vol. 10 issue 7

Fellow readers, how are you? We’re in the thick of things now, and I’ve got some notes I want to share with you. Perhaps it’s what we might consider ‘confirmation bias’, but a good portion of them relate to themes I’ve introduced over the last couple of issues.

Indeed, no sooner had I started writing about the questions around the extent to which God is directing the action and actors of the narrative, than the text more-or-less directly addressed the concept. In stark contrast to Mother Abigail’s pious sense of service, we are given a searing counterpoint in a chapter focussed on the Trashcan Man. Notably, however, the following is not presented as being part of Trash’s internal monologue:

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance … or change. Once such incantatory phrases as ‘we see now through a glass darkly’ and ‘mysterious are the ways He chooses His wonders to perform’ are mastered, logic can be happily tossed out the window. Religious mania is one of the few infallible ways of responding to the world’s vagaries, because it totally eliminates pure accident. To the true religious maniac, it’s all on purpose. (p649)

If this sentiment was presented amidst action centred around Mother Abigail, it might read as belittling the character’s sense of righteous purpose. Instead, it appears during descriptions of the erratic actions and frayed mental state of the man formally known as Donald Merwin Elbert. The text even goes one step further, mocking Trashcan for speaking to a crow for 20 minutes, convinced it was an instantiation of Randall Flagg. And yet, near the close of this week’s reading we witnessed Mother Abigail’s encounter with Nadine Cross, in which the former is similarly of the opinion that the dark man ‘comes in more shapes than his own […] Wolf, crow, snake… woman’ (p695).

Consider another comparison between the two characters. We had previously seen Abigail make the arduous journey to collect three chickens. Despite her advanced age, she makes the round trip on foot fuelled purely by the belief that it is God’s will that she does so. Early in this week’s reading, we find Trashcan nearly dead from untreated burns, heat exhaustion, malnutrition and dehydration. Quite pointedly, what gets him moving is a spark of belief — he feels himself called to the service of the dark man:

Now that he had a purpose, he found he could walk. (p611)

There’s a fascinating question being asked here: how are we to feel about each of these characters’ convictions? Is Mother Abigail Freemantle a living saint, appointed by God to direct those amongst His surviving children whom He has sent to her? Is Donald ‘Trashcan’ Elbert simply a wayward pyromaniac labouring under the burden of severe mental illness? Both could be true - sure. But, the novel seemed to suggest this week, any combination is possible: they could both as easily be equally wrong as equally right. Depending on your vantage point, it’s possible to read this sentiment as carrying very different meanings:

There is really nothing so comforting to the beaten of spirit or the broken of skull than a good strong dose of ‘Thy will be done.’ (p650)

Let’s widen our aperture a little and ask a related question. What’s the end goal here? It’s very interesting to me that 700 pages into this novel, we don’t really know where things are headed. All that the back cover foretold has come to pass: a plague has wiped out 99% of people, and those remaining have begun to form into two groups. So… what’s next? Many of those gathered in Boulder seem to suspect and expect that a) another group is amassing in the west, and b) they will, at some point, head east with malicious intent. To an extent, that comports with what some amongst Flagg’s cadre also believe: that there will be a confrontation, and a time of burning. Are those our stakes then? One side bent on domination, the other simply set on surviving the attempt?

In a couple of intriguing passages this week, we saw the dichotomy framed a different way. In conversation with Larry, Lucy Swann has a plain way of phrasing things: ‘it’s hate against us, worse, it’s emptiness.’ (p669) Now, that’s a distinction worth making, and one we find echoed and reinforced later on in an arresting passage centred on Mother Abigail:

She guessed that behind the conscious evil there was an unconscious blackness. That was what distinguished the earth’s children of darkness; they couldn’t make things but only break them. God the Creator had made man in His own image, and that meant that every man and woman who dwelt under God’s light was a creator of some kind, a person with an urge to stretch out his hand and shape the world into some rational pattern. The black man wanted — was able — only to unshape. Anti-Christ? You might as well say anti-creation. (pp686-7)

For me, this chimes with that idea in some of King’s fiction that I mentioned last week, that far older than society, morality, religion and order are things truly ancient and primitive, whose existence we spend our own trying to deny. Oldest, most elemental and perhaps scariest of them all: nothingness.

