we had any of the main protagonists, all stuck in their own separate storylines to this point, actually meet each other. If there is an A-plot here, I'm not sure there is, it's the Stu/Fran/Harold.

I forgot how long it takes before we see Tom Cullen. I have to admit, King just going "okay I'm going to pair up someone who is deaf and mute with an intellectually challenged character who can't read his writing" is almost a show-off move on his part.

And we're introduced to Julie Lawry (my god we still have like a thousand more characters to be introduced to, this book is madness). You can tell that Julie is evil because she has sex right away.

Julie Lawry was a groupie before Captain Trips hit. If you were the bass player of Dokken at the time of this book's writing, the good news is that you officially exist in "The Stand" universe and the bad news is that you had sex with an underage girl and then presumably died.

And Nick just punched her for pulling a cruel practical joke on Tom Cullen. Which... I know that NIck is supposed to be the good guy here and Julie's not but, y'know, maybe not a great idea to have one of your most heroic characters batter a woman?

And Nick decides to abandon her rather than take her with them. And Julie pulls out a gun. That escalated quickly. I'm not sure this scene is reading how King intended it to.

And finally we get the introduction Ralph, who is basically a "Green Acres" character shoehorned into an apocalyptic epic.

And here's Nadine Cross, the story's obligatory Bad News Girl (and her "ward," the feral kid Joe). Here are some contradictory facts about her:
1. Of course I had a crush on her as a kid.
2. She Makes No Sense As A Character.

This bit always haunted me: "It occurred to him that, despite their white beauty, gulls were carrion eaters. The thought that followed was nearly unspeakable, but it had formed fully in his mind before he could push it away: The pickings must be real good just lately."

I never caught this before but Joe immediately goes after Larry, just like Harold goes after Stu. They're both violently protective of the woman that they're traveling with.

And of course, Nadine is sort of Dark Fran. So it makes a weird kind of symmetry that Joe becomes socialized while Harold becomes murderous.

Don't let anybody tell you that Stephen King doesn't know his music. Here we have Larry Underwood playing an obscurity by Koerner, Ray & Glover: "Slappin' On My Black Cat Bone."

The thing about The Stand is that it's King trying to turn America into a weird and wild place as Tolkein's Middle Earth. So the whole novel is filled with all sorts of Americana, artifacts of a suddenly extinguished empire

So, where Tolkein had Tom Bombadil, Stephen King has Chuck Berry.

I'll take Chuck Berry thank you very much.

And we are getting existential here, Larry. "He couldn't be right. Couldn't be. If such a monstrous thing as this had happened for no good reason at all, what sense did anything make? Why were they even still alive?"

And here we have Lucy Swann. "But Hunter, we already have so many characters..." Yes, and you will keep getting more and more characters. You will get infinity characters. This is "The Stand," there are more phone books with fewer proper names in them.

And now we get to the history of Mother Abigail. I'm not going to lie, this was the one passage I skimmed through when I read through this entire blasted thing around age 11. and I don't blame young me at all.

This is an agonizing read, it just really feels... rote. Like it's clear King can't fully bring this particular era to life. The best parts are the ones where he's emphasizing how time passes. "A body's life went by so fast, how was it so a body could get so tired of living it?"

And we get a 100+ year old woman fighting with her true enemies: a bunch of literal weasels. This is so stupid.

Oh hey look, more characters finally meeting each other. Nick, Tom, Ralph and a little girl what we haven't even met yet come in. At this point of the story, character are being introduced in-between chapters something which will (deliberately) become overwhelming shortly.

And we have the veterinarian Dick Ellis here, who becomes super-important to the survivors for reasons that will become gruesomely obvious a few chapters from here.

"'Yes,' she said quietly. "You'll see. There's bitter days ahead. Death and error, betrayal and tears. And not all of us will be alive to see how it ends.'" Well this passage hit home.

"He says that he don't believe in God."
"Bless you, Nick, but that don't matter. He believes in you."

Like "Twin Peaks," you must take the world of "The Stand" at face value: plenty here is symbolic but the supernatural elements are 100% real. Good and Evil are concrete things.

And as much as most of the Mother Abigail stuff rings false as hell, her moment of weakness here where she admits that part of her hates god for putting her in this position hits home. Even she doesn't have the answers. The references to the Book of Job hit home.

