vol. 10 issue 11

But, fellow readers, will we ever see Stu Redman again? It’s a calculated form of words on which Stephen King ends this week’s reading, leaving open the fates of all parties involved. Judging from the body count during the last ~100 pages of the novel, we can be fairly assured that not everyone will make it out alive.

Here in the final stretch of The Stand, we’ve witnessed the complicating of some of the established power dynamics. Some things we might have previously thought we understood to be true, have been called into question. It’s interesting to me that (perhaps in service of a resolution) King has introduced a greater degree of doubt into the text, rather than starting to answer its questions.

First let’s touch on the demise of Harold Lauder. No sooner has he performed his function — cause destruction in Boulder; get Nadine out of there — than Flagg discards him as extraneous. If we think all the way back to the question we raised in the introductory issue of this newsletter, we can read the second half of Harold’s arc as conforming to a sense of moral justice. He made a deal with the devil (or near enough), and he paid the price. As King suggests in that section of Danse Macabre from which I pulled, this is a common trope of genre fiction: the character who acts selfishly, and seeks power by nefarious means, is revealed to have misunderstood the bargain he had entered into. Indeed, such a character arc predates paperback fiction by millennia — a straight line can be drawn through Elizabethan drama (eg Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (c. 1592)) and back to the Greek and Roman tragedies of several centuries BC. It endures, perhaps, because it is comforting to us as an audience to see bad deeds repaid with bad ends. We do not like the idea that a liar, cheater and doer of all manner of evil, can prosper. Such is our aversion to this concept, that it is one of the universal cornerstones of religious belief that even a marvellous mortal life gotten via ill means, cannot shield the miscreant from judgment after death.

Readers of genre fiction are not so pious as to wait however: we wish to see the man who killed Nick Andros suffer for his misdeeds. And, when we do, I found it interesting that King offers us the opportunity to believe what we wish about Harold’s state of mind in his final hours. When, facing death, he puts pen to paper in confession and apology (pp1,023-5) the reader has the option of pitying Harold for discovering too late the true nature of his bargain, and / or continuing to loathe him for what he hath wrought. There are those amongst the Boulder crew who would stop short of blaming Lauder for what he did, sure instead that he was just one of several pieces moved by the dark man’s hand. But that way of thinking also got more complicated this week.

As noted in previous issues, we spent the bulk of our time in the Boulder Free Zone for several hundred pages, and I read that partly as King keeping his villain out of sight so as to retain the mystique and sense of menace. As we approach the finish line, that strategy has been set aside in favour of showing more of Flagg up close, and the results are interesting. Where the late Mother Abagail was always quite clear that she was a servant of God, and a mortal woman (even if in unusually long standing), Randall Flagg has been content to leave uncorrected any misapprehensions amongst his followers (and enemies alike) that might hold him to be omniscient and all powerful. King too has left this question open throughout the novel, but — whilst I’m relatively certain we won’t be presented with a definitive answer — he has begun to tip his cards a little here at the end.

First we get the hazily glimpsed recollections that suggest Flagg was once a mortal man, and also that ‘the trappings of humanity’ (p1,028) had been stripped away from him. This, of course, begs the question of who or what performed the stripping, and to what end.

A little later, during the horrific consummation of his ‘marriage’ to Nadine Cross, there is a suggestion that Flagg’s true form is exposed: ‘the shaggy face of a demon’ with ‘a lolling tongue deeply split’ (p1,035). This thing at the core of Flagg is described as ‘[o]lder than mankind, older than the earth’, speaking once more to that theme I’ve raised previously, of forces older and more elemental than the ephemeral structures of human society.

Across the week’s reading we’ve also seen Lloyd struggle with what it means that Flagg’s power has been revealed to be finite. He doesn’t get the Judge as he had wanted; Dayna escaped him into death, as now has Nadine; and worse (?) Tom Cullen escaped his eye altogether. Like all cults of personality, there is little appetite amongst adherents for flaws in their chosen idol. Where these come to light, the first line of defence is denial. When that fails to cut it, the choices get tougher. We’ve heard of folks abandoning Flagg and Vegas, and we’ve seen the dilemma eating at poor Lloyd, who is especially burdened by the sense that he owes the dark man his freedom and his life.

We have known from the start of The Standthat it was exceedingly likely that good would triumph over evil; such is the way of fiction. Unclear as it has been to this point quite how the folks of Mother Abagail’s flock might prevail, the above has cast the matter into further, fascinating doubt for us this week.

Elsewhere in this portion of the novel, we witnessed the Trashcan Man near a kind of apotheosis, though interestingly it comes after he too faces a moment of choice. We saw Harold Lauder plagued by pangs of conscience, each time electing to further pursue the course he had already set upon: further into jealousy, greed, hatred and the dark man’s control. For Trash, the clouds part for an instant just as he has completed the work of rigging all the machinery at Indian Springs to explode. There is the briefest caesura in which he realises the nature of his actions — ‘It was senseless, insane. He would undo it, and quickly.’ (p1,069) — before his mind escapes him once more and he succumbs to the allure of fire and destruction and the inexorable descent.

We might find ourselves wondering whether the being now known as Randall Flagg ever faced such a moment of choice. Especially if we now have reason to suspect that he was once a mortal man, was his transformation — the peeling away of his humanity — irresistibly forced upon him, or did he too accept or decide upon it? After all, amongst those aspects that it is suggested were stripped from his mortal guise, is ‘possibly even free will… if there ever had been such a thing’ (p1,028).

