Site Presented By
Monday, Jul 6, 2009
On the 30th anniversary of "The Stand," the novelist confesses what haunts him about religion and today's politics.
By John Marks
Read more: Religion, Books, Science Fiction, Stephen King, Horror, Interviews, Fantasy, Authors, Books Interviews, Salon Conversations, John Marks
Oct. 23, 2008 | In 1927, a little-known writer of horror stories named H.P. Lovecraft tried to put into words the secret of his diabolical craft. "The one test of the really weird is simply this," Lovecraft wrote in the introduction to "Supernatural Horror in Literature," "whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes or entities on the known universe's utmost rim."
That's a mouthful, and yet I swear, two decades or so ago, I had the very experience that Lovecraft describes while on an overnight bus trip from Dallas to a Christian youth camp in northern Minnesota. Most of the other teen campers flirted or gossiped or joked around. Some endured the long hours by reading Scripture, and in their own way, may have been grappling with "the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities." I was mesmerized by a less prescriptive but equally god-smitten work: Stephen King's epic of apocalypse, "The Stand."
This year, the novel "The Stand" turns 30, and far from fading into the dustbin of bygone bestsellers, King's great tale of plague seems more prescient than ever. Fundamentalist religion, biological weapons, monster viruses, nuclear destruction, ecological havoc, mistrust of government, the breakdown of democracy -- it's all here. The 1,153-page novel recounts the story of a nasty airborne bug that decimates the population of the United States, leaving behind a remnant to wage a battle for the soul of humanity. The children of light are drawn to Boulder, Colo., where they follow a version of Moses named Mother Abagail, a 118-year-old black woman subject to supernatural visions, while the children of darkness gravitate to Las Vegas and come under the sway of a "dark man" named Randall Flagg, who wears faded blue jeans and worn cowboy boots and can turn himself into wolf, weasel and crow.
King has described his 1978 novel as an American version of "Lord of the Rings," and part of the originality of the work lies in its splicing of that narrative steeped in Northern European myths and sagas into a radically different setting: the state highways and national interstates of the United States. We get terrific set pieces: the deadly encounter between a psychopathic arsonist nicknamed the Trashcan Man and a sociopathic Elvis impersonator named the Kid; the escape from a biological weapons facility in Vermont, during which a ghoul utters the immortal line, "Come down and eat chicken with me, beautiful. It's soooo dark." Finally and unforgettably, we get a trip through a tomblike Lincoln Tunnel, thick with the bodies of the plague dead.
Though I didn't see the connection at the time, it made sense that I would read this particular novel on that particular trip. King has called "The Stand" a work of "dark Christianity," and in fact, the book resonated deeply with the themes in the Bibles opened on either side of me. In time, I walked away from the New Testament and became a novelist of, among other things, horror. To this day, I consider that reading experience aboard the bus a turning point in my life.
King has seen more than 50 novels, short story collections and novellas into print, one bestseller after another. His latest collection of stories, "Just After Sunset," arrives in bookstores in November, and in a brief, spooky squib of apocalypse like "Graduation Afternoon" or the Lovecraft-inspired epistolary tale "N.", King reminds us again of his power to unhinge with a single line or image. A master of the storytelling craft, he gets his ghastly fingernails right beneath the skin.
But it's "The Stand" that strikes me as the cornerstone of his legacy, an oft-criticized epic of a uniquely American apocalypse, a quasi-religious vision that has cast its shadow over everything from Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" to the "Left Behind" series of the Rev. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. Its traces can be felt in the Hellmouth horrors of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and has been cited by the creators of the ABC series "Lost" as a model for their dystopian island fantasy. The late David Foster Wallace cited the novel as one of his favorites.
In 1990, at the behest of fans, King released an expanded edition of the novel, restoring 400 pages that had been cut from the original version. In 1994, a mediocre television miniseries version starred Gary Sinise, Rob Lowe and Molly Ringwald. A Marvel Comic version of the tale appeared this fall, and next year, the graphic novel arrives.
Beyond the pop culture feast, at the novel's heart resides a much older myth, our founding myth, you might say, the tale of a manifest destiny, steeped in Jesus and gone horribly wrong. In the age of the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, faced with the prospect of another Great Depression, I can't think of a more relevant fantasy with which to chase away -- or embrace -- the gloom.
I spoke to Stephen King recently about the novel 30 years on, his new collection of short stories, religious faith, presidential politics and the possibilities of the afterlife.
It's 30 years since the publication of "The Stand," which was written, as you say in "Danse Macabre," "during a troubled period for the world in general and America, in particular." We're in another troubled period now. Do you feel yourself itching to write another apocalypse?
I just did. I finished a very long book called "Under the Dome," and it isn't like a worldwide apocalypse or anything like that, but it's a very long book, and it deals with some of the same issues that "The Stand" does, but in a more allegorical way.
As you worked on it, was "The Stand" at all in your mind?
Not really, because it has a different setup than "The Stand," but beyond that I don't want to say too much about it, because it's got to be rewritten and spruced up and everything. But you're right, the two eras are very similar. I just finished reading a book called "Nixonland," and the parallels to the Nixon campaigns and McCain campaigns are just depressing. He's doing a lot of events that are supposed to be populist but are in reality completely managed. He's got a vice president who's Joe Six-Pack. The parallels just go on and on. You've got the unpopular war, economic problems, gasoline problems. Whatever goes around, comes around. "The Stand" even says that. Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.
Do you find that Americans have become a lot more apocalyptic in their thinking in the last 30 years?
Americans are apocalyptic by nature. The reason why is that we've always had so much, so we live in deadly fear that people are going to take it away from us.
Next page: Is Sarah Palin a character from
"From a Buick 8" by Stephen King
"Lisey's Story"
