vol. 10 issue 12

Fellow readers, we made it. Twelve weeks and more than 1,200 pages — we survived the plague, and lived to read the tale. As befits the final issue of a read-along newsletter, let’s spend a little time thinking about the last ~100 pages, before discussing the novel as a whole.

King has a reputation for imperfect endings to his novels, and that was my experience with The Stand. What transpired over the first half of this week’s reading, I found pretty captivating. To my mind, the resolution of things in Vegas has a poetry to it that pays off admirably. Where the reader may have expected some form of confrontation between the two factions, in the end the lamb simply walks into the wolves’ den, and provides a reason for the wolves to tear themselves apart. Ultimately it’s hubris that renders Flagg’s project in Vegas a failure. In his desperation to prove his own power (including to himself), he insists on gathering all his followers in one place. And then… honestly, without exaggeration, the arrival of the Trashcan Man amongst that crowd was a goosebump-inducing, cheer out loud moment for me. Perhaps more than any other, that’s the image I’ll remember from this novel.

I love the fact that, in the end, chaos begets chaos, such that Flagg and his followers are destroyed by the loosest of loose ends: Donald Merwin Elbert. A few people have written to me since they finished the novel, expressing sympathy and compassion for the Trashcan Man. I think this is entirely by design on King’s part. Where there’s no doubt that Randall Flagg is evil incarnate, Trashy — one of his most loyal followers — is simply a man afflicted by mental illness, easily led astray. That he is ultimately the mechanism by which his would-be puppeteer is destroyed, felt powerful and meaningful, providing the character a measure of redemption.

Likewise, though Ralph may go to his death thinking ‘I just wish I knew what it was all for’ (p1,128), it’s his sacrifice (and Glen’s and Larry’s) that brings the whole of Vegas together in the first place. Proximity may not be entirely necessary in the case of an A-bomb, but it’s the fact that Flagg is before a crowd that makes the rest of it play out the way that it does. Evil is undone by its own over-reaching and will towards domination. All of that worked for me.

Call me unsentimental, but what follows felt a little like diminishing returns. Whilst the image of Stu and Frannie together with a newborn is obviously set in King’s mind as constituting a happy ending he wants to write towards, it takes a little too long to get there. After the drama in Vegas, there was too generous a helping of Stu’s arduous journey back east; by this point any remaining jeopardy (will the baby be alive!?) felt a little empty, and it was just a case of being witness to Stu’s struggles. Now, I say Stu specifically because, as a couple of people have pointed out, once Tom and Kojak (both more interesting characters!) get King’s everyman back to Boulder, they’re pretty much abandoned. Not a slim paragraph is spared to let us know Tom got back to his house OK, adopted Kojak, and invited young Leo Rockway around to play with his toy garage.

Being charitable about it, we know that one of King’s models for The Stand was The Lord of The Rings, and that book famously indulges in too many successive endings once the true jeopardy of Sauron and the One Ring are dispensed with. King’s corrective is to focus on working towards that single image of a couple with a healthy newborn, and that’s understandable. It’s just a shame that it leaves a few threads feeling unfinished.

A handful of small miscellaneous notes before we talk about the novel as a whole:

• Glen Bateman’s assertion that there ‘doesn’t seem to be quite enough Nazi’ in Barry Dorgan (p1,118) put me in mind of this superb essay by Dorothy Thompson, first published in Harper’s Magazine in 1941: ‘Who Goes Nazi?’.

• I don’t understand why King has to invent Rambo IV: The Fire-Fight for Tom and Stu to watch, when it could have been any one of the first three movies.

• At p1,2000 there is a mention of Castle Rock when Frannie is trying to sell Stu on Maine. Unlike many of the novel’s locations, it’s not a real place, but several of King’s stories are set there: including the aforementioned Cujo (1981).

• Towards the very end of The Stand (circa pp1,205-6) there is a sense of King returning to the larger theme of man’s inclination towards violence. As I’ve noted in previous issues, King has been a staunch advocate for gun control for many decades, and it’s telling that the arming of law enforcement represents a tipping point for Stu and Frannie to move away from Boulder. This is another respect in which The Stand mirrors Tolkien, much of whose work was informed by the horrors he witnessed in World War II.

It seems like a losing game to try and summarise my feelings about a 1,200 page novel in a few closing paragraphs. And, indeed, that’s one of the principal reasons why Sipped Ink functions the way it does. Hopefully you don’t arrive to the latter part of this final newsletter issue unsure as to what I thought of the novel. Still, some closing thoughts.

