vol. 10 issue 2

Fellow readers, how are you getting along? I myself have recovered from the bug with which I was afflicted last week. I heard from a few amongst us who were also suffering with something (which did not make me at all paranoid), and also from IM who was testing positive for COVID — my best, of course, to all of you.

SS wrote in to say how much they were enjoying revisiting the novel, having read its original version back in the late 70s.

My Dad and I had an incredibly small cultural overlap, but King was one. In fact, I remember we both went to see Christine when it came to the cinema in Barnstaple. One of very few occasions I can remember going to see a film with him. Jaws was definitely another!

JC also sent a note, highlighting how apposite this line from p62 felt during the week of a UK general election: ‘Put not your trust in the princes of this world, for they will frig thee up and so shalt their governments, even unto the end of the earth.’

This week, the New York Times unveiled a ‘100 Best Books of the 21st Century’ list, and amongst those who submitted ballots was our author, Stephen King. Long-time Sipped Ink participants may like to know that he voted for Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, which we read together in 2019, and he also selected a Margaret Atwood novel (Oryx and Crake (2003)) — we read her The Blind Assassin (2000) in 2020. None of King’s novels made the final list, though last year’s read-along pick, Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead is in at 61; the aforementioned Tartt features at 46; Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (the subject of 2021’s read-along) is at 42; and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, which we read in 2017 (and almost universally disliked) ranks at six! (Among our previous read-along picks, particularly notable by their absence to my mind, both Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle (2021), and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015) — this latter perhaps because the author, as editor of T, is on the NYT payroll?)

Before we turn to the novel, I wanted to take a moment to note that we lost Shelley Duvall this week. Wonderful in several roles (a personal favourite being her turn in Annie Hall (1977)), she remains indelible for many viewers as Wendy Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of King’s The Shining. RIP Shelley.

OK, turning to this week’s chunk of The Stand. For my money, I had not expected the pre-apocalypse part of the plot to be so extensive. There’s no doubt that the spread of the virus has kicked up a notch since we left off last week. More frequently we’re introduced to new vectors by which it has spread from state to state, now far beyond containable. But, 200 pages in, I thought the continental United States would be a desolate wasteland by now. As it happens however, and as mentioned last week, King is still firmly in the character-building phase of the novel, making sure that readers are suitably invested in the lives of multiple protagonists.

As such, I’m not sure we got much in the way of thematic development this week. To the extent that it seemed present, there’s a good chance that I’m simply guessing at themes that won’t be all that prevalent in the chapters to come. So, take that as a caveat before I talk a little about one theme I did find myself highlighting: oppositional dichotomy.

We know from the back cover of the novel that there will eventually be a pair of post-apocalypse leaders, each with their own conception of what life after societal collapse can look like. Rightly or wrongly, this has led me to look for places in this early section of the text where such choices and contrasts are at play. Last week we looked a little at the choice facing Frannie with respect to her pregnancy. We saw further development on that score this week, and witnessed the fracture it caused at the heart of the family as each member struggled with their convictions. As part of this, we get some insight into Frannie’s feelings about her parents, and — in part — King assays this by giving us her impression of the rooms with which they are most closely associated. On the one hand, there is her father’s workshop: messy, indeed ‘dirty’ in her mother’s telling, and scented with the mix of oil and ‘the phantom smell of her father’s pipe’ (p107). It is a space in which Frannie feels comfortable, despite (and perhaps because) it contains memories of her late brother, whose absence she still feels keenly. It is also a space from which her mother repeatedly attempts to extricate her.

On the other hand we have her mother’s parlour: a place of manners and civility, in which the heirloom grandfather clock sits ‘ticking and tocking off segments of time in a dry age’ (p110), and in which Frannie feels constrained and repressed. This place also contains memories of the late Frank, though they are not memories of his life, but rather of his coffin.

It looks like Frannie is about to lose her mother, and it also feels likely that her father may follow close behind. If Frannie herself is to survive the spreading plague, it will be interesting to witness the manner in which she wrestles with her feelings towards her parents. In such circumstances it is natural to seek a kind of closure or resolution, but the Goldsmiths look set to leave things just about as far apart as they’ve ever been as a family.