And Mark & Perion are introduced in the group off-panel, but (spoilers) they're basically just brought in to die. This was around where things got really confusing for me as an 11-year old because the narrator just keeps going on like you're supposed to know these people.

Oh god. Here it comes, the section where Mark's appendix bursts and they have to operate on it despite not knowing anything about surgery. With keys. Oh god this is hard to read.

Glen lamenting on how the federal government made things worse: " For some people, the necessity to continue covering up even after the damage is done is all-important. It makes me wonder how many immunes they killed in Atlanta and San Francisco and the Topeka Viral Center..."

And we have the Big Shootout Scene and it's remarkable just how useless Harold is here.

Okay, we have one of my favorite set pieces: The Trashcan Man's travel to "Cibola" (a.k.a. Las Vegas). Despite the massive length of The Stand, we don't really spend enough time with the "evil" Survivors, so this section is really vital.

At this point, King's marking time, and these gazillion threads are starting to be woven together: "the day Nick Andros and Tom Cullen saw buffalo grazing in Comanche County, Kansas, Trashcan Man crossed the Mississippi..."

And this is a detail I like: For the Trashcan Man, Mother Abigail is a frightening figure and Randall Flagg is a soothing image. I can't help but think of those polls showing how Republicans trust Trump more than anyone else for news about the pandemic.

It should be noted that Mother Abigail feels "fear and pity" which is about how the reader should approach Trashcan Man. It's hard not to feel sorry for him, despite the damage he does. He's not pure evil, no, that's The Kid.

The Kid is based on Charlie Starkweather, even though Charlie Starkweather is EXPLICITLY mentioned earlier in the novel as being pals with Flagg. This is a confusing timeline. There's the idea that the Kid, in fact, might be him reincarnated.

"Coors beer's the only beer. I'd piss Coors if I could. You believe that happy crappy?"

Has anyone in the world actually talked like the Kid? I swear to god some of his lines have haunted me my entire life.

The Kid is quoting "Back Door Man" here, about eating more chicken than any man ever seen, which is something that also pops up in King's short story "The Jaunt."

It's been a while since we've last seen Lloyd, but you can already tell he's different. He's gone from a complete fuckwit to someone in a position of power, he's sharper somehow. Flagg, as evil as he is, is bettering the people around him.

I identify with Lloyd to be quite honest. He is a born second-in-command, as am I. He goes along with Poke, he goes along with his lawyer and he stays true to Flagg to the end. He has no direction on his own, neither do I.

And we're here where Trash Can Man is just trying to keep himself alive. The Kid will just murder him for any random reason. This kinda feels like life under Trump. Trump is absolutely The Kid and he has the steering wheel in his hands my god

Okay, Trashcan Man calling Aces High "Mr. High" is genuinely amusing. I love how King manages to make the reader happy for him because he's finally found his place even though his place is technically evil.

And then he immediately has to crucify one of the first friends he's ever made. A tough lot in life for poor Trashy.

"Larry is a man who found himself comparably late in life." -The Judge.

Same tbh haha.

Oh yeah, more new characters! This is The Judge and Lucy Swann and I think these are the last truly major players introduced.

"I was thinking about that watch and the death of capitalism."

Also extremely same.

And we have Nadine's interior monologue in which she talk about being in thrall of the Dark Man because that's her role in the story and that's... that's really it as far as her interiority. Just a jumbled mess of incoherent motivations and second-hand goth romance.

And our survivors are trying to get a society back together. Theoretically, this could be fascinating: how does one put together America after a total collapse?

In practice, well we're into what I would politely call the "slow" stretch of the story.

I wonder if Nick wasn't so adamant about cutting Harold out of the committee things would have gone differently. He'd still be a jackass but maybe he wouldn't go as far as essentially becoming a terrorist. It seems to be his biggest resentment.

"There is a frightening, sickening ease-and a clear attraction-to the way in which things can be blown apart. The hard job is bringing things together again." If there's a moral to this section of the book, there it is.

And one of the best long-played gags in the book: Larry growing to idolize Harold during his trek... only to find out what he's really like, starts to play out here.

