IT by Stephen King (1986): I Don't Want to Grow Up

"Oh Christ," Bill groaned to himself,
"if this is the stuff grownups have to think about
I never want to grow up."

"I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries," Stephen King famously said back in the Eighties, as a comment on, and perhaps a defense of, his rising popularity, which was heading right into the stratosphere. It's a cute, self-deprecating line that defends against the stuffy critical backlash he often got, and still gets lo these many decades later. Heading critics off the pass, as it were. But sometimes I think King undersold himself at times, regular "jes' folks" guy that he is, and his demotic work often rose above a common fast food meal eaten on the run. Sometimes it rose above other meals that critics said were much healthier, more nourishing, for you... but, you know, fuck that.

This is IT, this is the Eighties horror epic to end all epics, the sum total of Stephen King's career up to that point. King sweeps up all the detritus, cultural and psychological, of a certain class and generation of middle Americans, their tastes and desires and fears and imaginations and jobs and failures, and stuffs them inside a horror story that is part Fifties monster movie and part mind-expanding cosmic revelation. As he said at the time, "Wouldn't it be great to bring on all the monsters one last time? Bring them all on—Dracula, Frankenstein, Jaws, The Werewolf, The Crawling Eye, Rodan, It Came from Outer Space, and call it It."

Look, here there might be a few spoilers: proceed, if at all, with caution. Come back, friend, when finished with IT. (Or more precisely, when IT is finished with you...)

My wife and I read IT at the same time late last year, fortunately I had two copies of that Signet paperback from September 1987—what a sturdy little fucker that edition is! She grew up terrified by the famous 1990 TV movie, and therefore was a little reluctant to read it (she's a Dark Tower acolyte), while I was already out of high school (oh by fall 1990 I was a college sophomore) when that adaptation aired. Me, I was more freaked out by the 'Salem's Lot TV-movie of the late Seventies!

Back in the autumn of 1986, I read IT as soon as it appeared on bookshelves in hardcover; even sooner, because my librarian mom brought it home for me as soon as the library had received it but before they put it into circulation (a real perk of her job for me, sorry patrons of Millville Public Library 35 years past—or Millville Pubic Library, as it was for awhile after a prankster pal of mine swiped the "L" off the sign on the building front, a real Falstaffian wit he was). Fifteen years old and hauling that behemoth into junior high, reading it in study hall, savoring its every terror, is one of my favorite memories of school days.

1st hardcover edition, Viking Press, Bob Giusti cover art

I read through the novel I'm not sure how fast, because it felt like something you wanted to savor. While it's easy to say IT is, at almost 1,100 pages, self-indulgent, I don't recall ever being bored or frustrated by IT; while I'd been a reader all my life, by that point my tastes weren't varied at all: King was very much my whole book world, and what he said, went. I don't think I would have even understood that phrase, "self-indulgent," as a criticism. If he wanted to spend 15 pages on, I dunno, a pharmacist and his patient, or half a dozen pages on a town's sewer system, or a man and wife arguing about driving Al Pacino in a limousine, well, dammit, I was gonna read it and be happy!

New English Library, 1987

After my utter disappointment rereading The Stand ("I need more about how society collapses" I thought while reading it in January 2020, how's that for irony, har-de-har-har) I almost expected to be just as let down by IT. But let me make it clear: IT was an utter satisfying delight to reread. I practically felt married to it for a few weeks, so thoroughly absorbing as it was. This was, oh so aptly, like visiting an old friend that you thought too many years had passed between you to still have a connection, and then finding out that was not true. My wife and I both were swept up in the propulsive narrative.

Gone was the repetitiveness of The Stand, gone the bloat, the shallow philosophizing, the social naivete, the tacky characters, the amateurish repetitiveness. There was little self-indulgence to be found. Here, now, was something thoughtful, refined (as refined as King can be, I guess), streamlined (as streamlined as an 1,100-page novel can be, I guess), a smooth-humming vehicle ready to take you to the dark side, all revved up and ready to go.

