The Richard Bachman Story

I often consider Mental Floss to be smarter-than-average clickbait, as much as I like knowing what the most popular hashtag is in each state, but this recent article is quite relevant to what I'm doing here. It just so happens we will be going "back to Bachman" soon, with his second book, The Long Walk. As previously noted here, one of the needs for the Bachman pseudonym was to get around publisher hesitations to publish more than one book a year by the same author. Nowadays, King is one of the few exceptions to the rule, but it took him some time to work up to that level of prestige. Hence, with this blog in the relatively early phase of King's career, there's a lot of Bachman titles coming up.

The Stand (1978)

One daunting thing about this project is that Stephen King didn't mess around when it came to writing really thick novels almost right out the gates. Sure, Carrie was relatively thin (ranging from 200-350 pages depending on what edition you read), but 'Salem's Lot and The Shining cranked up the page count considerably. The Stand is the fourth novel he published under his own name, and would be the longest novel he wrote, even in it's "abridged" form, until the release of It in 1986, and still hold the #2 position (again, in abridged form) until Under the Dome in 2009. I'm actually looking forward to a shorter (albeit not short) novel when The Dead Zone shows up here later on.

The big question about The Stand is this: Is the original version too edited, or the uncut version too bloated? The jury is split nearly down the middle, but I sense some favoritism, probably induced by the author himself, toward the 1990 edition. In the interest of full disclosure, I have read the uncut version, but it was so long ago I had forgotten major plot points going into this one, so I don't feel I can confidently make comparisons. Bigger doesn't always mean better. Two of his most reviled books, The Tommyknockers (brought to you by booze and coke) and Dreamcatcher (by Oxycontin) are among the largest. However, the readers generally uphold The Stand in any version to be among the best of his books. As I detail below, I count myself among the fans, with really the only strike against the book in its original form being the over-edited feel.

Enough about page counts, let's talk about the book itself. I consider The Stand to be a double novel. You have your global epidemic story, a scientific apocalypse, in Book One, "Captain Trips", followed by a supernatural "classic" apocalypse" story in the other two books, "On the Border" and "The Stand". The first part was new territory in Stephen King's writing, much more science fiction than horror. The second part falls more in King's wheelhouse, focused more on action and suspense than the science. It isn't a hard break, as the second book straddles both parts. Therefore it would be hard to actually break the double novel into two discrete parts. Not that it is necessary to do so.

King did not invent the plague novel. There are more examples than I can think of from further back in history than I probably realize, but a few examples come to mind. Freshest in my mind is Earth Abides by George Stewart. Stewart, who wrote all kinds of books, took a hard scientific angle at how society would or could rebuild after a plague wipes out most of humanity. He spends a lot of time first describing the collapse of the old world, and then analyzing all of the challenges of rebuilding, right down to mundane stuff like education and agriculture. In other cases, like in Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain, readers are treated to a scientific explanation of a disaster that is warded off. Then you get crazy stuff like I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, where it is one "normal" man against a race of plague-altered mutants. King follows Stewart and Matheson in the "world failure" scenario. The government and its scientists are either idiots or monsters, not Crichton's heroes, and they are to blame for everything. Stewart doesn't bother to explain the real cause of his plague, and Matheson omits the birth and spread of his completely.

King and Stewart part ways in their approach in Book 2 of The Stand. Stewart obsesses deeply about how one rebuilds a society. While King also believes that people are more likely to pull together into large communities in the wake of disaster, he doesn't worry too much about the details. While certainly not advancing a Walking Dead-style Hobbesian anarchy, he is able to gloss over community building challenges in a way Stewart could not thanks to the character of Mother Abigail and her godly abilities to bring people together through dreams. When it comes down to the minutiae of running the Boulder Free Zone, nothing seems to be too difficult. Need a committee? Start a committee. Turn on the power, and eat from the largesse left behind. Only in the very last pages does King allude to future challenges, mainly in the form of undesirable leadership coming into power. Meanwhile, Stewart's protagonist (whose name escapes me, although I recall it was unusual) is wrestling with faltering education system and constant crop failure and other assorted agricultural issues.

Book 3 is what separates The Stand from its peers. I think it could even stand (no pun intended) on its own, but with 620 pages of buildup, the reader probably cares more about the characters than if they went in cold. First, it is our first real chance to see how the bad guys operate. The big surprise is that, in spite of Randall Flagg/The Walkin' Dude/The Dark Man/Actual Satan Himself driving their bus, most of the people there are not bad people. They just do the work they are assigned to do, like change lightbulbs and maintain military equipment for their defense. This opens the door to a host of theological questions a la King, as Flagg and his top men (Lloyd, Trash) are clearly evil or at least seriously deranged. If you distill the entire Las Vegas settlement to its basics, you soon realize that the community was destroying itself from within, even though a nuclear blast did most of the work, ultimately. Even though they were doing things that Boulder could only dream about, Las Vegas was morally empty, with no trust between the leaders and workers, or even between the leaders themselves.

