Book review
Stand and deliver, dear reader: for this epic, postapocalyptic novel that Stephen King first published in 1978 will grab your attention from the beginning, and will not let go until you are done with it – or until it is done with you. The Stand takes the reader inside a world ravaged by disease and threatened by absolute evil, seamlessly combining elements of the horror and science-fiction genres to create a uniquely compelling narrative that – perhaps more than any of Stephen King’s other novels – remains terrifyingly relevant for each new generation of readers.
End-of-the-world novels were not a new thing when Stephen King wrote The Stand; the two atomic bomb blasts that ended the Second World War and ushered in the Cold War made people all over the post-1945 world concerned about the prospect that nuclear war could end all life on Earth – or at least make life downright miserable for anyone lucky, or unlucky, enough to survive a third world war. Novels like Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957), Peter George’s Red Alert (1958), Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959), and the Eugene Burdick/Harvey Wheeler book Fail-Safe (1963) set forth varying scenarios regarding how a nuclear war might unfold and how many people (if any) might survive. In The Stand, by contrast, the agent of world destruction is not nuclear weaponry but rather a new disease.
The Stand was not the first novel to set forth such a scenario; Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954) had presented the nightmarish tableau of one uninfected man, a scientist, all alone on an Earth where everyone else is infected with a bacillus that has transformed them into bloodthirsty, nightwalking vampires. Yet whereas I Am Legend presents its horrors with a kind of grim intimacy, in a fast-paced, 174-page novel, Stephen King in The Stand paints on a truly epic canvas, and sets forth a future America where two groups of survivors are pitted against each other, in a battle of good-versus-evil that unfolds on a cosmic scale.
And that battle begins on June 16, 1985. In 1978, that was seven years in the future – like a writer setting in 2029 a novel that is published today. For us, of course, June 1985 is way back in the past – Ronald Reagan in the White House, New Coke, the finding of the Titanic, Live Aid, Back to the Future at the multiplex, Miami Vice on television, INXS’s “What You Need” on the radio. I was proofreading medical newspapers for Mercury Press in Rockville, Maryland, and was just starting to think about applying to graduate school. All of us who were alive in 1985 have the 1985 we lived. Stephen King’s imagined 1985 is something much more grim.
The virus that ends the world as we know it gets out of isolation in a California army lab – a panicked employee flees the lab with his family just before the gates shut, and the employee and his family are found in east Texas two days later, all of them dead or dying from an illness that ravages the body in a manner reminiscent of bubonic plague. But this disease is viral – a rapidly mutating, antigen-shifting virus that defeats all of the body’s attempts to contain it. It comes to be nicknamed “Captain Trips,” and it is 99.4% fatal. Late in the novel, a survivor looking back on the history of the virus describes the workings of the virus by saying that “With Captain Trips, the flu itself changed every time your body came to a defense posture. And it just went on shifting from form to form until the body was worn out. The result, inevitably, was death” (p. 805).
It was three years after the publication of The Stand that the first diagnoses of AIDS were made; and even before the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was identified as the cause of AIDS later in the decade, many readers of The Stand found it impressive, and disturbing, how Stephen King had forecasted the rise of a new virus that attacks the human body in shifting, unrelenting ways.
It takes some time for Captain Trips to do its deadly work – giving Stephen King time to offer lots of foreshadowing. Larry Underwood, a down-on-his-luck rock musician, calls a hospital in New York and gets nothing but a recording: “At the time of your call, all circuits are busy. If you will hold, your call will be taken as soon as possible” (p. 113). Stu Redman, an easygoing East Texan who witnessed the gas-station auto accident that heralded the arrival of Captain Trips, watches the evening news with growing concern:
An East Coast flu epidemic seemed to be in the early stages – the Russian strain, nothing to worry about except for the very old and the very young. A tired New York City doctor was interviewed in a hallway of Brooklyn’s Mercy Hospital. He said the flu was exceptionally tenacious for Russian-A, and he urged viewers to get flu boosters. Then he suddenly started to say something else, but the sound cut off and you could only see his lips moving. (p. 115)
Soon enough, all the sound cuts off on all the televisions everywhere, as a total breakdown of society occurs. 99.4 percent of 237.9 million (the population of the United States of America in 1985) is 236,472,600 – meaning that there are about 1,427,400 Americans left alive, minus those who have died from other causes during the social breakdown. This new reality leads to horrifying tableaux like a scene in which one character has to walk through the Lincoln Tunnel from New York City to New Jersey – through a tunnel filled with rotting corpses that he envisions returning to life to revenge themselves on him.
It soon becomes apparent that this postapocalyptic situation has dimensions that are spiritual rather than scientific. One group of survivors – those who have demonstrated, over the course of the novel, that they possess some sort of ethical core and care about others rather than just themselves – find themselves drawn toward the city of Boulder, Colorado. As a college town renowned for progressive politics and a healthy lifestyle, Boulder seems like a suitable place for the good people to go and form what comes to be called the “Free Zone.” Meanwhile, the selfish, the greedy, the mean-spirited, and the cruel among the survivors find that they are impelled toward – wait for it, wait for it – Las Vegas.