French translation, 1988

 

It had come here long after the Turtle withdrew into its shell, here to Earth, and It had discovered a depth of imagination here that was almost new, almost of concern. This quality of imagination made the food very rich. Its teeth rent flesh gone stiff with exotic terrors and voluptuous fears: they dreamed of nightbeasts and moving muds; against their will they contemplated endless gulphs. 

TV-movie tie-in, 1990

Online I often see horror fans almost reluctant to read IT, intimidated by its weightiness. But there's no need to be afraid to tackle this tome: King's prowess in sucking you into the story and enveloping you in his world knows few equals. His storytelling might is in full flower here, and there are few pleasures as welcome as disappearing into a really good read. Rarely did I feel like King was overwriting, or getting bogged down in useless details or wandering off into digressive weeds as he is wont to do. Sure, here and there, he could've pared down a paragraph, a page, a section. But that is to quibble; this shit is pretty tight.

Truth in advertising

I have loved since my first read the Derry Interludes, ostensibly compiled by loyal Mike Hanlon, which are so vivid, so real, so captivating. Found I had forgotten little about them over the years; the eerie chills of Pennywise's infamous appearances throughout Derry's history are some of King's most striking imagery in his catalogue. How I thrill to hear about him capering in the background of a Bonnie-and-Clyde-style ambush, a sad and horrific KKK burning of a Black nightclub, a lumberjack barfight that is more Texas Chainsaw than Texas Roadhouse. The midnight clown prince appears wherever humans wear the mask of evil; he is both its progenitor and its excuse, eager and grinning to join in the fray.

1990s Signet reprint

I had forgotten about how the townspeople of Derry looked the other way, literally, when trouble was afoot, knowing their whole lives that the place they live is tainted, and always has been, in 27-year cycles. In 'Salem's Lot King showed that the town itself is corrupt, and thus drew the vampire to it; here, while Derry is wrong, it may be because IT has existed inside Derry for millennia, literally buried in its earthen self. The parents of our main characters often seem to look the other way, or who don't quite grasp what's going on with their children: Bill Denbrough's parents are lost in the depth of their grief over the murder of Georgie; Eddie Kaspbrak's mother is delusional about his fragile health; Ben Hanscom's mother takes his attempt at weight loss as a personal affront; Beverly Marsh's father "worries a lot about her." Kids and adults exist, or at least they once did, almost on opposite continents, and King understands this intuitively.

Japanese translation, 1994

I've got to talk about the real-life horrors that populate IT: the homophobic murder of Adrian Mellon in the opening of the Eighties, Tom Rogan's beatings of his wife Beverly Marsh and her friend, the sad lonesome deaths of the abused Corcoran boys, and young sociopath Patrick Hockstetter's animal and sexual cruelty are the scenarios that trouble many contemporary readers—not to mention the tween "love-fest" at the climax (if you'll excuse the pun) of the Losers' tale in the Fifties. As they say now, these situations all hit different today. I recall no particular upset at these occurrences when I first read the book; today, yes, certainly as an adult I'm more sensitive to these depictions that, when used in fiction, can seem exploitative or tone-deaf.

But King is trying to get at real life, and there's no way one can mistake his gut-wrenching depictions for the sleazy, skeevy pulp-horror of so many an Eighties horror writer. These horrific non-supernatural occurrences lend a moral weight to IT that is an essential component; if King had left these disturbing realities out of IT due to some squeamishness, or sense of political correctness, or some idea of "too far," or some notion that certain things cannot be used in fiction, then the book would have been a cheat. And there's nothing worse than a cheat.

Many times on this reread I thought, this book has just as much right to be called A (not The, certainly no one book could or should ever be The) Great American Novel as anything else written in the last 50 years or so. The stories of his thirty-something characters after their lives in Derry come with all the attendant concerns—college, money, sex, career, ambition, health, aging—well-sketched examples of "how we live now" school of contemporary fiction. He weaves this tapestry of middle American life into a shared whole, in the guise of genre fiction, to reflect back at us our fears both as children and as adults.