Fran's reaction to his mistaken belief that she and Harold were an item is pretty choice.

You can tell Harold is a villain in a Stephen King book because King goes out of his way in mentioning that he hates rock music. That's King's shorthand for "this person has awful taste."

Oh never mind that earlier comment about Harold, he explicitly is described as wanting to be a part of that meeting so that he can relay all of the details to Flagg. So, good call Nick.

Of course if he had these details, Flagg wouldn't deem him to be dispensible later on.

A huge part that this section of "The Stand" drags is that Stu and Fran are just the dullest couple ever. What's the old saying about "happy couples are all alike?"

The first committee meeting is hush-hush and Larry instantly makes the point "wasn't keeping secrets how the whole American project just came to an end." It's the start of an ongoing thread here: is this new democracy doomed to repeat the mistakes of the old one?

And now we have the first of what seem like a thousand complete transcripts of committee meetings in which one of the participants is a deaf-mute. Which is... this is one of the few times that I wish I were reading the non-uncut edition.

"LARRY: He's the sharpest old guy I've ever met. He's only seventy, for the record. Ronald Reagan was serving as President at an older age than that
FRAN: That's not what I would call a very strong recommendation." LOL.

And Nick nominates Tim Cullen to be one of the spies, putting the life of the mentally challenged person who also happens to be his oldest living friend. Just an absolutely ruthless guy, Nick Andros.

Nick's argument is that Tom will stand up to torture better because he will never change his story. JFC dude. These are our heroes, ladies and gentlemen.

Fran immediately grabs this: "You said we have everything to win and nothing to lose. Glen. Well, what Tom? What about our own goddamn souls?"

And Mother Abigail exits the book for a spell. No great loss.

And one more reference to Patty Hearst, a completely random reference, she was once had stayed in one of the towns near Boulder. A reminder of the book's origins. I always wondered what that King book about the kidnapping would have been like.

Rational Glen Bateman has come to the belief that rationalism is a deathtrip which I kinda think this is a general message from King: there are sharp limits to human understanding and we are under sway of powers that we'll never fully understand.

This I think is very true.

"We're here under the fiat of powers we don't understand... that means we may be beginning to accept-only subconsciously now... a different definition of existence. The idea that we can never understand anything about the state of being"

"(Flagg is) the last magician of rational thought, gathering the tools of technology against us... I only know that he is,
and I no longer think that sociology or psychology or any other ology will put an end to him. I think only white magic will do that."

I don't believe in any organized religion, I'm a pretty staunch agnostic and I doubt I'll ever believe in anything resembling a God, but the older I get the more spiritual I become. The more of life you experience, the more improbable it all seems.

If "The Stand" is a grand metaphor it's about how people come together in times of great crisis and work and believe in something higher than themselves-whether it be God or the Dark Man or the belief in humanity's ability to persevere. You gotta serve somebody as Dylan once sang

I want to add this about our heroine Fran: she breaks into Harold's house not once, but twice for no real good reason beside a hunch. Now, it pays off because Harold is actually plotting against them... but seriously it is kinda not justified after the fact.

And now we get to the point where even the freaking dog gets his own section to have a long interior monologue and I think this is officially where it becomes clear that King (as he would admit later) is starting to spin his wheels.

And next? Another blasted meeting transcript.

"NICK: I withdraw my objection to Harold, but not my basic reservations, I just don't like him very much." Not, the most diplomatic of politicians our Nick, but rarely wrong.

Little of this made the miniseries, thank goodness. Oh and a tad bit more about that flawed but worthwhile stab at adapting the nigh-unadaptable: ew.com/tv/2019/09/19/…

The moment where they all come together to sing the National Anthem is extremely corny, but after 600 pages or so of nonstop death and misery, the book's earned a moment of grace.

"I don't see how you can grieve for a whole country, but I guess you can." Big 2020 mood.

Oh man Fran just referenced MTV's Randee. I had completely forgotten about that dude.

Oh yeah, almost forgot. In the world of "The Stand," Jim Morrison faked his own death. Although he most likely died of the superflu.

No I have no idea why King just threw this in there, but why not at this point.

And a key moment here. Larry turns down Nadine for Lucy which is a) the moment that solidifies that Larry has really changed and b) the moment where Nadine turns fully to the Dark Man.