The Stand overall has a shagginess to it. Certainly the subject matter (a post-apocalypse struggle between good and evil) deserves a broad canvas, and yet the middle part of the book feels overly concerned with the rudiments of small government. All of that material helps us get to know characters better, and builds a picture of what is at stake of course, but it doesn’t do much to move the plot forwards, and it feels like the novel spins its wheels for a while. We can’t know for sure of course, but this feels like a symptom of King’s aversion to plotting. After inventing all of these characters, and watching them assemble in Boulder, it feels as though he pens a few chapters without a clear vision for where he’s going. In a previous issue of this newsletter I alluded to a plot point in The Stand of which I was aware going in. It comes from this interview with King from a few years ago, in which he lists The Stand amongst his favourites of his works, but also admits that one of his only experiences of ‘writer’s block’ came when composing it. Having assembled such a large cast of characters, he says he felt unsure of how to progress:

The book stayed on a shelf for about three weeks while I just went for long walks, and tried to figure out what to do with the story. […] And then I remembered something that Raymond Chandler said: “when you don’t know what to do next, bring on the man with the gun.” I thought well, what if someone blows up about half of these troublesome people? I can deal with the ones that are left.

I had been awaiting this moment for much of the novel’s second half, and now I find myself unsure whether it refers to the bombing executed by Harold Lauder (which, after all, only takes a couple of named characters out of the book (and provides Nick Andros the opportunity to play Obi-Wan Kenobi to Tom Cullen, which I thought was quite neat)), or the ‘hand of God’ finale itself. In either case, it’s strong evidence for the novel’s flabby middle being (at least partly) a result of indecision on the author’s part. (Side note: I felt something similar when reading King’s 2009 novel, Under the Dome. At more than 1,000 pages it too wrestles — sometimes in a somewhat ungainly fashion — with an expansive cast of characters trapped in one location.)

That said, I had a great time all told. Stephen King remains one of the authors I find it easiest, and most consistently pleasurable, to read. His pure storytelling prowess, and talent for composition on a scene-by-scene basis is quite extraordinary. Only when one looks back at the thing as a whole is there cause to question whether some of the choices made really paid off. There’s certainly part of me that would like to return to the beginning, and meet some of the cast all over again, knowing about them what I now do.

Finally, let’s close the loop on the framing I introduced twelve weeks ago. Do we feel that The Stand played into the function Stephen King laid out for horror fiction in Danse Macabre: to reinforce the established moral order, by punishing the wicked and showing that their actions go unrewarded? In broad strokes this looks like the case: Flagg gets vaporised; Stu and Frannie walk off into the sunset with little Peter. In the details things get a little messier. For example, we might question whether all of those assembled in Vegas deserve to share Flagg’s fate. Likewise, we (and Stu) note the first signs that the Boulder Free Zone might be on a dangerous path as it continues to grow.

And what of that short epilogue? In my reading it serves one primary purpose, which is made explicit in its closing lines. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned how King employs the concept of ‘ka’ in his Dark Tower stories, to allude to something like the soul / fate / karma. One of the most famous formulations in those works is that ‘ka is a wheel’, and we see the same thing here in The Stand. Not only is the main action of the novel bracketed by pages proclaiming ‘THE CIRCLE OPENS’ and ‘THE CIRCLE CLOSES’, but the final words of the novel are reserved for making sure the reader understands that happily ever after is strictly for fairy tales.

I’ve enjoyed including these recommendations in the weekly email, and I hope that some of you have maybe made a note of a title or two to investigate in the future. My final pick is quite simple, and perhaps expected: On Writing (2000) is arguably one of King’s most celebrated works. I’ve seen it quoted by writers of all stripes in the last two decades, and for good reason. Part autobiography, and part guidance on the craft of writing, it’s as readable as anything he’s ever penned, and provides both a fascinating glimpse at King’s writing life, and an indispensable primer on writing fiction that — for my money — is unmatched in its straight-forward approach.

If you have any interest in either King as a man, or the practice of writing, I wholeheartedly recommend it.

As a little bonus, here’s a recent interview with King celebrating his 50 year career. (I particularly enjoyed his answer regarding critics who initially regarded him as an unserious writer.)

Before I sign off, a piece of recent King news that may be of interest: The Life of Chuck won the People’s Choice Award at this year’s Toronto Film Festival. It’s an adaptation — with a pretty great cast, led by Tom Hiddleston, and directed by serial King-adaptor Mike Flanagan — of a story from the 2020 collection If It Bleeds, and I’m very keen to see what they’ve done with it.

And so — 24,715 words from me later — that’s it. Thank you so very much for sticking with me, and for reading The Stand by my side these last three months. Judging from many of the notes I’ve received (you can just hit reply to this email), most readers have enjoyed the ride, and a few have even been introduced to an author they had previously written off as not being for them. What more could I possibly ask for?

Happy birthday Mr King, and farewell fellow reader.

✌🏻

— Adam