Monsters from Baby Boomer fare like the Teenage Werewolf and the Mummy, midnight clowns and vampires, are something like placeholders; our brains are primed for fear, and those primitive childish creatures build the muscles that we'll use to defend ourselves against the hazards and vicissitudes of life when we're grown. Even ITs final form, the nature-gone-amuck giant-sized Spider that the adult Losers face in the sewers of Derry, can not be fully comprehended. Not all of us have the stamina—it was right and it was correct for a character like Stan Uris to exist, one person in the troupe utterly unable to face IT again— but those of us who do...

 

Turkish translation, 1987

 

Make no mistake: IT contains some of the author's finest frights of his career, none of which are diluted by the book's massive size. King flexes his well-honed horror muscles in memorable scenes large and small, missing no chance to scare the bejabbers out of readers. Chilling, lurid, pulpy, flat-out disgusting—King has mastered every aspect of terror, while knowing that often the most frightening things aren't necessarily a monster on the rampage, but a man who talks to the moon, a child contemplating death, a woman realizing her husband will kill her if he can. King knows how to sneak past your defenses, cut you deep, and then be off before you realize you're bleeding. A balloon, a toy boat, a friendly folk hero, and other icons of childhood can freeze your blood, electrify your spine, make you contemplate gulfs of endless pain in the silvered eyes of a BEEP BEEP RICHIE

"I'd rather stay here in my room/Nothin' out there but sad and gloom," sings Joey Ramone in the Ramones' snarled-up cover of Tom Waits's creaky dirge "I Don't Want to Grow Up", and you can just see all the Losers nodding in agreement, even if it isn't Little Richard or, god forbid, Pat Boone. It's a nice rebel sentiment, but you won't win any points trying to avoid the inevitable. Adulthood is coming, it is definitely coming. It will have its way with us all, and there surely is intent in Stephen King ending this inevitable journey of losers and winners with that single, all-encompassing, all-meaning word: it. 

And oh yeah… my wife loved it too.

Living in Fear: A History of Horror in Mass Media by Les Daniels (1975): Immaculately Frightful

 

Despite being able to Google any and all topics at any and all times, I still cherish having my own nonfiction collection of horror reference books. I've always been interested in author biographies and critical appreciations of the genre, especially for the general reader and not (necessarily) the literary academic. While my shelf of these titles pales in comparison to my shelves of actual horror fiction, this latest addition to my library deserves a post of its own.

Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media (Da Capo Press oversize paperback, 1983) is virtually a one-stop shop for most of your horror literacy requirements. Author Les Daniels (1943-2011) made his bones in the early Seventies when he published Comix: A History of Comic Books in America, one of the very first books on the topic. He gained a reputation as a serious, but not stuffy, chronicler of the overlooked, the forgotten, the thrown-away popular enjoyments of the past. (Hmm, sounds familiar...)

 

Daniels continued to write about comic books, with histories of Superman, Wonder Woman, and others following later. As his favorites had been the notorious EC horror comics of the Fifties, it's no wonder that he soon turned his attention to that also much-maligned genre in toto. We should be glad he did, because he almost effortlessly draws a line from Greek mythology, Biblical mystery plays, epic poetry, and proto Gothic literature to early American religious sermons, and then more recognizable horror fare like The Monk, Frankenstein, Varney the Vampyre, Dracula, Poe, Bierce, Washington Irving, et. al. 

But of course he's practically just getting started. The Order of the Golden Dawn, Weird Tales, the Lovecraft circle, "Inner Sanctum," Universal monster movies, Boris Karloff, William Gaines, Richard Matheson, Rod Serling, Hammer flicks, even a brief consideration of the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, and Alice Cooper in the context of psychological horror and nihilism—all come under his discerning eye and fluid pen. Daniels also generously included several classic short stories to serve as markers of their era, from Poe, M.R. James, Machen and more, including a solid-gold personal fave-rave, Matheson's "Blood Son."

 

I haven't even mentioned the lovely b&w art that accompanies the text, vintage illustrations from down the ages,woodcuts, iconic movie stills, comic and magazines covers (but nary a single, believe it or not, actual book cover) even a full-length EC Comics story. I can't tell you how excited I was to learn about Irish artist Harry Clarke's Art Nouveau-inspired drawings for Poe's dreadful tales (above). 