In another instance, Col Deitz commits an interesting observation to tape, which may come into play a little later in the novel:

My mother used to say you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar, and I guess I still believe it. (p125)

The other thing I found myself highlighting this week were instances in which characters seem increasingly aware that they are standing at the threshold of something great and terrible.

There is Dr Soames’s professionally informed realisation of the severity of the situation:

I’ve signed twelve death certificates in the last twelve hours. And I know of another twenty that are going to be dead by noon unless God shows mercy. But I doubt if this is God’s doing. I suspect He’ll keep right out of it as a consequence. (p162-3)

I quote this instance in particular because it couples a scientific / medical judgment with an opinion based in religion. I find the contrast particularly interesting as I anticipate more such contrasts as the narrative pushes its characters into ever more dire circumstances.

A more subtle instance of a character anticipating a threshold comes a little later. I found it touching that, as he descends amongst the ruins of Project Blue, Starkey stops to read every announcement on the notice board (p193). Though it’s not explicit in the text, I felt that he does this because normalcy is a breath of fresh air to him in that moment, and — even as he plans his own suicide — he knows that it is soon to be in short supply in the world.

Also this week, we got some character development, and some character introductions. Can I admit to being the slightest bit disappointed to see Poke go? I found the short time we spent with him and Lloyd (the ten pages of Chapter 16) to be some of the most vibrant of the novel thus far. I had all but convinced myself that these two were going to join the ranks of fiction’s great villainous duos (Bonnie & Clyde; Mr Wint & Mr Kidd; Mickey & Mallory; Sweeney Todd & Mrs Lovett et al) before Poke himself got ‘pokerized’. Still, I’m sure we’ll see a lot more of Lloyd in the chapters to come.

Most notably though, we end the week with the introduction of the novel’s antagonist: Randall Flagg. First, we find Stu dreaming of a place he initially feels he ‘ought to get to’ (p122), before he senses a malevolent presence there:

Him he thought. The man with no face. Oh dear God. Oh dear God no. (ibid)

And, seven chapters later, the man himself finally arrives into the novel at p195. I’m sure we’ll have plenty to say about Flagg in the weeks to come, but for now I think it’s worth noting the contrasting style that King takes when introducing him in Chapter 23. There is a more impressionistic, and certainly less grounded, tone to the way Flagg is characterised. Though we are told more about him than perhaps any character, so much of it is textured so as to prove difficult to grasp. We are left with a very definite sense of the character, but relatively few concrete details. Contrast this, for example, with the impressive economy of Chapter 20, in which King exhibits a lightness of touch whilst elucidating Frannie’s own thoughts and feelings, and simultaneously moving forward the relationships between Frannie and Jess, and Frannie with each of her parents.

I write this having woken this morning to news of an assassination attempt made on a former US President. You certainly didn’t sign up for this read-along to hear my thoughts on the political climates of foreign lands, but several Stephen King-related notes come to mind. Firstly, King is known for his vehement dislike of Donald Trump, and has been one of his most high-profile critics on social media since the 2015 announcement of his candidacy. Secondly, King has also been a prominent and persistent voice calling for gun regulation in the US for decades. In 2013, following the Sandy Hook shootings, he published an essay titled ‘Guns’ on the subject. And finally, at least two of King’s novels — The Dead Zone (1979) and 11/22/63 (2011) — feature as a central plot point the assassination of an American President.

Because it amuses me, a few notes on elements in this week’s section of the novel that situate it temporally:

At the end of Chapter 11, Larry goes to see a movie featuring Freddie Kruger. This must have been one of King’s adjustments in the ‘Complete & Uncut’ edition of the novel, because the first A Nightmare on Elm Street wasn’t released until 1984. King has no doubt chosen it because of the series’ central plot device: Kruger’s ability to stalk people in their dreams. This feels relevant enough to The Stand that one wonders whether the makers of A Nightmare on Elm Street were influenced by the original version of the novel, only to have the film series referenced in the 1990 re-worked version!

I do have one hair to split. Larry notices that the ‘movie had a Roman numeral after its name’ (p104), and whilst this means it could be any of the four sequels released before the action of the novel (up to and including A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child), none of the films’ titles features a Roman numerals — they all use Arabic numerals. Tut tut Uncle Steve, I expect better.