As spectacular as the demise of Las Vegas is, the final hundred pages are really the heart of the drama. Glen, Larry, and Ralph go off to martyrdom (and no, I have no clue what the whole "hand of God" thing was), but what about Stu and Kojak? And even if they survive against all odds, what are they returning back to in Boulder? Even having read the book before, I was still riveted over how Stu pulls himself out of what should be a certain-death scenario and finding out if the ingenuity of Boulder is enough to protect a new generation from Captain Trips. At this point, Captain Trips is kind of a background nuisance, only coming out of hiding when a child with at least one non-immune parent is born. However, although he doesn't come right out and say it, it is clear one cannot simply "kill" Randall Flagg, not even with nukes, and he's out there somewhere. I guess I get to wait until the Dark Tower books to explore those avenues further.

In Progress: The Stand

Thanks to vacation and other fun things, The Stand, Stephen King's magnum opus, is coming up quicker than expected! If you were disappointed to not yet see an excoriation of Lawnmower Man or one of the other not-yet-seen movies from Night Shift, don't worry. I'll be watching and reviewing as I track them down. Admittedly I'm not putting much effort into this, but just think of future reviews as little surprises down the road.

June 4 (page 93): Even in its original shorter version, this book clocks in at over 800 pages, nearly double that of The Shining. Therefore, what would normally be considered good progress barely makes a dent here. The plague is getting started, but nothing serious outside of the army base where it burst out from. Especially impressive in this section are the character back stories, even the ones that are early Captain Trips fodder, and in particular the chapter sections describing the wild vectors the virus is taking through the country.

June 20 (page 260): I've been juggling some other books this month, so the updates aren't exactly copious. However, I finally reached the end of Book 1 ("Captain Trips") and figured it was time for some quick reflection. Stephen King has managed to kill off 99.4% of the world's population in the space of a short novel, inadvertently making the previous three books substantially less scary. So far the book has read more like a warped version of Earth Abides, but the Dark Man has appeared twice now and the dreams are beginning, which will sort out the survivors. The next book ("On the Border") will physically bring the groups together, something that has barely started at this point. The last sentence ominously portends the conflict ahead between Harold and Stu.

July 3 (page 428): Maybe my recall of the long version, which I read years ago, is not so great, but much of the focus has been on the "good guys" in Boulder. Randall Flagg has been pretty infrequent and Lloyd has been minimized. True, Trashy has gotten quite a bit of coverage, probably more than the rest of the baddies put together, which I don't really consider a good thing. Trash Man makes me feel dirty just reading about him. As I continue through Book 2 ("On the Border") it feels like King is wrapping up the scientific part of the book and getting a lot more theological and/or paranormal. While I don't prefer the supernatural, I understand it comes with the territory when reading Stephen King, and therefore the narrative is actually becoming more engaging. Yet, here we are halfway through the book, and no sign of confrontation yet. Harold's on the edge though. Just add Nadine and....kaboom. (I've also moved this post back to the top so it isn't buried by Graveyard Shift and Children of the Corn....you're welcome.)

July 9 (page 621): I've been picking up speed, and reached the end of Book 2 last night. For about the last 300 pages, the focus has stayed entirely in the Boulder Free Zone, but I sneaked a peak at the beginning of Book 3 ("The Stand"), and we're finally going to get a look at how the other half lives. While I still contend that King's theology is nothing special, it certainly is driving the second half of the book. Those we think of as marginalized in regular modern society have inherited the Earth, as represented by society in Boulder. Nobody was really powerful before the plague. Stu was just one of the guys, Fran was thinking about what to do with her life, and (looking to the other side), Trash and Lloyd were in and out of jail. Nick (deaf and mute) and Mother Abigail (108 years old) by their very conditions were not valued in the previous world. Only Larry, who had the dubious honor of performing the last hit (?) song of the old days, carries any modicum of fame with him, and he has been pretty good at denying that ever happened.

July 13 (page 747): This will probably be the last update and I'm now reaching the part where the pages fall out. Since all copies of this version are old and this is a mass-market paperback, even with heavy tape, the last few pages are literally falling out. Unless this version is drastically different, I continue to be surprised by how little I remember from my first reading of the novel. For such a giant book, the real confrontation doesn't even get underway until the last 100 pages. Also, where Book 2 was almost entirely about the Boulder Free Zone group, Book 3 hasn't even devoted one page to how things are going since Stu, Larry, Ralph, and Glen took off. Only Stephen King could write a book longer than all his other previous books combined (eh...maybe half anyway) and still have me feeling like he is rushing the narrative. No wonder he gave the world the unabridged edition 12 years later.