And we must also check in with the good guys, of course. Tom Cullen bravely makes his way back east, as the four horsemen (and one… horse-hound?) of the Boulder Free Zone head steadily west. Much of the dialogue between this latter group is consumed with wrestling over their purpose, and what — if any — higher power asks if of them. I think King does a good job of introducing questions here, without either weighing the text down in philosophy or making his characters’ personalities subordinate to the roles they play in the dialogue. It would be easier to have Stu or Ralph play the everyman and Glen Bateman the unbelieving sociologist, and have them act as little more than mouthpieces for a discourse on the nature of faith and free will. Instead — to my mind at least — King keeps the reader’s interest at the level of character, and allows the nuance of their relationships to play out the argument.

You’re just going to have to take my word on this, but Glen raises a theory this week that more-or-less mirrors one I had considered positing in an earlier issue of this newsletter. As Mr Bateman would have it (circa p1,093) the purging process that they are collectively undergoing is charging the ‘batteries’ of their human souls (though he stops short of using that word). This is part of the larger conversation around the role biological extremity (eg starvation) plays in religious revelation, but Glen’s point is distinct. A couple of weeks ago, I found myself wondering whether one explanation for the increased frequency of (kinda sorta) psychic phenomena amongst the survivors of the superflu, was simply that the world had been emptied out. Perhaps without the incalculable psychic noise of our everyday lived experiences, many of us would be better attuned to frequencies that are otherwise so muffled as to be undetectable. I could be grasping at straws here, but I think Stephen King suggests as much in this scene. It’s subtle, but it comes in two parts. First, there is the seemingly comic inclusion of Kojak’s response to Glen asking if the dog understands he is (in their new formulation) a ‘battery’: King writes, ‘Kojak didn’t appear to know or care’ (p1,096). Second, there is the moment in which two of the men comment upon the lemon under-taste of animal crackers. Larry says, ‘I remember that from being a kid. Never noticed it again until now’ (ibid). Taken together — and not to get too ‘tree of knowledge’ / ‘original sin’ about it — there’s the merest hint of an idea here that animals and children see the world most clearly, where adult perception is clouded by accrued bias and misunderstanding.

We end the week confronting much the same question as we’ve already raised here. Is Stu Redman’s fate the will of some higher power, or ‘just loose dirt’ (p1,103)? I’m not sure we’re going to get much in the way of firm answers, but there’s only one way to find out.

This being the penultimate issue of our newsletter, this week’s recommendation is one I’ve been saving. To date, my favourite Stephen King reading experience — and one of my favourite ever reading experiences, full stop — came when I was fifteen years old, hanging on every word of The Green Mile (1996).

As you might remember, I’d read a few of King’s novels at that point, starting with Dolores Claiborne (1992), which we discussed back in issue 2. I also vividly remember buying a yellow-jacketed hardback copy of Rose Madder (1995) in my home town’s branch of John Menzies. But it was around the corner, on Saint Peter’s Street, that I picked up The Green Mile in the spring of 1996. There was an independent bookshop there for a while, named The Paperback Exchange, and (as proved essential) I was on good terms with the staff.

The Green Mile was something of a publishing experiment for King, modelled after Victorian novels such as those of Charles Dickens. It was originally published in six volumes, each around 100 pages, between Mar–Aug 1996. I picked up that first slim paperback as quickly as I could, and then became increasingly desperate for each new instalment throughout the course of the summer. On the last Thursday of each month, I tore down to Paperback Exchange just as soon as I could, for the next instalment. By the third volume the staff had agreed to keep a copy behind the counter for me. By the fourth volume I was waiting outside the door when they opened. And, ahead of the final volume, they had let me know (with a wink) that they actually received the delivery of new books on a Wednesday afternoon…. It’s a little thing, but I’ll never forget picking up the sixth and final part of The Green Mile — in an under the counter cash transaction — a day early. I read it in one gulp, and felt like I was in on a secret.

You may well have seen the 1999 film adaptation. It’s pretty good! Tom Hanks, Michael Clarke Duncan and James Cromwell are all well cast, and Frank Darabont’s direction doesn’t feel too much as though he’s reaching to re-bottle the lightning of his other prison-based King adaptation: The Shawshank Redemption (1994). If you haven’t, and if you’re inclined to take one recommendation from me this whole summer, I strongly suggest you read The Green Mile. It’s a wonderful novel, and one I have felt torn about revisiting for decades. (How could it possibly contain the same magic that it did for me as a fifteen year old?) If you’re in a position to read it for the first time, I strongly recommend that you do, but I’m also a little envious!

Thanks to AB for sending this photo from their holiday, on which two fellow readers are currently working hard to catch up. I believe in you both. What else could there possibly be to do in Verona anyway?

If you have photos or comments you’d like to share on The Stand and your experience reading it, send them my way during the week. There will be one last email from me, and it’ll arrive a day earlier than usual! Stephen King’s 77th birthday is this coming Saturday, 21 July and that’s when you’ll receive the final email of this read-along. We’ll talk about how this whole thing pans out. Until then, I could go for some animal crackers.

✌🏻

— Adam