And of course, there's the irony that after idolizing Harold from afar, he ends up being the one to get the woman he was once in love with. Well, at least temporarily.

And here we have Nadine's origin story. Basically, she and her friends play with a Ouiji Board and Flagg hits on her through it by saying "WE ARE IN THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD NADINE". And just like that she's under his spell because Nadine makes no sense as a character.

Nadine goes from virginal, uptight schoolteacher to Sexy Femme Fatale pretty much overnight because genre writers must abide by the Madonna/Whore Complex.

Oh no. More meeting transcripts.

And they get Stu to act as law enforcement, in a scene that reminds me a bit of "Deadwood," which was also about a society emerging from nothingness and mere anarchy.

"'Everything's going to be fine,' he said.
She was shaking her head back and forth slowly, and some of her tears flew off into the warm summer night.
'I don't think so,' she said. 'No, I really don't think it is.'"

Man, hard agree, Fran.

And here we have Harold's moment at the crossroads. He realizes that Boulder is welcoming him, he connects with the Burial committee workers, he starts to wonder if he should abandon his vendetta

And then of course comes Nadine and it's time for him to think with his dick.

This is the most cringe-y and embarrassing sex scene in literature (non Tom Wolfe-division) but at least it's supposed to be.

As a nerdy, acne-covered teen, I will not pretend that the concept of being seduced by a mysterious older woman had an immense appeal on my first read.

And Larry sends the Judge to his death. The Judge absolves him for this, among other things. ""Then live with it," the Judge said with great relish. "For God's sake, Larry,
grow up. Develop a little self-righteousness."

King isn't afraid to just flatly put his morals on the page. It's not great storytelling, ("show don't tell" gets violated a lot), but there's a lot of real wisdom here. Corny, homespun wisdom. Maybe even cliched at times. But as DFW argued: cliches are cliches for a reason.

Judge Farris faces his impending death and the apocalypse as an adventure. It's probably as positive of a spin as you can put on it:

"He would sleep better tonight, under the stars, his old body wrapped firmly in two sleeping bags. He wondered if he would ever see Boulder again and thought the chances were probably against it. And yet his excitement was very great. It was one of the finest days of his life."

I can sympathize. There's a chance that I could catch this and this could end up being the end of it all but at least I caught a glimpse of the end times. It adds a weird aura to everything.

The scene where they hypnotize Tom to turn him into a spy should be goofy as heck but it gets spooky real quick. With hypnotized Tom calling himself "God's Tom."

God's Tom on Flagg: "When he grins, birds fall dead off telephone lines. When he looks at you a certain way, your prostate goes bad and your urine burns. The grass yellows up and dies where he spits. He's always outside. He came out of time. He doesn't know himself."

Good bit here: Flagg needs Nadine to be virginal, but she's confused about why anal doesn't count as "defilement." The conflict in much of King's work is this: strange, ancient rules/rituals/customs in a hyper-aware, very modern America.

And the death of two newborn twins brings up the idea that any babies being born would just be picked off by the superflu and the whole human enterprise is pretty much null and void.

Of course, it makes sense that these two sequences are back-to-back. This whole sequence: it's about fertility, procreation, producing the next generation. Ultimately, Nadine's just a Baby Making Machine to Flagg.

Nadine has a meltdown. And there's another meeting. This is right around where King was about to abandon the whole manuscript. Instead, he would make an executive decision to just kill off a whole bunch of characters and see if that helped.

It will.

If King had to do this book over again, you'd think he'd realize that Dayna the badass bisexual assassin would have been a more fun character to explore than the Countless Crying Women we've gotten to this point.

Leo/Joe is psychic too, I guess? The rule with King is that if you're a minority or mentally off you have magic powers. That's just how it works.

In any case, Joe/Leo correctly calls out the committee for being useless because they represent the "old ways" and that those ways are just like Flagg's ways. A lot of this section of the book reads like self-critique. Like King knows how unreadable the novel itself is getting.

Or as Fran puts it: "I don't like any of the things that have been happening. Visionary dreams. An old woman who's the voice of God for a while and then walks off into the wilderness. Now a little boy who seems to be a telepath. It's like life in a fairy tale."