And, as it turns out, each group has a leader to rally around. For the good people in Boulder, their leader is an elderly African American woman named Abagail Fremantle. She appears in people’s dreams, summoning them toward Boulder with messages like this one:
Mother Abagail is what they call me. I’m the oldest woman in eastern Nebraska, I guess, and I still make my own biscuit. You come see me as quick as you can. We got to go out to the Free Zone and get settled before he gets wind of us. Things are gonna happen awful fast, I reckon. (p. 309)
The “he” that Mother Abagail mentions in her dream messages, the leader of the bad people gathering in Las Vegas, is one Randall Flagg – one of the most chilling villains ever crafted by an author who has specialized in creating villainous characters. Think of that local bully or town tough you once knew – the guy who enjoyed picking a fight, winning that fight, and then stomping on his victim long after the fight was won – and then put that guy on steroids and crank the volume up to 11, and you’ve got Randall Flagg. People call him “the dark man” or “the black man” (to refer to his moral nature, not his skin tone, but I still didn’t like the designation); and in the post-Captain Trips world, he has developed some mystical abilities, like the power to levitate. And once he has gathered his people unto him in Las Vegas, he intends to start running the world, his way, in a spirit of absolute evil.
Mother Abagail is as impressive as a hero as Randall Flagg is frightening as a villain. Deeply religious, profoundly humble, she comforts the people who come to see her, as best she can: “The people who had been drawn to the Free Zone all came to see her in this place, and she received them, although they sometimes made her tired…and they all wanted to tell her that they had dreamed of her and of him. They were terrified of him, and she nodded and comforted and soothed as best she could” (pp. 402-03). She understands Flagg’s moral emptiness, and the attraction that his evil will have for the weak-minded: “He would have his followers. He was a liar, and his father was the Father of Lies. He would be like a big neon sign to them, standing high to the sky, dazzling their sight with fizzling fireworks” (p. 403).
Nadine Cross, a woman who was initially drawn toward Boulder but now finds herself drawn toward Las Vegas, describes the feeling as “a kind of mystic event, a border-crossing. It was as if these mountains…were a no-man’s land between two spheres of influence – Flagg in the west, the old woman in the east. And here the magic flew both ways, mixing, making its own concoction that belonged neither to God nor to Satan but which was totally pagan. She felt she was in a haunted place” (p. 501).
And Nadine’s situation is especially troubling – because she senses that her destiny is to give herself to Randall Flagg (she is even saving herself for him) so that she can bear his child. And the reader quickly gets the sense that that child, fathered by the embodiment of evil on Earth, will make Damien from The Omen look like Harry Potter.
The rival civilizations of the Boulder “Free Zone” and Las Vegas’s empire of Randall Flagg demonism inevitably come into conflict. It would be an oversimplification to call Boulder “good” in contrast to Las Vegas’s “evil”; in the Free Zone, people there and then are like people here and now – imperfect people trying to do the right thing. Against attempts to get the electric power started up again, a terrorist bomb is set off, killing some of the novel’s most sympathetic characters. Stu Redman is dismayed at the anger he sees among the frightened Free Zoners:
These are the good guys? They don’t give a shit about [those who were killed]. They care about catching [the perpetrators] and hanging them…like a charm against the dark man. (p. 602)
And those of us who were around on 9/11, and are old enough to remember, recall seeing and hearing just that sort of fear and anger.
Inevitably, the two societies move toward a final confrontation; but in what may be meant as a hopeful note amidst all that death and destruction and demonism, it emerges that Randall Flagg’s devilish hold on the world is not all that he had thought it to be. And on this return to The Stand, 40 years after I first read it, I was impressed at seeing that it is the strength of women that prevails against him. Mother Abagail’s humility, compassion, and purity of spirit we have already discussed. A Free Zone woman, captured by Flagg’s minions and scheduled for “interrogation,” carries out a bold act of self-sacrifice that sets Flagg’s plans at naught. And even Nadine Cross, who seemed to have given herself over to the forces of evil, ultimately shows herself able to deny and foil the wicked Flagg.
The action of The Stand moves toward a resolution that has a decided deus ex machina quality to it. And yet the novel builds up such momentum, sets forth its nightmare scenarios with such verve and energy, that I am not disposed to mind.
I mentioned at the beginning of this review that I think The Stand, written so many years ago, may be the most enduringly contemporary of Stephen King’s novels. It is not his greatest book; I would give that honor to The Shining, in which Stephen King not only drew upon his own experience as a hotel caretaker, but courageously confronted his own inner demons. But The Stand may speak to people today like no other Stephen King book.
After all, I am writing this review two years after the time of the novel coronavirus outbreak. A new disease came upon the scene, seemingly out of nowhere. It was described as being 20 times deadlier than the “conventional” flu. Societies around the world shut down for a time, leaving major cities as empty as in any postapocalyptic thriller. My brother sent me a photo of a deserted street in the normally bustling Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., and wrote, “It’s like The Omega Man (the 1971 film version of Matheson’s I Am Legend)!”
COVID-19 is clearly not the second coming of The Stand’s Captain Trips. But the coronavirus reminds us how vulnerable and fragile the façade of our civilization can be – an unhappy truth of which The Stand provides a haunting reminder.
- Goodreads rating – 4.34
- SUMMARY – Paul Haspel