Still working on a few more ambitious revisitations, but The Stand has been the “book in the bathroom” for a couple of weeks.
Sorry if that’s TMI, but it seems like a basic part of life to me—some comics, some light reading, some often-reread book, something in the bathroom for the time one spends there.
I’m sure I’m not the only person to think of Stephen King as the Charles Dickens of the late 20th Century. That may or may not be a compliment depending on how you feel about Dickens. The analogy isn’t entirely apt. Dickens had a more influential public persona and his political sympathies had more of an impact on Great Britain at the height of his influence. But King has had a similar kind of acute vision of a socially specific world: middle-class and working-class white men and their domestic and psychological experiences. He also has a similar gift for memorable plots and scenes and for descriptive prose.
He can’t write women well (though maybe Rose Madder and Gerald’s Game show progress? I haven’t read either) and he has trouble with any person of color.
Of King’s books, I have nothing but good things to say about The Shining and The Dead Zone, the latter in particular. They’re really terrific. In the next tier, there are parts of Firestarter, Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary, It, Misery, The Green Mile that I really like, but each one of them has something in it that just does not work at all. (It in particular, and if you have read it, you know exactly what I mean.) I haven’t read some of his more recent books (Gerald’s Game, Rose Madder, Doctor Sleep, Under the Dome, 11/23/63), but I’ll probably tackle them at some point. I’ll leave the Dark Tower books for some other column—I like them a lot until I hate them very much.
The Stand, though, is such a mixture of interesting characters, memorable scenes, really bad characters, really dumb scenes, and a basic situation that I both like and find irritating at the same time.
If you haven’t read it or seen it, the basic gimmick is that it’s a post-apocalypse after a bioengineered virus developed by the United States escapes the lab and wipes out 99% of humanity. The survivors in the U.S. are haunted by dreams that sort them into good and evil. The good people end up in Boulder and the evil people in Las Vegas. The good people have a very elderly magical black woman to lead them who just says homilies, the bad people have a Satanic figure who can turn into crows, wolves, read thoughts, see distant events, etc. The bad guys start collecting discarded U.S. military gear and preparing to kill the good people, the good guys have democratic meetings and turn the lights in Boulder back on. Eventually four of the good guys (all men, naturally) are told by the magical black woman (on her deathbed) that she’s had a vision from God and that they have to walk from Boulder to Las Vegas with no weapons or equipment to face the evil leader. Since they’ve just survived an assassination attempt by two traitors in their community they’re shaken enough to agree and they follow her orders. One of them gets injured badly fairly close to Vegas and they leave him (that’s part of God’s marching orders) and the other three go on. They die in Vegas but so do all the evil people because one of the bad guys brings an A-bomb he found in the desert into town and God (more or less) sets it off. Injured guy gets home to his lover, they have a baby, the human race gets to start over.
Summing it up like that probably makes clear why I have ambivalent feelings about it. It’s cheesy as hell, the whole “here’s God’s latest judgment on humanity” angle doesn’t work except when it really works (the point where the four guys set off because they figure at this point, if you don’t believe in divine providence, you’re not paying attention is a point where it really works). The people in Boulder are incredibly white feeling in a way that’s a bit squicky. There’s only one interesting female character really and even she’s kind of passive and defined by her romantic relationship—she’s a madonna (literally, she is pregnant with the baby who will reveal whether this is the last generation of people on the planet or not) and the other major female character is the whore and we never get the faintest sense of what’s going on inside her head, really. (She’s chosen as the bride of Satan, more or less, but there’s nothing to explain who she was before the plague that helps us understand that.) But there’s a couple of male characters who are genuinely interesting, most particularly the character of Harold Lauder, who is an overweight young adult intellectual who is drawn to evil out of resentment but who teeters on the edge of redemption before he finally falls into the pit.
At this point, when the book is its bathroom role, I just skip around and read through a few scenes that I really like. I can’t help but see the actors who played the characters on the 1994 ABC miniseries as I read—they’ve forced out whatever images I had in mind from when I first read the book. (Except Rob Lowe, who doesn’t feel at all right as Nick Andros, the deaf leader of the good guys; I’m mixed on Jamey Sheridan as the Satanic leader, Randall Flagg.)
