vol. 10 issue 5

Fellow readers, how are you? It’s been quite the week, as our merry band of post-apocalyptic travellers make their ways forward. Towards what? That remains to be seen. Away from whom? Well, that kind of also remains to be seen. Stephen King is evidently enjoying playing with the metaphors that he’s conjuring as we get into the middle part of this novel, and I’ve found myself inescapably analysing certain scenes and relationships, trying to peer beneath the surface to see what might actually be at play. We’ll get into some of that, and you can judge for yourself whether or not I’ve (almost literally) lost the plot.

Mostly, however, this week I’d like to give some consideration to further developments in the vein of societal reconstruction, as decried by Glen Bateman. It strikes me that, amidst the wasteland he has brought forth, King is now developing his characters and moving his plot forwards primarily by showcasing interactions between people. We’re learning more about our characters based largely on how they treat each other.

Item one on my ‘potentially paranoid / reading too much into this’ list, is the construction of some of these pairings - and, with some regularity to begin with, they do seem to be pairs. I’ve already written a little about Harold & Frannie and Larry & Betsy. This week we got Nick & Tom and Nadine & Joe. Consider these last two pairs for a moment. In both cases communication is a problem: Nick being unable to speak or hear, and Tom living with a learning disability; Joe seemingly having regressed to a younger mental age, his English limited. Perhaps this is simply King seeking to keep things interesting for himself, or… maybe it has plot implications? If you’re like me, you’re still reading the novel with the question constantly in your mind: how / why did these particular people survive? The scientific explanation, of course, would be in some quirk of genetics that granted immunity to the Project Blue super-flu. But, if our acquaintance Glen Bateman is on to something, the release of the virus isn’t simply a result of human error, but is in fact pre-ordained in some fashion. And then there’s the personage of Randall Flagg, and — to a lesser extent, thus far — Mother Abigail, and the dreams in which both are broadcast to survivors. These things also suggest that there’s something more pre-destined or orchestrated at work. In which case, we must ask whether there is purpose in these particular individuals having survived.

Depending on how invested you are in the above line of thought, you may have found yourself wondering this week whether we’re witnessing some of Glen Bateman’s prophesied societal discord in action. Perhaps the happiest we saw anyone this week was a brief moment on our first page, in which Larry is on his own on Independence Day, thinking about the sheer possibility that the emptying out of the world has presented:

No problems, except which way you were going tomorrow and how much time you could make. It was pretty wonderful. (p403)

He doesn’t know, of course, that he’s about to discover that he is now very alone, Rita having taken her own life in the night. Across the course of the week’s reading, we’ve seen Larry struggle first with his recurrent loneliness, and later in the company of people. Consider what each of these relationships brings forth in Larry. We’re witness to the persistent doubt he carries with him: the sense, planted by friends, family and lovers of the past, that he is at core a selfish, broken person. We known him to be quick to anger, and the text has given us glimpses into the effort that he must make to refrain from letting that anger control him. It should not escape our attention that it is normally women at whom Larry directs his anger most quickly.

Speaking of which, let’s switch our attention to Nick Andros. One of the novel’s most sympathetic characters thus far, Nick has formerly been something of a nice guy. We saw that get complicated this week. First he befriends Tom Cullen, whose companionship frustrates Nick in no small part because of the aforementioned communication problems: Nick relies upon writing; Tom can’t read. There is a moment in which Nick considers leaving Tom behind, but his decision not to quickly pays off when Tom’s instincts save them both from a tornado. (Side note: I found this scene, in which Nick senses the dark man’s presence in both the storm and the storm cellar, to be very effective!) Later, the two run into a third: Julie Lawry.

Here I feel as though I need to insert a note about some of the choices I’ve noticed King making when it comes to describing characters. In a previous issue we discussed the presence of the N-word in the text, and I argued that it was a valid inclusion where it reflected (and hopefully taught us about) the mind / personality of the character whose speech or internal monologue it appeared. If we’re feeling generous, perhaps we can extend this explanation to some of the depictions of women and minorities we’ve encountered in the novel of late. You may have noticed, as I have, that where an introductory to a male character might comprise a description of his clothes, age and perhaps stature, first appearances (and often subsequent appearances) of female characters almost invariably include some assessment of their attractiveness, with or without description of related physical attributes. Here, I’m less inclined to allow King the excuse that these are the thoughts going through his male narrators’ heads. That may or may not be true, but it seems more likely to me that King (particularly at this point in his life (early 30s) and career) has a difficult time writing women. This is not uncommon amongst male authors, and frequently presents as objectification or over-sexualisation. Thinking back on The Stand so far, I’m not sure that the first 500 pages would clear the embarrassingly low bar of the Bechdel test, which calls for two named female characters to converse about something other than a man. I’ve written about this elsewhere with respect to other male authors (even some I admire, such as Haruki Murakami), and don’t wish to belabour the point here. I just found it particularly noticeable during this week’s reading that the first appearances of both Julie and Nadine are alarmingly gendered.

