vol. 10 issue 0.5

Fellow readers, welcome once more to the Sipped Ink summer read-along. It’s been a pleasure to watch this little project grow over the ten years that it has been running. There are some amongst us who have participated in all nine of the previous read-alongs, but there are many more who have hopped aboard more recently, and quite a few who are joining this year for the very first time. Welcome one and all.

For those who are new to the read-along — or those in need of a refresher — the way this works is quite simple. Below you’ll find the reading schedule for the next twelve weeks. Over the years we’ve settled on a pace of roughly 100 pages per week: this seems to work fairly well for most people. There are as many who find it too slow as find it too fast, so that makes it about the sweet spot to my mind. Each Sunday, I will send out a newsletter issue a lot like this one, discussing the week’s section of the text. I always set out with the aim of striking a balance between thematic analysis, close reading, character studies etc. I don’t always succeed. Ultimately, I’ll be guided by what I find interesting, and the feedback I get from fellow readers.

So, here’s the schedule this time around:

7 July — p98 (end of C10)
14 Jul — p200 (end of C23)
21 Jul — p304 (end of C32)
28 Jul — p402 (end of C40)
4 Aug — p507 (end of C44)
11 Aug — p603 (end of C47)
18 Aug — p700 (‘…and what a sorry sound they made’)
25 Aug — p803 (‘…interested in my feet?’ she asked.’)
1 Sep — p893 (end of C56)
8 Sep — p1,000 (‘…and into the presence of Randall Flagg.’)
15 Sep — p1,107 (end of C72)
21 Sep — p1,211 (end)

The unusually perceptive amongst you might notice that the final date is a Saturday. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, it happens to be Stephen King’s 77th birthday, and so it’s irresistible to me to try and bring this whole enterprise in for a landing on that day. We’ll see how we get on. Either way, we’ll be done in time to cleanse our collective palate with that new Sally Rooney novel on 24 Sep.

You’ll notice that some weeks are a little longer than others, and some don’t fall neatly on chapter breaks. As ol’ blue eyes used to say: them’s the breaks.

My favourite part of the summer read-along is hearing from fellow readers. At any point during proceedings, you can write to readalong@zioibi.com, or hit reply on one of these emails. I promise to read it all, and I apologise in advance for not replying to everything. As mentioned above, this kind of input will also shape the content of my weekly despatch, so please let me know what you’re liking / disliking / finding interesting about the novel as we go along.

Before we’ve even begun, I’ve heard from a good number of participants for whom this will be their first Stephen King novel. As such, one thing I’ll also include in each of the twelve weekly newsletters, will be a recommendation for something else from his oeuvre. My own relationship with King goes back to the early 90s, when the film adaptation of Misery (1990) sparked a love of his work that has lasted to this day. A couple of years ago I recorded a podcast episode about my experience with that film, so if you’re looking for extracurricular activities already, you can find that on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or online.

OK, a few notes of introduction to the book itself. In its originally published form, The Stand (1978) was Stephen King’s fourth novel to hit shelves (though only the third with his name on it; we may get to the Richard Bachman of it all at some point). His debut was 1974’s Carrie, a story of high school bullying, abusive religious family dynamics, and telekinesis. The paperback sold millions of copies, and led to Brian De Palma’s 1976 film adaptation, starring Sissy Spacek (which, it warrants noting, garnered Oscar nominations for Spacek and Piper Laurie — quite unusual for a ‘horror’ movie). Almost overnight (though after many years of failing to sell a novel to a publisher), it made King one of genre fiction’s brightest rising stars.

King’s second novel was the tale of small-town vampirism, Salem’s Lot (1975), which also had a good deal of commercial success and critical acclaim. And he followed that up with The Shining (1977), a haunted house novel par excellence, about alcoholism, isolation, and writer’s block. Thanks in no small part to Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation (initially poorly received, but latterly reappraised), it remains one of King’s most well-known titles, even amongst those who haven’t read a page of the author’s work.

I won’t waste time here explaining how it came to be that the version of The Stand currently sat on your coffee table is some 400 pages longer than that offered to purchasers in 1978. Those of you who have been unable to resist the temptation to crack this sucker open already, will have noticed a short preface in two parts. Therein, King himself forewarns readers of the original version (I know of at least a couple among our number) that this is not an entirely new book. He also goes some way towards explaining how he came to remove about a third of the text before its original publication, and how it came to pass that he added most of it back in.

On numerous occasions I’ve heard King refer to The Stand as many of his fans’ favourite novel, of the 65 he’s published. In interviews as recently as 2021, he has also listed it amongst his own favourites of his works. As someone who has read somewhere around half of his published fiction, and enjoyed far more of it than not, I’m excited to finally find out what all the fuss is about. I’m grateful to you all for joining me.

Read-along participants of yore have heard me weigh up the pros and cons of picking novels that I’ve already read. When we made our way through Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (2013) a few years ago, and Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle (2021) a couple of years after that, those were texts I already knew and loved. As I’m sure you can imagine, that made writing the weekly newsletter a little easier. But it also left the whole enterprise feeling a little less alive to me. On balance, I prefer those years where the text is new to me, and we’re discovering it together. This is one of those years. The downside — if you want to call it that — is that we’re going in without much of a map, perhaps just a few mismatched tatters. But don’t worry, we’ll piece it together as we move along.

Here’s something to get us going. In the final chapters of Danse Macabre, his 1981 non-fiction book largely about the function and reception of genre (and particularly horror) fiction, King summarises one of his arguments thus:

I’ve tried to suggest throughout this book that the horror story, beneath its fangs and fright wig, is really as conservative as an Illinois Republican in a three-piece pinstriped suit; that its main purpose is to reaffirm the virtues of the norm by showing us what awful things happen to people who venture into taboo lands. (p442)

One of the roles horror fiction plays is to reassure us of the correctness of the rules by which society normally operates. There is a morality and fairness to horror that does not hold true in the (far scarier) real world. Engaging with a work of this genre, we are comforted in knowing ‘that the evildoers will almost certainly be punished, and measure will be returned for measure’ (p443).

In his memoir On Writing (2000), King says of himself ‘in my character, a kind of wildness and a deep conservatism are wound together like hair in a braid’. One can understand immediately why someone who thinks of himself this way, would be drawn to a form of fiction he finds to be deeply moral, but dressed up to shock. In that same book, King says that he believes in God, but has ‘no use for organised religion’. This has been a theme throughout much of his fiction, beginning — of course — with Carrie White’s fearful, devout mother.

Let’s take this as a starting point, and see what we find.

That’s going to wrap it up for the introduction. I hope you’re half as excited as I am to start reading tomorrow. (Of course, I won’t tell anyone if you start today!) I’ll write to you again next Sunday, 7 July to discuss the first 98 pages of the novel (up to the end of Chapter 10). Until then…

✌🏻

— Adam