Fran and Larry plot to uncover Harold's intentions in his ledger but decide to hold off on telling Stu their suspicions because... because it would screw with the plot otherwise.

David Lynch would be proud of this scene: they get the electricity running but it results in a brief spurt of chaos, it acts like the primordial force that it is, devices start going off on their own like it's "Maximum Overdrive."

"It is said that the two great human sins are pride and hate. Are they? I elect to think of them as the two great virtues." And Fran & Larry read Harold's Ledger to reveal the disturbing truth: he's in an Ayn Rand phase.

Oh and the first sentence: "My great pleasure this delightful post-Apocalypse summer will be to kill Mr. Stuart Dog-Cock Redman; and just maybe I will kill her, too." Among the obvious things wrong with this, it's just not a really not clever nickname for Stu.

When I was 11 I thought this was bad writing. It made sense that he'd want to kill his rival but why would he want to kill the girl he liked? I honestly still don't quite understand this way of thinking but have to give it up to King that he was right about men like Harold.

And finally, FINALLY, the explosion. The second mass death event that pushes forward the plot.

But Mother Abigail returns just in time to prevent the casualties from being what they otherwise would be. Note this for later on.

R.I.P. Nick Andros, Sue Stern, Teddy Weizak, Chad Norris and random others

"I don't know nothing, seems like, but I feel scared. Like it's going to end bad. I didn't feel that way before, but I do now."

Same, Stu. Same.

Hey good news. We're like 750 pages in and we're *almost* to the main plot.

Mother Abigail's body "is eating itself," just like Lloyd's Rabbit. Just like how the communities, both the Zone and Flagg's colony in Vegas, start to turn on each other.

And Stu tries to make the case for actually putting Harold and Nadine on trail rather than just lynching them because they're trying to build a society here but, as we'll see, the "rebuilding society" plot is about to be (thankfully) put to bed very soon. That's not this story.

And Rich Moffat, the town alcoholic, dies of an accident on the day the power comes back for good. A sacrifice on the altar of one of the Old Gods that has come to return a reminder that technology always has a human cost.

Mother Abigail comes in and closes the book on all the other various subplots here: this isn't about the new society or Larry's prsonal growth or Fran's baby damnit. This is Good vs. Evil. It's time to take... (dramatic pause)

A Stand.

Fran is pissed at this. She's a bit annoyed at the fact that the God of "The Stand" is just, well, murdering everyone and now wants the people she cares about to sacrifice themselves. She's not wrong, but the Plot demands what it demands.

"Ralph was sure... She would be gone in a flash of light, taken. Or they would see her spirit, transfigured in radiance, leaving by the window and going up into the sky. But in the end, she simply died." R.I.P. Mother Plot Device

"God always wins. God's a Boston Celtics fan, I bet." I guess I'm professionally obligated to quote this line.

And Stu, Larry, Glen and (random dice roll) Ralph for some blasted reason go to walk to Las Vegas without any equipment to face The Source Of All Evil because a dying old lady told them to. After *800 pages full of everything* that's what our main plot boils down to.

And you know what? It's honestly a relief! After spending so much time Stuck Inside Of Boulder With Those Mass Death Blues Again it feels good to have our characters on the move again with some purpose. Bring on Book III!

We get a lot more inside Vegas during this last section, which is a lot more interesting than Boulder as bad guys are often more fun to read about than heroes. Here we have the guards tasked with killing the Judge (but leaving his head intact, as it's going to be sent back)

A thing about Flagg is that his people are devoted to him but all of them are scared shit of him, he's so temperamental and quick to being offended, so they don't *like* him. I imagine this is what it's like working for Trump.

One of the guards is named Dave Roberts. A name that Stephen King would be writing about, in a radically difference context, in the book "Faithful" about the 2004 Red Sox season. This Dave Roberts isn't so lucky, as he definitely is not ruled safe.

And Bobby Terry blows the Judge's head clean off, much like Poke way back in the beginning of this bloody shaggy dog tale, which is the exact opposite of the way he was supposed to do the thing. And Flagg, like any good Big Band, pops in to kill his henchman.

"There were worse things than crucifixion."
"There were teeth."

And the death count gets substantially higher from this point out, but of course not as much as the first book which killed off basically the entire world.