In the latter case, it is not long after Larry makes her acquaintance that he is assessing Nadine’s appearance, and considering trying to sleep with her. When it comes to Nick and Julie, things are… worse. In a matter of a few pages, things move from Nick mistaking Julie for a mannequin in a drug store, to them having sex before even leaving the room in which they meet. Now, any combination of the arguments I’ve introduced above could be in play here, and I don’t think we currently have the information required to discern the mix. How much is this a case of King failing to write a well-rounded female character who is something other than a sexual object? To what extent is the characterisation of Julie impacted by her being seen through the lens of Nick’s male gaze? Or, particularly given how badly (former nice guy) Nick quickly comes to treat Julie, is there something more at play here, plot wise? Personally, I found the whole Nick and Julie sequence so bizarre that I found myself scribbling down the note: ‘is Julie real?’. She seemed like such a caricature, and the shift in Nick’s personality so extreme, that I began wondering whether Julie was in fact an instantiation of the novel’s dark forces. If they couldn’t carry Nick off in a tornadic storm, perhaps they could seduce him in the form of a young woman?

Stopping short of that interpretation, we can also read the encounter with Julie as another instance of the Glen Bateman maths: more people = more problems. Nick and Tom are doing alright before they meet her. As mentioned above, Nick has chosen Tom’s company over isolation, and he’s rewarded for the decision. Almost as soon as his internal monologue introduces the idea of meeting a third, who could help communicate between them, so Julie appears. But things go badly, quickly.

It’s a similar story with Harold, Frannie and Stu. The former pair are going along nicely enough, and then they run into Mr Redman. No sooner does this happen than jealousy blooms between the two men, and they quickly get into a confrontation, with Frannie reduced to a sexual object to be owned and controlled. ‘I’m not going to try to take her away from you’ (p420) Stu says to Harold, though the chapter closes on a sinister note: ‘that was the beginning of his knowing that he did want her, after all’ (p421).

Let me try and tie some of this rambling into a coherent bow, by contrasting two ideas that have been bubbling to the novel’s surface since the world emptied out. First, there’s the pessimistic, anti-social thread, which here I’ve pinned (perhaps unfairly) to the otherwise affable Glen Bateman:

Show me a man or woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call ‘society.’ Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home. (pp413-4)

But, King is also unmistakably interweaving ideas about the importance of companionship. No character chooses to be alone. (Even Glen has Kojack, and tells Stu that if he asked him again to join up, he’d probably agree to it.) Nadine’s assessment of Larry’s evolution in his time alone is that he’s ‘stopped looking for houses and started looking for people’ (p478). Whether he had internalised this before that moment, we have witnessed Larry oppressed by loneliness, and know it to be true.

So, which is it to be? As things move on, will being in the company of others bring out the best or the worst in our characters? Will they be stronger together, or seek to tear one another down? There’s only one way to find out!

Since we talked a bit about pairs this week, I wanted to round out the newsletter with a brief note on a pair of novels published in 1996: Desperation by Stephen King, and The Regulators by Richard Bachman. Some amongst you may already know that the latter author is in fact a pseudonym of King’s, which he adopted when his career took off in the 1970s. One motivation was that his publisher didn’t wish to put out more than one novel with his name on it per year, lest it dilute enthusiasm. King has also admitted that he wished to publish under another name so as to determine whether the public were now only buying his novels because they had the name Stephen King on the cover.

Depending on how one counts, there are seven Bachman novels in total, with one — Rage (1977) — actually preceding The Stand to market. In the mid 1980s, a bookstore clerk uncovered the truth, and (with the author’s permission) exposed the fact that the Richard Bachman books were the work of Stephen King. This didn’t stop King having a further bit of fun with the pseudonym however, publishing two novels on the same day in 1996 — one under each name. The books mirror one another in a lot of interesting ways, with many of the same characters appearing, though in quite different circumstances. The worlds of the two novels are distinct enough that they certainly take place in different realities, though the central antagonist is the same. If you put them both together, I figure you must be getting up towards the length of The Stand.

I read a paperback copy of Desperation on a canal boat holiday in Wales, and the experience remains inedibly etched in my memory. For one thing, I recall rushing to pick up a copy of The Regulators as soon as I got home. This odd pair of books is not amongst King’s best, but the formal experiment is at least audacious and interesting.

OK, that’s another week checked off. When next I write to you, we’ll be more or less half way! That will be Sunday 11 August and we’ll discuss the novel up to the end of Chapter 47, on page 603. Until then, stay out of the corn!

✌🏻

— Adam