Nick’s pining for ‘telephone viewscreens’ (p161) certainly echoes sci-fi works dating from several decades before this novel, but it always strikes me how quickly we accepted video calls as a mode of communication once the technology arrived. We haven’t yet got our teleporters and hoverboards, but FaceTime just… works. Pretty amazing when you think about it.

The mention (at p187) of AIDS as a possible comorbidity factor in the spread of the Project Blue super-flu is another element King must have added in the novel’s revised version, since its first outbreak was in the summer of 1981.

Here’s a good one. Frannie’s joke, which doesn’t land for her father, in which she takes his assertion that ‘flu is flu’ and makes the pun ‘Flu made who’ (p182), is a reference to the AC/DC song ‘Who Made Who’ and/or the album of the same name, released in 1986. The song was written for, and the album is the soundtrack to, the 1986 horror movie Maximum Overdrive, which was written by Stephen King, and is — to date — his sole directing credit. I cannot, in good conscience, recommend that anyone makes an effort to see Maximum Overdrive, but if you’re ever on a flight with limited options and one of them is… actually, just make sure you have a book with you.

In writing to me last week, a couple of people raised the question of whether the several appearances of the N-word in the text is a marker of when it was written. I think there are two questions here. Firstly, why does the word appear in the text? In his ‘memoir of the craft’ On Writing, King dedicates significant space to the importance of ‘authenticity’ in the act of composition. He writes of the frequency with which he has been called out for his use of profanity, blasphemy etc in his work, and cites in defence the imperative that one must represent one’s characters (their dialogue and inner thoughts) honestly:

You must tell the truth if your dialogue is to have […] resonance and realism […] and that holds true all the way down to what folks say when they hit their thumb with the hammer.

So, where homophobic, misogynistic or racial slurs (and the N-word is not the only one; see also this week at p99) appear in the text, they tell us something about the character whose mouth or mind they spring from.

In fairness to those who wrote to me, however, I think they know and accept this. I think they are driving at the second question: textual justification or no, is it more likely that these terms appear in a novel penned in the 1970s than today? I think perhaps that is so. Amongst popular novels, even those set in locales and periods when racist attitudes and language were more outwardly prevalent, I do believe that the editor’s red pen would strike out a good deal more of these words and phrases in the publishing environment of 2024. Whether or not this is a good thing, and how it impacts upon the ‘authenticity’ of those works, I leave to the individual reader.

I mentioned last week that we would, at some point, discuss the first Stephen King novel that I read. Well, no time like the present. As listeners to the previously-linked podcast episode will know, my introduction to King’s work was (at 11 years old) watching the film adaptation of Misery on a flight to California in the summer of 1992. The following year, I picked up the author’s latest novel: Dolores Claiborne (1992).

It’s interesting to me now to think that I encountered King not as an author of ‘horror’, which is — to this day — his reputation, but as the writer of taut psychological thrillers. Neither Misery (a note on that in a future issue) nor Dolores Claiborne contains anything the slightest bit supernatural (unless you count a total eclipse, which, though of our world, seems also somehow magical). The latter is an exceptional character-driven novel in which the titular character comes under suspicion for the murder of the wealthy lady for whom she works as a housemaid and care-giver. I don’t wish to say much more than that, because the book remains one of my favourites from King, and there’s a lot of pleasure to be had in uncovering the mystery for yourself. Tightly paced, at ~300 pages you could fly through it in a weekend. But if that’s not on the cards, you’re in luck: there’s a really pretty great film adaptation from 1995. The casting director on that production knew what they were doing by putting none other than Kathy Bates in the lead role. Not only is she characteristically great, but it gives rise to the frisson of caution in the audience’s mind: could she be as twisted here as she was in Misery?

OK, this is bordering on 3,000 words and we both have other things to be doing with our weekend. I will say goodbye for now, and I will write to you again next Sunday, 21 July, so discuss the novel up to p304 (the end of Chapter 32). Any nightmares you have in the meantime are almost certainly not portentous.

✌🏻

— Adam