And we have Danya undercover and, eww, under covers with Lloyd. We learn that Flagg is training fighter pilots. And we get the first mention of the Rat Man, who I guess is our final notable character although his role is more expanded in the miniseries.

And Danya notices that most of the people in Vegas aren't necessarily bad, they're in fact more industrious than those in Boulder. They're more together, which is obviously a note about life under fascism.

...And she gets a few more paragraphs before she's captured. She gets to make fun of Lloyd's dick before she's brought before Flagg, which I guess is something.

"Maybe he sells fear because he's got nothing else to sell." Ahem, possible modern day political significance here.

And the weird thing is that, in this particular instance, Flagg is charming with Danya.

Although, he reveals he doesn't know that Mother Abigail gave her instructions to Stu and the rest. We start seeing now there are limits to his powers, his downfall begins here.

The whole thing is a ruse, Flagg wants to know the third spy. Danya knows but doesn't tell. She kills herself. R.I.P. Danya: you were the coolest character in the novel and you should have gotten more to do

Oh hey and maybe a record for pages in-between first apperance in a novel and second is Julie Lawry, the one who blows Tom's cover.

And we get Harold, who is introduced as "The dying man" to add a little mystery. Flagg doesn't trust him, so he arranges his death. And honestly I don't blame him in this one, although you end up feeling a bit bad for Harold despite everything.

In his dying note he crossed out "I was misled" and offers up his attempt at a legitimate confession and apology: "I want to sign this by a name given me in Boulder. I could not accept it then but I take it now freely. I am going to die in my right mind: Hawk."

And Flagg is starting to realize that things are falling apart around him. He's also forgotten about his past completely (there's a reference to a military life and a "Boo Dinkway" that feels significant, but I can't find anything historical context or later SK connections)

And of course the entire Nadine plot basically ends in a horrific rape scene at the hands of Flagg. Just ugly and stupid and awful.

And she's basically a vegetable until her last scene, where she sacrifices herself to kill Flagg's hellspawn. "She was the perfect incubator," Flagg notes, and all Nadine has ever been is a plot device, her character continually twisted for whatever purpose SK has needed her.

She's a mother-figure for Joe, a lust/love interest for Larry, a femme fatale to Harold, a villain for the Committee, an incubator for Flagg and the only act of true agency she's given is to commit suicide. Just an utter artistic failure and a product of boring sexism.

This piece makes a good case for what I mean "a struggle that never entirely makes sense on a personal or philosophical level" is as good of a summation of her attraction/repulsion to Flagg. io9.gizmodo.com/what-i-learned…

And we have Lloyd who has become "something of a diplomat." It's kind of whiplash going from thinly written Nadine to Lloyd, who is given a rich interior life and a compelling, believable character arc.

One of the pilots made the deadly mistake of mocking Trashcan Man, with the same line of his childhood bullies, and he sets off a fatal trap. This ends up putting the entire climax of the book in motion, but the first-time reader doesn't know it yet.

And Julie Lawry gives up Tom's info, but Flagg's busy with Nadine and Tom gets a chance to leave, which also becomes key a little later on. After hundreds of pages of nothing, things are actually being set up for the finale. You can tell the break King took while writing helped.

Oh right Barry Dorgan, he's the last notable character to get introduced. He's a former cop who has, unsurprisingly, decided to join up with the fascist community. This is not a book that has any sympathy with authority figures.

Another commentary: Lloyd comments that most of the people in the police department over there were violent criminal types.

Lloyd giving the report to Flagg about how everything fucked up, and it's partly Flagg's fault, is great dark comedy. Lloyd getting the upper-hand for once.

And Trashcan Man accidentally saves Tom Cullen's ass by rigging Vegas's search helicopters to explode.

And Flagg tries to levitate after Nadine has tricked him into killing her and his unborn baby. "But it was a long, long time before his bootheels would leave the sundeck, and when they did they would only hover a quarter of an inch above the concrete. They would go no higher."

Trashcan Man, seeking redemption, thinks about picking up Captain Trips but he, the schizophrenic dropout, figures out what the army somehow didn't: deadly diseases are very bad weapons because you can't really aim them. They infect everybody.

