vol. 10 issue 1

Fellow readers, what did we make of our first week of reading? As it happens, I undertook most of it whilst suffering the effects of a summer head-cold, which made for an interesting reading experience.

I was intrigued by the structure that we’ve seen unfolding thus far. The short opening section, in medias res, has an almost cinematic quality. We witness the dramatic escape from containment that we know (from the novel’s back cover) will precipitate disaster, and it ends on that foreboding little detail of Charlie Campion’s coughing. The first chapter proper (part of it set this very week in 1990) immediately kills off everyone we’ve met thus far, and introduces us to a new set of characters, whom we have good reason to suspect may not be long for this world. Taken together, this opening section contains the most ‘incident’ of the week’s reading. The next few chapters, by comparison, take us to more pedestrian settings, introducing us to a larger cast. Each is under the weight of their own struggles, be it unplanned pregnancy, getting robbed and beaten up outside a bar, or unexpected success exposing the weaknesses of one’s character. With each new person we meet, we can’t help but ask ourselves whether they will survive the coming plague, and if so how.

Upon reaching Chapter 8, King turns to a different cinema-adjacent technique, editing together a compelling montage, which shows the beginnings of how the virus is spread: invisibly, person-to-person, the number of infected multiplying exponentially. There are hints here of the devastation to come, such as when King looks up from the linear chain he’s linking together, to note when two characters pass on ‘the sickness which would soon be known across the disintegrating country as Captain Trips’ (p81).

Also worth noting: after almost 100 pages, there’s not a hint of anything supernatural. Perhaps the rampant spread of a deadly virus might have seemed as much back when the novel was first published, but that’s certainly not the case to the modern reader. King’s debut novel Carrie (1974) ran to fewer than 200 pages, and the next two (Salem’s Lot (1975) and The Shining (1977)) were each in the mid 400s. The author’s project with The Stand was confessedly to write something in the way of an epic, and that only partly comes down to page count. It’s also about scope (see here our burgeoning list of players and growing number of locales), and pace. It has long been one of King’s most effective techniques to place recognisably ordinary people into extraordinary circumstances, and see how they cope. Painting on as large a canvas as this, it is worth noting that the author is taking his time to build the reader’s investment in the real-feeling side of the equation, before introducing anything that requires suspension of disbelief.

As such, it’s also far too early of course to start analysing the novel’s themes, particularly against the rubric I laid out in my introductory email wherein horror fiction is seen as hewing strictly to morality when its fright wig is peeled off, Scooby Doo style. It feels worth it to lay some ground work though, and I do have a couple of things that I noted this week that feel as though they could possibly become larger themes in the novel.

The densest locus of this stuff, it seemed to me, came in one dollop in Chapter 6. There’s no doubt that King is introducing his characters by way of showcasing their struggles for a reason. Nothing reveals our true natures more quickly than the manner with which we handle adversity. Placing characters under pressure is a neat shortcut to showing the reader who they are at their core. In the early going of an apocalypse novel, such as The Stand, it also serves the purpose of setting the stakes for the various characters. Nowhere has this been clearer thus far than in the case of Frannie Goldsmith’s unplanned pregnancy. Her conversation with her father contains the strongest dose of moral argument we saw this week. It begins with the details around her brother’s death at age thirteen:

The man who hit Fred had been drunk. He had a long list of traffic violations, including speeding, driving so as to endanger, and driving under the influence. (p68)

There is, this incident makes crystal clear, no such thing as natural justice in the world of this novel, even before a plague is visited upon the population. It seems surpassingly likely, that as things move along, some of the big questions our survivors will find themselves asking will revolve around this topic. Why did this happen? Why was I spared? Whether or not these questions are asked within a religious context will likely depend upon the person doing the asking. Here, King introduces these threads in an interesting way. First by setting up opposing reactions to the question of Frannie potentially seeking an abortion. And second, by having Peter Goldsmith draw an equivalence between his son’s accidental death, and the deliberate termination of a pregnancy. His wife, he states, would ‘argue against it for all the standard reasons. Morality, she’d say. A morality that goes back two thousand years’ (ibid). But, despite his reading being the wider, and immersion in philosophy being the deeper, ‘it’s me that ends up arguing from feeling’ (p69).

This passage felt a little clunky to me, perhaps because it stood out as such a dense knot of philosophising, but I can let that slide because of how obviously it feels that the author is here introducing questions that will have increased importance later. I guess we’ll find out whether I’m right about that.