Favorite scenes include (spoilers, but come on, the book’s been out for a long time and I already spoiled the ending for you above):
The former sociology professor Glen Bateman (played to a T by Ray Walston) encounters Randall Flagg when he is brought to a jail in Las Vegas (near the end of the book) and he has a marvelous final dialogue with him before he’s shot to death. I like any of the scenes with Bateman in them—he’s basically the character I identify with the most (no surprise).
The entire sequence leading up to Harold Lauder and his fellow traitor Nadine Cross attempting to kill all of the leaders of the Boulder community with a remote-control bomb. Also the scene where Harold has been betrayed after they leave Boulder and he realizes what a fool he’s been in harboring his hatreds and resentments. Actually almost all the character development for Harold is great—he’s the most interesting character in the book.
The lone survivor of the town where the plague was first unleashed, Stu Redman, is kept in several secure scientific facilities while they try to figure out why he’s immune. Eventually the medical personnel and scientists catch it too. There’s a terrifying scene where Redman makes his way out of a medical facility full of the dead and dying.
I’m not very fond of the character Larry Underwood, who is a moderately talented young musician who is in the middle of being a one-hit wonder when the plague hits, but he gets one of the deepest backstories—I do like the bits we see of his life before the plague and his escape from a New York that is full of dead people is really chilling.
The scene with Nick Andros before the plague, where he’s attacked by some bullies in a small town and rescued by the sheriff of the town (who is related to the bullies) and who then does his best to save the people who’ve taken him in when they fall ill is vivid. I otherwise find Andros and his close friend, the mentally disabled Tom Cullen, annoying and I tend to avoid the few other parts where either of them is prominent. (You can’t avoid Cullen in the final parts of the book, which do have a sentimental pull to them.)
The good guys in Boulder decide to send in three spies to see if they can get a better picture of what the Las Vegas folks are up to. One of them is a retired judge (played by Ossie Davis in the miniseries; I never got the sense in the book that he was Black, but I’m glad the casting directors tried to break up the unbearable whiteness of the Boulder group). He’s ambushed by two of Randall Flagg’s men (one of them played by Sam Raimi in the miniseries!) as he approaches Vegas because Flagg has seen him coming with his supernatural vision. He wants the judge’s body completely undamaged so he can send it back to Boulder, but the guards screw it up and the judge ends up an unrecognizable mess. It’s a great scene because Flagg shows up to punish his errant henchman, who has been fretting that he’d end up crucified (literally) for his failure. But as King memorably writes, “There were worse things than crucifixion. There were teeth”.
I both hate and love the scene where the atomic weapon in Vegas blows up, and so I often re-read it, trying to figure out whether it works at all and if so why.
I like a lot of the scenes in the book that feature Flagg’s right-hand man, Lloyd Heinreid, who is a rather sympathetic figure despite being a hardened criminal and murderer. That might be because he was played really well by Miguel Ferrer in the miniseries, but I also think it’s another of King’s gifts—he is really great with secondary villains as well as with the major antagonists. (Flagg is actually one of the weakest of King’s major antagonists because he’s got no real interior life—he can’t, really.)
I have taken to reading catalogues in the bathroom because they are the only magazine-like objects still in my house. I really don’t like reading from my phone or iPad there. I want disposable paper.
That out of the way, I mainly remember the plague stuff from The Stand, but I remember liking the plague stuff a lot. The Las Vegas scenes more than the Boulder ones. All the many, many white dudes, insufferable. But you are right that that’s King’s territory, the unbearable whiteness of white men on the make. My first tier is also what yours is, but my second tier leads off with Needful Things. You might want to reconsider it, especially before Salem’s Lot. Carrie also has some interesting female characters, though not as righteous as the movie, because…Sissy Spacek. The Dead Zone is both a great book and a great film, so that’s a coup. (I love The Shining, both ways, but I know King does not agree with me, and I do see his point.)
Needful Things hit me when it came out, much more than It. Demonic Elvis Presley, among other awesomeness.