Instead, Trashy finds Chekhov's Nuclear Bomb. If the reader has remembered Glen Bateman's idea about 600 or so pages ago, they know what's coming with that.

"It's the eighth inning and he's losing his stuff and there's no-fucking-body warming in the bullpen." Never forget that Stephen King is a diehard baseball guy.

Whitney and Ace High and a bunch of the Vegas people are getting ready to split, which ends up being an extremely wise idea. Lloyd, given the chance, remains loyal to Flagg despite everything, which ends up a weirdly noble sentiment.

Everybody has free will in The Stand. Yes, it's a chess-game between God and Flagg, but once in place the pieces get to make their decision whether to follow through or not. Even Trashy has a moment of sanity when he decides to set off the chargers that seal his fate.

Oh and just in case you needed one more bit of evidence that Randall Flagg *might* be the villain, he exclaims he's going to put a dog's head on a spike.

Stu feels oddly sympathetic to the dead Harold. "He wanted to pay Flagg back for Harold as well as Nick and Susan."

In the miniseries instead of finding the body (standards and practices would not like that) he has a psychic premonition and that actually works better.

King predicts our current sports-free existence: "In the back of his mind he's still thinking, At nine o'clock I'm going to pull a few beers and watch the Sox on the tube. And when he goes in there and sees that empty cabinet, he feels as
disappointed as hell."

And our four heroes are running out of food. *looks at single cookie, two slices of bread and a third of a jar of peanut butter and jelly* Okay I feel them here as well.

Stu breaks his leg and the rest have to abandon him, despite Larry's objections. Of course, this also ends up working out for Stu. Forgive me if I'm giving away the ending here, but well King pretty much gives away the ending so...

Kojack brings food and supplies to Stu, like he's goddamn Lassie. At this point, King's like "everybody has magic powers, even the dog. It's page 900. If you've stuck around this long, you're officially down with nearly anything."

They remark about the animals that the virus has killed and Larry goes "and left the cats" really morosely and honestly screw you Larry. I'm glad you're about to get blown up now.

Throughout the book, Flagg has never been as scary as the book says he is, which King has said was the point all along, he's scarier when he's an unknown force. Flagg's defeat is here: Glen laughs at him and speaks the truth: "you're nothing."

Granted he gets killed immediately afterward, but he has somehow won the encounter.

"He told me more of the truth than anyone else bothered to in my whole miserable life." Lloyd isn't wrong here although this ultimately might speak to the company that he used to keep before the superflu.

I cannot believe that the second most prominent black character in this entire sprawling novel is a creep named The Rat Man who speaks in third person.

The point of the stand portion of "The Stand," as far as I can tell, is that Larry and Ralph's execution brings together Flagg's whole clan, who had been stationed in several different cities, together in one spot.

...right in time for the Trash Can Man to bring forth the atomic bomb that's going to wipe out the lot of them. Which fine, a perfectly okay ending right?

Except King can't leave it alone and he has THE LITERAL HAND OF GOD pop out of nowhere to set it off.

After all that we get a literal deus ex machina. Just what a jaw-droppingly ridiculous anticlimax.

Oh and Flagg, of course, pops out of the narrative right before it goes off because, well, he's got another half-dozen or so novels to pop up in.

Lloyd last words are, hilariously, "oh shit we're all fucked!"

And the end of this is a solid capper: "And the righteous and unrighteous alike were consumed in that holy fire."

THE END...

Oh, no wait, we still got like another 30 pages! Suckers, you thought you'd get out of this that easily?

And we return to Stu, who has the (regular) flu and notes that all the Free Zone organization notes "now seem mildly foolish." Dude, they kinda did at the time.

A callback to the incident that inspired King, the chemical spill that could have killed countless had the wind been blowing a different direction, Stu tries to factor where the atomic bomb's fallout will end up.

Whether we live or die can be up to something as little as that.

And Stu is now delusional, repeating dialogue from the start of the book, just like the interior monologue of the dying old man in his hospital bed. You can tell we're finally circling back here near the end.

And the reason it was important that Tom Cullen eluded capture thanks to Trashy's helicopter sabotage? It's so he can rescue Stu.

Book 3 is, um, a lot tighter-plot wise than the second half of book two. Everything serves a narrative purpose.