 

 

As for "modern" horror, Daniels seems almost dismissive of both film adaptations of Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist, which maybe made sense back then but today I find inexplicable: those two movies are, along with their base novels, the tent poles of modern horror entertainment. Thomas Tryon gets a mention of a paragraph, as does non-horror author John Fowles, and a few other "contemporary" writers, but Daniels wrote this book prior to Stephen King's ascension and domination of even the very concept of "horror." Daniels himself would start to publish his own horror novels, a historical series about the vampire Don Sebastian de Villanueva, in the ensuing years. The final words are about the monster cereals of the Seventies, perhaps an ignominious end to such a towering work, alas...

1975 Scribner hardcover

 

Obviously a precursor to King's chummy horror/Cold War kid memoir Danse Macabre from 1981, Living in Fear is a reference work at heart. I think anyone attempting to read it from cover to cover would simply get bogged down by the sheer weight and heft of Daniels' approach. You may be thinking now that this isn't the type of book you read straight through, and you'd be right.

Indeed, I see many fans online make this mistake with Danse, and then give up in frustration. I was introduced to King's book in 19-effing-86 and I still don't think I've read it in its entirety. Books like these are to nosh and nibble at, appetizers and hors d'oeuvres for the brain. It is something to keep on your shelf and when you run across some horror blank spot and you think, What did ol' Les Daniels have to say about "The Night Stalker"? Or Creepy magazine? Or Robert Bloch? Think how ridiculous it'd be if you tried to eat an entire Thanksgiving dinner spread all by yourself. No, you help yourself to a serving, go back for seconds later, eat some leftovers for a midnight snack or the day after.

I'll be honest: Daniels writes with such casual authority, from such a wellspring of knowledge and experience, in such clear prose, that I found myself dealing with pangs of jealousy as I read. While I knew of many of the topics and names and stories contained herein, it is the brisk aplomb with which Daniels sets down his insights that impressed me most mightily. His ability to synthesize and summarize decades upon decades of fearsome entertainments, to move from classic literature to pulp fiction, from silent film to the Seventies cinematic excesses, from radio to television and magazines, is nothing short of magnificent. 

Striking a path between the academic and the aficionado, Daniels has offered up a clear, deep well to drink from. Despite it being almost half a century old, Living in Fear provides so much context, insight, enthusiasm, and appreciation for the origins of, and the genre as a whole, that it belongs in every serious horror and pop culture fan's library.

Stephen King: The 1980s Signet Reprints

  Stephen King's 73rd birthday this week put me in mind of my first collection of his paperbacks: these reprintings of his classic '70s and early '80s titles. I unfortunately don't own them any more, and haven't for decades. Since I began this blog I've amassed most first printings of his original Signet editions, but I can't quite forget my first true loves...  

That famous, eye-catching “Stephen King” logo can be traced back to the Christine paperback in late 1983. Some short time later, I think around late 1985 with the first paperback appearance of Thinner, all his earlier books were repackaged with that logo, now a silver/gray, and smaller cover art images from the original editions (except Christine itself, as the title was the art). The consistent design, color scheme, title typefaces, and spine detail truly branded King’s work, and for those readers coming of age in this era, they remain the Stephen King paperbacks. Now, to begin my collection of these again!

The Year's Best Horror Stories XVI, ed. by Karl Edward Wagner (1988): Savage Amusement

Sorry to say that nothing quite as terrifying as J.K. Potter's cover illustration appears inside this 16th installment of The Year's Best Horror Stories (DAW Books, October 1988). Which is not to say this anthology isn't worthy of a place on your horror bookshelf; indeed, any self-respecting vintage horror fiction fan probably has at least a few of these, published from 1974 to 1994. It is to say that the stories collected here by Karl Edward Wagner are generally on the more mature end of horror, stories written with flair, intelligence, and only a little gratuitous grue—though there are several worthy exceptions to this observation. As book designs go, I dig this one a lot: the bold red, the gargoyles bordering the bizarre image, as well as something not seen: a tacky blurb noting the presence of a new Stephen King story! Most paperbacks then would've blasted that info from here to kingdom come.

