vol. 10 issue 3

Fellow readers, I hope you’ve had a good week, and have enjoyed how The Stand has started to unfold for us. Recently, MC dropped me a note with this line from Cormac McCarthy’s late novel The Passenger (2022): ‘I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.’ That’s why we’re here, so let’s get to it.

This time around I primarily want to talk specifically about one chapter from this week’s section of The Stand, and also drop a note about a quirk of Stephen King’s writing style. First though, a couple of thoughts on the burgeoning shape of the novel as a whole.

Last week I noted Stuart Redman’s ominous dream (p122), and FB wrote in to point out that I should also have included mention of Nick Andros’s earlier, similar dream in Chapter 18:

He dreamed oddly, and all he could remember upon waking was that he seemed to have been walking through endless rows of green corn, looking for something and terribly afraid of something else that seemed to be behind him. (p160)

It’s been my experience over the last ~150 of the book, that the threads are really starting to multiply, and are not (yet) entangling as I had perhaps expected them to. This week we witnessed Nick (in Chapter 25) have another similar dream, and Frannie (in Chapter 28) also similarly afflicted. These eerie harbingers are binding the novel’s plot-lines across distance, as does the pandemic nature of the super-flu, impacting each in their own way, but sparing no one entirely. And wasn’t that our collective experience of our own pandemic? For an extended period of time it was impossible to speak with anyone whose life hadn’t been altered in some way by the spread of the disease, and the measures in place to contain it. Turning on the news, or coverage of a sporting event happening half a globe away, you were repeatedly confronted with the reality that this thing was big enough to touch pretty much everyone, everywhere.

At 300 pages into this novel, it still genuinely feels to me as though we’re in the phase of getting to know our characters and setting their individual plots in motion. The promise of the narrative is that each of these parts will at some point comprise a whole, but to me thus far it still feels much like King is juggling a good number of balls, and we readers are also tasked with keeping them straight one chapter to the next.

That said, this week it did feel as though we witnessed a significant step forwards in the spreading of the disease. And, in fact, King chooses to pan his authorial camera back quite some ways to show the scope.

In all, Chapter 26 is something quite different to much of the novel thus far, and represents an interesting formal solution to the problem of narrativising something as massive in scale as the spread of a viral pandemic. King introduces the idea of (ineffectual) control measures, and also the reactions to them. It was interesting to me that the first instances of protest are couched in political language. Unconsciously, perhaps influenced by my expectations of where the novel might be heading, I had expected King to foreground religious push-back.

We move from the campus protest, to an armed counter-insurgency at the WBZ-TV studio, in which the on-air talent wrestle back control of the message being broadcast, by force.

Next King turns his eye to the print media, giving us the story of the Durbin Call-Clarion, before moving on to the Los Angeles Times. In each of these brief glimpses we are witness to the efforts of individuals to break through the noise of the official story, to communicate the truth. In amongst them, King inserts the figure of a man with ash on his forehead and a ‘hand-lettered sandwich board’ (p232) proclaiming the imminent arrival of the end times. By way of juxtaposition, the reader is asked to assess the veracity of each of these messages and their respective messengers.

Next we move on to radio broadcasts, and the tale of Ray Flowers on KLFT, opening the phone lines to the truth one last time, and getting shot by the military for doing so. That the lower-ranking officers immediately turn their weapons on Sergeant Peters is both narratively satisfying and further indication (if we needed any) that all attempts at control are doomed to fail. At this point in the novel, every formerly sound structure is fraying.

An apotheosis of sorts is reached in those pages (c pp236–41) laying out radio communications between various military outposts. King chooses not to show us the massacre of the marching students directly, instead giving us responses to it as it unfolds. Much like the aforementioned nightmares, there is a pervasive sense of powerlessness as these officers (and we as readers) witness this avoidable tragedy first simmer, and then spill over.

It is followed by a sequence in which a series of voices claim that they have asserted authority, before swiftly being proven wrong — further evidence of the impossibility of controlling the new normal, which continues to spiral further into entropy.

(I don’t intend to do a lengthy ‘things were different in the 1970-90s’ section this week, but I did find myself wondering how different this chapter would have to be if the action of the novel was set today. Consider the ways in which King might have exploited the idiosyncrasies of the current communications landscape — primarily, of course, the internet and social media. Think of how your own experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic were shaped by those media as methods of both receiving and sharing information.)