Oh I forgot to add that Nick is back in ghost form, giving Tom advice in his dreams? Because that is also happening, probably because King realized he hadn't included a ghost in the book yet and that's like a QT film without a gratuitous shot of women's feet.

I mentioned that King revised The Stand to be set in 1990 after writing it in the 70's. He did a phenomenally shitty job at it. This scene in particular: Stu sets up a film projector to watch some movies as they're stuck on the road.

A film projector. In 1990.

So King adds a paragraph explaining "well Stu could have hooked up a VCR but movies are better on the big screen." It's a save I guess, but it's like an Alfredo Aceves save where you give up two runs and strand a runner on third.

Stu and Tom are still on their way back to Boulder and time has slowed to a crawl again. They happen to find a bag of weed and... leave it behind. Narcs.

"God's Tom" confirms that Flagg's still out there and says something ominous about Fran's baby. At this point that's the final question: if her baby succumbs to the superflu... well that's it. The end of the human race, this whole thing has just been (as Fran puts it) a "coda."

And FINALLY we're back in Boulder, which now has armed sentries. A sign that as civilization returns, it's starting to look more and more like Flagg's Vegas.

This book doesn't have a high opinion of humanity, which you can probably gather by the fact that it kills most of us.

And the confirmation that Fran's baby does have Captain Trips which... well, maybe there won't be humans in the near-future.

Stu takes this, not-well but stoically because that's who he is.

It turns out the baby is... uh half-immune. Meaning it catches the superflu but unlike everyone else who caught it, it can fight it.

I'm not sure about the science here, but we've gone well beyond the realm of the rational at this point.

We get one final crying jag from Fran who has spent approximately 60% of her sections in tears. With Boulder filling with people, she wants to return to Maine. After all that time spend on rebuilding, this book is ultimately uncertain if it was all worth it.

"There are such beautiful places Stu. Bridgton... Sweden... Castle Rock." Right now, all of King's regular readers are going "WHEREVER THE HELL YOU GO, STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM CASTLE ROCK"

Is the desire to leave just because of a distrust of civilization or is it just a rebirth of that old American impulse to expand and explore. They mention some other Free Zone members who have been eager to explore. Much of the Stand has been a "road movie" after all.

BUT the troubling thing is that the new sheriff wants guns and guns have been more trouble than they have been worth throughout this entire novel. King, if you've read his Twitter account, is very much pro-gun control and you can read that between the lines here.

"All any of us can buy is time... his children's
lifetimes, maybe the lifetimes of my greatgrandchildren. Until the year 2100, maybe, surely no longer than that. Maybe not that long. Time enough for poor old Mother Earth to recycle herself a little. A season of rest."

"These toys are dangerous; the devil in men's brains guided the hands of God when they were made. Don't play with these toys, dear children, please, not ever. Not ever again. Please . . . please learn the lesson. Let this empty world be your copybook." And we have our moral.

It's Fran who gets the final word here. Stu asks her whether people can change and Fran gives the only true answer. "I don't know."

"I don't know" our omniscient narrator repeats.

I don't either. Right now I'm not optimistic.

THE END?

No, of course not. Like all horror movies of the era, it has to end with a hint that the evil hasn't yet been vanquished. So we have "The Circle Closes"

"We need help, the Poet reckoned -- Edward Dorn." That's the writer of the original "Gunslinger," which means that this ties right back into King's Dark Tower series which I have not read a word of.

But I do know that it features Flagg as a key villain. And here we have him popping up again, this time to sucker an unnamed tribe. It's uh not un-problematic.

Flagg has forgotten just about everything once again. "My name is Russell Faraday," he says now, to these stereotypical natives who, of course, are dark-skinned. Our first black characters since the Rat Man.

"I've come to teach you how to be civilized!" Flagg says, and I think that pretty much answers the whole "what does this book ultimately think about civilization?" question.

And we have the final words, a very mechanistic view of the universe, fitting for a world where ancient forces play chess with the rest of us:

"Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again."

And thus ends "The Stand" and thus ends what has to be one of the longest Twitter threads in history. There are some more odds and ends I'll go over in the next few days, but this is the end of the main event. Thanks to everyone for following along.