 

This new King story, first printed in the J.N. Williamson anthology Masques II, "Popsy," wouldn't appear in an King book till 1993, in his third short-story collection, Nightmares and Dreamscapes. Wagner puts it first, although its vibe doesn't really give you much of a feel for what comes after. It's a mean little story, with pulpy crime fiction elements, probably King was reading a lot Jim Thompson, Ed McBain, and Andrew Vachss at the time. Dude owes lots of money from gambling debts, a mysterious criminal boss wants little kids, so dude's gotta step up, doesn't wanna know what'll happen to either himself or the kids if he doesn't. But he kidnaps a child who has more to protect him than simply human parents. Wish I'd read this one back in the day, with a terrific climax, oh that delicious King snap: and his breath was like flyblown meat.

Children's and young adult author Jane Yolen (above) brings us her "Wolf/Child," a fine little tale of colonial exploitation, native superstition, and comeuppance. As one character says, "There are many odd things out here in the jungle... It just takes an observant eye, my boy." The title is perfectly literal, the payoff perfectly delivered. In David Campton's "Repossession" a middling accountant becomes fascinated by a light burning in the window of a derelict factory building. Soon he's having visions in which he imagines himself inside the factory, seeing a man in a black Victorian frock-coat, which you know isn't good.

 

Well-known genre practitioners appear: quiet horror maestro Charles L. Grant's "Everything to Live For" is a thoughtful exploration of teen life, one of my least favorite topics, and encroaching death. A sadness at the core makes for chilly reading. Pure Grant goodness. Ramsey Campbell wrote "Merry May" for his 1987 collection of "sex and terror" stories, Scared Stiff (heh). Campbell mixes his brand of urban decay with some folk horror, and the result is truly unsettling: a creep drives a few towns over for some illicit vacation satisfaction promise from a magazine ad and  gets a fine how-do-you-do from the villagers celebrating May Day in their own special way.

 

Wagner reaching across Ramsey Campbell, 1980s

 

"The Scar," Dennis Etchison's entry, is one of his oblique and metaphoric works of psychic anomie, and in his intro Wagner notes its "mood of paranoid urgency," but this one truly left me scratching my head, alas. Guy has a violent freakout in a diner, woman with a disfigured face... Wagner also mentions Etchison "is planning a new anthology, Double Edge, to follow his tremendously successful Cutting Edge." A sequel to Cutting Edge, the terrific 1986 anthology?! It never came to be, alas, although Etchison did publish a Dell novel with that title in 1997.

Noted film historian Leslie Halliwell (below) provides some great suspense and claustrophobia in "La Nuit des Chiens," bringing to life a  rich European paradise. A group of old friends make their way through a small town celebrating a local festival, looking for an upscale restaurant, but find themselves on darkened unfamiliar streets, an increasingly large number of dogs following them... and in imagination he felt the savage amusement of beasts at the group's clumsy, hesitant progress. The unexpected appearance of the n-word surprised me, although I got it—British Halliwell is referencing the British-only title of the world's bestselling mystery novel, but I wish maybe Wagner had simply bleeped it out. But story trades on its twist which isn't truly worthy of the careful buildup before it. Have you noticed that when people who aren't horror writers try to write horror they think it's only about that twist ending? And cannibalism? 

 

The man behind the endless psychic vampire Necroscope saga, Brian Lumley, presents "The Thin People." It elicits some absurdist shivers with the literalization of its title—but it only made me think of this classic "Simpsons" bit, sorry. R. Chetwynd-Hayes is in top form, in his witty yet still scarily effective "Moving Day." This title is euphemism, to the horror of the man who's gone to live with his great-aunts, surely always a poor idea. "Give your Auntie Edith a nice kiss, dear!"

My appreciation of horror poetry begins and ends with Baudelaire, so I'm not sure what to make of t. Winter-Damon's "Martyr without Canon" other than it's a jumble of nonsense, like those liner notes a Beat-besotted Bob Dylan used to write for his albums back in the Sixties. It appeared first in Grue magazine, which I don't think I'd heard of before this, a semi-pro zine that ran from 1985 to 1999. Winter-Damon, whose poetry appeared in many small-press horror publications, died in 2008. Another small-press poet, Wayne Allen Sallee, provides "The Touch," a non-supernatural bit of gritty, everyday violence, always Sallee's stock-in-trade.