The chapter ends with a speech from the President of the United States ‘not seen in many areas’ (p245). It is rife with falsehoods, undercut by the frequency with which the speaker breaks into ‘a spasm of coughs and sneezes’ (ibid). A short coda, in the form of graffiti on a church, makes clear that few people remain under the illusion that those (formerly) in power have sought to maintain.

A little later, when Frannie speaks of the possibility of ‘[s]omebody in authority’ coming to ‘put things back in order’ (p272), we know that she no longer thinks it at all likely.

Stephen King is a voracious reader, and readers of his own work know how he enjoys introducing literary allusions. Sometimes this involves foisting a knowledge of literature or poetry upon characters whom you might not expect to possess it. Earlier in the novel we saw an instance of this when (at p191) General William Starkey — by his own admission not a bookworm — is able to quote verbatim sections of Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ (1920).

This week’s section of the novel contained several such instances. Stuart Redman — another non-bookish type — recalls (c p280) how he found himself unexpectedly entranced by a copy of Richard Adams’s Watership Down (1972) intended for his nephew. And Frannie, even in the grip of grieving her newly-dead father, reaches first (at p263) for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and then (at p267) William Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily’ (1930) as ways to explain her situation to herself. This isn’t just King showing off how heavily used his library card is. In each case, it reads to me like a writer acknowledging that someone else who picked up a pen before him, explained a given sentiment about as well as it can be said. Such a wonderful thing is the shared cultural inheritance (of which Cormac McCarthy speaks, above) that sometimes, the most effective way to explain a disorientation, is to refer to Alice down the rabbit hole.

Once you start looking for these things, you’ll spot them everywhere in King’s work. Direct reference to other texts is plentiful, but so too are more covert inclusions. As one example, the description (at p237) of the evening ‘spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table’ is a couplet lifted directly from T S Eliot’s masterful 1917 poem ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’. If Uncle Steve thought he could slide that pitch by me, he bet wrong. But my assumption is the opposite: King put that there especially to engender a spark of recognition in those who will recognise it. As a result the text is richer; it makes us wonder what else we might uncover if we truffle around for it.

One must be careful with these lines of enquiry however, lest one finds oneself going too far. I’ll let each of you judge for yourselves whether this otherwise innocuous line of description (from p288), is in fact an allusion to William Carlos Williams’s poem ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ (1923):

A red wagon, old and faded and rusty, the words SPEEDAWAY EXPRESS barely legible on its sides, stood in the middle of Durgin Street (p288)

A couple of brief notes to round things out.

I very much enjoyed Larry Underwood’s encounter with Rita Blakemoor, including the latter’s astute observation that her diamonds are ‘only rocks again’ (p258) — such a wonderful encapsulation of the manner in which society and its norms have begun to evaporate away completely.

I also thought the strawberry pie transition from Chapter 27 to Chapter 28 was cute — something like a cinematic cross-cut, which it feels as though King is employing for fun, or perhaps in tacit admission that he has a good number of plates spinning at this point in the novel.

If you want to do some language analysis with this section of the text, you could do worse than looking at how King portrays Frannie’s slipping sanity in Chapter 28 (affected by her grief, isolation and wider circumstances) by employing rhymes and alliteration. Contrast this with the showy vocabulary and too-familiar, try-hard speaking style of the odious Harold Lauder.

If you’ll permit me, the briefest recommendation for another of Stephen King’s works. I’ve heard from a couple amongst our readership who have already finished The Stand, and may be in need of new reading material. I’ll make it quick, because I’ve already written (and spoken) about this one at some length. It will suffice to say that if you only know Annie Wilkes from Kathy Bates’s (admittedly excellent) portrayal in the 1990 film adaptation, you are missing out. I suggested last week that Misery (1987) makes an excellent reading accompaniment to Dolores Claiborne (1992), and I’ll reaffirm that here. The later novel (which I recommended last issue) is gentler, where the tension in Misery is often ratcheted way up. It’s another 300 page gem of a thriller, and it plays out a little differently than even fans of the film might expect.

That’s what I have for you this week. I will write to you again next Sunday, to discuss the novel up to the end of Chapter 40 on page 402. Let’s hope Lloyd can get out of that cell without having to resort to munching on a raw rat!

🐀✌🏻

— Adam