Participants in last year’s read-along may like to know that Stephen King is a sometime bandmate of Demon Copperhead author Barbara Kingsolver: the two have occasionally played together as part of the loose ensemble, The Rock Bottom Remainders. Towards the beginning of his memoir On Writing (2000), King recounts a conversation he had with one of their mutual bandmates: Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club (1989). In response to him asking what question she wished she received from interviewers, but which never seemed forthcoming, Tan responded “no one ever asks about the language”. King — at least at that point in his career – agrees, noting that such questions are reserved for the authors of literature (the DeLillos and Updikes of the world in his example) and not the writers of popular novels.

Let’s do our due diligence then, and spend a little time each week looking at some of the language.

Early in Chapter 2, the same explanations for Frannie’s pregnancy are given twice in very similar language:

Somebody in the quality control department at the jolly old Ovril factory had been asleep at the switch. (p22)

somebody in the quality control department of the jolly old Ovril factory was asleep at the switch when my batch of pills went by on the conveyer belt (p25)

The first is part of Frannie’s internal thought process — her anxious mind spinning, retreading the same possible explanations for the umpteenth time. The second instance is dialogue: Frannie, having rehearsed this language in her mind several times, performs it for Jess like lines she’s learned for a play. Note that she has to add a little detail for his benefit, to fill out the picture she has in her mind, of an inattentive Ovril employee sat before a conveyer belt.

I also highlighted some of the malapropisms and poorly-grasped words used in Vic Palfrey’s interior monologue: ‘bobwire’ (p72), ‘sanny-tarium’ and ‘fambly’ (p73). It’s an effective, unobtrusive way for the author to show you (rather than tell you) something of Vic’s education level, and perhaps personality.

In general, I think it’s also worth paying attention to the linguistic differences between each of the different lead characters’ chapters. Consider for instance the qualities of Nick’s POV: as he is Deaf, King introduces a heightened level of more specific detail about the concrete facts of his surroundings, and fewer impressions. I found this particularly interesting when — at the very end of this week’s reading — Larry seems to start experiencing a heightened visual sense, and wonders whether he is ‘going crazy’.

Something I’ve been keeping my eye on whilst reading is King’s decision, when revising the novel into its current ‘Complete & Uncut’ guise in 1990, to time-shift the setting forward to the 1990s. For the most part thus far this has been almost invisible, to the extent that one wonders why he didn’t just retain the original 70s setting. Perhaps that will change as we go on.

However, relatedly, a couple of miscellaneous things that might be of use, particularly to the younger readers amongst us:

The ’Dr Spock’ mentioned at p36 is not related to the half-Vulcan first officer of the USS Enterprise, but is rather the author of The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, a best-selling guide that has been in print continuously since 1946.

The explanation of the functioning of a ‘chain letter’ (p82) reads as pretty quaint, and probably stands on its own. It is striking though, how this one simile for the virus’s spread dates the novel more than perhaps any other single element from this week’s section of the text. To those who do not recall (or never knew) a world before email: this primitive-sounding snail mail pyramid scheme was a real thing. In more recent times it has mutated into any of the more virulent phishing scams and crypto cons you care to name.

As mentioned in the introductory email, I thought it might be nice to finish each of these weekly despatches with a note on other works by Stephen King that have brought me joy in the past. This week, the briefest of comments on the author’s debut novel, Carrie.

Famously, King abandoned Carrie after only a few chapters, and it fell to his wife Tabitha to pull it out of the bin and insist that he carry on with it because she wanted to know what happened next. What better encouragement could a storyteller ask for? It went on to be the sort of colossal success that King, as a struggling writer previously only published in horror magazines, could not even have dreamed of.

Carrie is one of the very few novels that I read in a single sitting. It wasn’t my first Stephen King novel (we’ll get there), but once I was under the author’s spell, it quickly made my shortlist of titles to check out. It’s difficult to know whether or not to recommend Carrie to new King readers. Certainly it contains much of the promise of his storytelling talent, and is a strong enough tale in and of itself. But in significant ways it’s something of an outlier. For one thing, it’s an epistolary novel pieced together from multiple vantage points, which is uncommon for King. Perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t feature any characters for whom one can really cheer. By King’s own admission, he never managed to render a likeable version of Carrie White. The reader may empathise with her struggles (bullied at school; ostracised; tormented by a religious zealot mother), and may even feel some catharsis in the revenge Carrie seeks, but — much like her creator – the reader is unlikely to like Carrie White much. This is something King quickly remedies in his fiction, and most readers of his work will find at least one likeable central character anchoring his subsequent novels.

OK, that’s everything for this week. Remember, you can always hit reply on this email and let me know your thoughts on the book. I will write to you again next Sunday, 14 July, to discuss the novel up to p200 — the end of Chapter 23.

Hope you’re well!

✌🏻

— Adam