 

British periodical that ran 1979-2001, first appearance of "Echoes from the Abbey"

 

Fans of more old-fashioned frights, like prior to the 20th century, shouldn't miss "The Bellfounder's Wife" by A. F. Kidd and "Echoes from the Abbey" by Sheila Hodgson. These two women, neither of whom I was familiar with till now, are at ease evoking subtle terrors in the manner of M.R. James: My last impression was of a series of gaping mouths set in folds of dirty linen. These are as far from typical "Eighties horror" as it is possible to get, and Kidd's ice and fire ghost is one of this antho's most arresting entities... 

She was almost close enough to touch, now, and I saw with a sort of fascinated revulsion that the whole of her side and her arm were boiling, like milk on a stove, bubbles rising to the surface and bursting. The flesh hissed and simmered, and I felt the heat which radiated from it. Her ruined face drew close to mine, and then she smiled.

 

Wagner finishes on a high note with Michael Shea's "Fat Face," originally published as a chapbook by Axolotl Press. Patti is a prostitute working in a Los Angeles massage parlor in a cheap hotel; across the street in an office building a man sits at his office window and looks down on the activity below. Despite the mockery of her colleagues, Patti feels kindly toward him as he runs an animal shelter there, and one day decides to visit. While I found it over-written and overlong, the payoff is a wonderfully disgusting bit of Lovecraftian grue, body horror so gooey and grotesque it would've been a perfect Stuart Gordon vehicle. 

 

Nightmare ought not to be so simply there before her, so dizzyingly adjacent to reality. That the shapes should be such seething plasms, such cunning , titan maggots as she had dreamed of, this was just half the horror...

I haven't mentioned all the stories, however they're fine if lacking a bit of real bite. Wagner's brief introductions provide biographical background on each contributor, which is great because I knew virtually nothing about a handful of them (many included were more SF&F writers, which may be why). He also states "these stories are chosen without regard to theme or method, style or approach," and that well-known writers appear along with the not-known. That's certainly how I myself learned my way in and around the genre back in the Eighties, buying and devouring anthologies filled with names I only dimly was aware of, and then sought out more work by the authors who had the most effect on me—I'm sure you've done the same.

While I enjoyed this volume as I read it, impressed by the high-caliber, professional-grade prose and imaginative flair on display, I began to feel there was little potency, little that reached down deep to disturb, to linger. Not to say this title isn't full of good horror moments; it is, with lots of the authors working at the top of their respective games. But I often wonder, when reading a vintage horror for the first time, if I would have enjoyed it had it on its original publication. That's why I chose this Volume XVI: it came out in late 1988, when I was starting my senior year in high school and really ramping up my horror intake. Would I have been impressed by the stories herein? Not sure, as nothing here is as inventively ground-breaking as what Clive Barker or Joe Lansdale or Michael Blumlein or Poppy Z. Brite were doing back then. Still, anything with Wagner's name attached is a must-have for your horror paperback library, and I look forward to collecting every volume—only three left to go for me!—of Year's Best Horror.

The Stand by Stephen King (1978/1990): Dancing on the Grave of the World

"You're nothing! Oh pardon me... it's just that we were all so frightened... we made such a business out of you... I'm laughing as much at our own foolishness as at your regrettable lack of substance..." 
—Glen Bateman, upon first meeting Randall Flagg

Let's get right to it, gang: The Stand has never been one of my favorite Stephen King novels. No need to get excited; I'm well aware of its status as maybe his most beloved book, if one may use that word for a novel about a plague that kills more than 99% of humanity. Despite its imposing length, it may be the one Stephen King novel people have read who've read only one Stephen King novel.