All of this is, of course, tied into our earlier questions around whether the action here is directed by a higher power, and by the question that preceded even that one, as to whether this particular piece of genre fiction is ultimately interested in the preservation of a moral order.

A few smaller points that I also wanted to make:

• I’ve very much enjoyed how King continues to explore the relationships in the novel. In the odd duo of Trashcan and The Kid this week, I saw an echo of Lloyd and Poke. One a truly unhinged and dangerous psychopath, the other weak of personality and easily led astray.

• If you want to do some extra-curricular activity this week, consider the function of The Kid in the novel. We learned from King’s preface that the character was excised entirely from the originally-published version of The Stand; what does his presence add to the text? What does it teach us about both the Trashcan Man, and the ethos of the wider group amassing around Randall Flagg?

• No relationship knot feels quite so consequential at this point in the novel as that between Lucy, Larry and Nadine. That’s a topic that likely deserves further analysis, but I’ve chosen not to do it here lest I waste everyone’s time with predictions about how it could go, which then pan out incorrectly. What I will say is that it feels to me as though — whilst almost every other character belongs distinctly to one camp or another — Nadine’s valence is in question. At this point in the novel, it feels to me as though she could go either way, and whilst King appears to be seeding clues that she will end up at Flagg’s side, those could just as easily be red herrings. (Also worth keeping in mind that her fate seems tangled up with that of Joe / Leo.)

• There were more than a few turns of phrase and linguistic touches this week that had me reaching for my highlighter. I enjoyed Mother Abigail’s sense that Glen Bateman ‘always eyed her like a racetrack agent looking at a phony ten’ (p685). And I absolutely loved this evocative detail of the place in which Nick has settled:

He had his own entrance by the back door, and he kept his ten-speed parked under the door’s low, overhanging eave, where it stood axle-deep in generations of fragrantly rotting aspen leaves. (p697)

I’ve not expressed this thought publicly before, and I feel a little bad about it, but I realised some time ago that I’ve unconsciously been ‘saving’ King’s magnum opus, The Dark Tower series, until the great man is no longer with us. I’ve read the first, relatively slim instalment — The Gunslinger (1982) — and enjoyed it. Without ever having actively decided to do so, I now understand that I’ve been holding on to the possibility of having the rest of those beloved novels still to read when the day comes that the last Stephen King novel has been written. Why am I mentioning this now? Because there was an interesting crumb of King news this week: something resembling a hint that more stories set in Mid-World are yet to be told.

Despite having not read beyond the first volume, here’s what I do know about The Dark Tower: it’s at the very core of the King-verse. When it comes to the interconnectedness between King’s fictions — about which I wrote a little last week — most everything runs through The Dark Tower. It’s one of the things that excites me about the prospect of finally reading them one day: the thrill of uncovering connections I hadn’t previously understood.

This week, I want to recommend another book that (somewhat inadvertently, as I understand it) set up one of these crossovers. Mr Mercedes was a novel King published in 2014, and which sits on the crime / thriller end of the author’s spectrum. It’s a King novel one might recommend to readers in one’s life who enjoy detective novels or police procedurals, but have little time for the supernatural. That recommendation should come with a caveat however: Mr Mercedes is the first of a trilogy of novels, and across Finders Keepers (2015) and End of Watch (2016), King finds an interesting way to start slipping a thread of the supernatural into the story.

Things went a little further in 2018, when one of the prominent side characters in that trilogy, appeared in The Outsider, a novel in the classic ‘normal people in a messed-up supernatural situation’ Stephen King mode. As I understand it, Holly Gibney’s appearance here was a surprise even to King, as he needed a character to fill a specific role, and Holly suggested to the author that she be allowed to break free from the Bill Hodges trilogy, and into the wider King-verse. And she hasn’t stopped there. Gibney was also the main character in the titular novella of the shorter fiction collection If It Bleeds (2020), and finally got a novel all her own in 2023, simply titled Holly. In fact, despite the aforementioned Mid-World hint, rumours persist that King’s current project is a further novel starring Holly Gibney. If you want to learn more about the character that has so captivated the author’s imagination over the last decade, the best place to start is Mr Mercedes.

OK, that’s your lot for this week. I will write to you again next Sunday, 25 August, to discuss the novel up the section break on p803, which (somewhat intriguingly) ends ‘why would Harold Lauder be interested in my feet?’ she asked’.

🦶🏻

— Adam