 

 Doubleday hardcover, Oct 1978

Bosch-inspired art by John Cayea

 

But when I read it in 1987 or '88, I found it lacked what I most loved about Stephen King; that is, an intimacy, an atmosphere of the chummy detailing of the American quotidian that he'd done so supremely well in his other novels and short stories. Reading King felt like home, and The Stand most definitely did not feel like home. How could it? It is an epic story about people who no longer have one and are desperate to build a new one. That epic length never bothered me: I'd already read 1986's IT as soon as it was published in hardcover. But the giant panoramic post-apocalyptic canvas really did not appeal to me, and while I read almost every other King work over and over and over again, The Stand was one and done for me.

Stephen King in 1978

Most horror fiction fans probably have a decent understanding of the book's publication history: Doubleday hardcover in '78, Signet paperback in '80, then in 1990 another Doubleday hardcover edition in which King put back in something like 500 pages from his original manuscript that he himself had edited out before its first publication (Complete & Uncut, this new edition said; Uncircumcised would've just been impolite). In case you don't know the particulars, he spells them out in more detail in his intro to the '90 edition. Going by online reviews, this expanded edition is either: A) the best thing ever; B) the worst thing ever. Many prefer the shortened original. People have strong opinions about Stephen King books, it may surprise you to learn, especially one regarded as his greatest. In fact, you're about to read one now.

 First Signet paperback, Jan 1980
Don Brautigam cover art

(Okay, friends and neighbors, before I forget, here there be spoilers galore. I'm gonna be rambling all about The Stand and you won't want to continue if you haven't read either version. But maybe come back after you have!)

Doubleday hardcover, May 1990

Working in a bookstore when this massive 1,200-pager arrived on shelves, I was interested just enough to skim the new opening and closing chapters. The opening is now the family that careens into Hapscomb's Texaco at the beginning of the '78 version; it's fine, I guess, starting off the story in a panic (They're all D-E-A-D down there). But I recall being particularly put off by the final chapter, in which the evil, otherworldly Randall Flagg's time has come round again... accompanied by a Bernie Wrightson illustration that's entirely too comic-booky. It seemed all too obvious, weirdly unimaginative (but probably a way to link the Gunslinger/Dark Tower series into it, which King was now writing and Signet  publishing in earnest). I was deeply unmotivated to read this new leviathan, and remained so... till now.

I'd never seriously considered rereading The Stand. What a commitment! Perhaps it was something deep-seated in my unconscious, who knows, guess that's why I can't even recall how I picked it up at the beginning of December, because before I knew it was knee-deep in that mother. Reading the 1980 Signet paperback—I'm happy to own a mint first-print of it, but I'm not a monster, I do have a beat-up copy for actual reading—I was something like three or four hundred pages in and the story-line felt... constrained. Uptight. Airless. Condensed. I began to think maybe there was something to the idea of the complete uncut edition after all. Maybe I did owe it to myself to bite the bullet, go for broke, ride the lightning, and dive in. So I put my reading on hold till I was able to locate a nice, also first-print, sorta mint paperback (published in a sturdy mass market edition in May 1991) for a sawbuck, then went back and started over a week or so later. Seriously. I did.

 

And I'm not gonna lie: it was a grind. King's well-known weakness to overstuff his narratives with irrelevance and folksy analogies is on full display. He went wide instead of deep, expanding but not layering. The problems with The Stand are more serious than simply the number of pages: the real fault lies in execution, in writing, in characterization, and in scenario. Neither the 1978 nor the 1990 version is exempt from these fatal flaws; the longer edition simply reveals these flaws as baked-in, that's all. King famously said back in the '80s that his books were the literary equivalent of a McDonald's meal, but that junk food's still gotta be fresh, hot, and correctly salted, right? Right.

Well-known and -loved characters like Stu Redman, Frannie Goldsmith, Larry Underwood, Nick Andros, et al, all get extra sentences in their personal histories, but nothing I found essential or particularly enlightening. Better were the vignettes of superflu survivors who meet grisly ends, with King evincing both sympathy and merciless horror: a Catholic man whose family dies but won't commit suicide because it's a mortal sin; a child on its own falls down an improperly sealed well but does not die right away. Chilling, classic King... but mere crumbs.

Anchor Books, 2011

Also better and included now is one of King's patented family breakdown scenes that's top-notch. Early on, pre-apocalypse, it's pregnant Frannie, our heroine, in an argument with her mother in the family's parlor drawing room, whose hysteria over Fran's out-of-wedlock family way borders on the absurd. The confrontation crackles with real emotion, King getting at class and social standing and good breeding all at once. I hungered for more of this kind of King Americana.

 "How could you do something like this to your father and me?" she asked finally... "How could you do it?" she cried. "After all we've done for you, this is the thanks we get? For you to go out and... and... rut with a boy like a bitch in heat? You bad girl! You bad girl!"

New English Library, 1988 reprint
 

Trashcan Man, a pyromaniac gutter bum, with stupid dancing and cries of "Cibola," remains a tacky, tasteless character. And then King unleashes, in the uncut, a dude known as The Kid, so now we've got Trashcan and the Kid (heeey! don't tell me you forgot that Saturday morning teevee classic). It is a dopey read, a side travelogue no one asked for, almost too King for King, if you know what I mean. "Kill your darlings" goes the old writers' adage, and this darling should have died, died, died. The Kid is a caricature of a King character, a parody. While the Kid comes to disturbing end, he's cringe-inducing, dressed like a greaser extra from, well, Grease, spitting out embarrassing dialogue like "Coors beer is the only beer, I'd piss Coors if I could, you believe that happy crappy, awhoooooga" then sprinkles in some Springsteen and Doors lyrics. Then he rapes Trashy with a pistol. You believe that happy crappy?

Despite the various gross, gruesome scenarios King revels in, there's a naivete I hadn't noticed on first read. This depiction of the good folks of Boulder rebuilding society, all-American salt-of-the-earth types, was just so square. Why, they even have a ready-made town drunk and a hot-rodding teenager to contend with, and good god I was up to here with old prof Glen Bateman's observations about "-ologies" not being enough anymore, the glad-handing and back-slapping, the jokes during their endless, oh god endless meetings to figure out how to get busy being born all over again. Like everybody just up and knows Robert's Rules of Order and has a perfect conception of deploying committees and subcommittees and voting and vetoing and accepting in toto and everyone is happy to vote for the main characters.

New English Library paperback, 1991

Speaking of characters, too many fade in and out under the weight of the expanded narrative. Women are, in old-time pulp fashion, described in terms of physical appearance. And the endless litanies of names! If one more character said about another "Joey Shmoey, by name" I was gonna plotz. "Sally Lovestuff, her name is," or "Goes by the name of Bigtop Ragamuffin, he does" or "Tall, pretty girl, she is, that Wendy Jo" and "Heckuva nice guy, sounds like, over this jerry-rigged CB contraption we got going on here." Their dialogue is irredeemably corny, as if virtually every character was being voiced by a cast of cracker barrel regulars. He's always populated his books with jes' folks types, but Jesus everloving Kee-rist, King, did everybody who survived the superflu just walk fresh off the set of "Hee Haw"?

I'd forgotten deaf-mute Nick Andros was even around, and overshadowing him is a crime as he's one of the novel's most sympathetic characters. His sacrifice during Harold Lauder's bombing is one of the novel's high points, maybe its most heartbreaking moment: He couldn't talk, but suddenly he knew. He knew. It came from nowhere, from everywhere. There was something in the closet. Rereading it just now to get this quote right, hairs on my arms stood up. Nick's dream appearances to poor Tom Cullen, explaining how Tom has to try to save Stu Redman's life, are touching—if a little too convenient plot-wise.

 

 French edition, 1981

Speaking of Lauder, how's he for King's prescience about a certain type of American male we see all too often these days? The creep, the outcast, the psycho, the loner (today he's the incel, the school shooter, the edgelord, the MRA, the dude who complains about "nice guys" and getting "friendzoned," folks, these entitled losers are nothing new). Nadine Cross's unholy seduction of him for Randall Flagg is disgusting, sad, and all too successful (she lets him fuck her in the ass but not in the pussy, saying that will keep them pure for Flagg, my goodness what a lovely couple those two make). Harold's suicide after the bombing sticks in the throat—men like him shouldn't get free of the consequences of their actions so easily, even if they do express remorse as he does in a suicide note.

 Later '90s reprint

Let's just say it: for all his storytelling prowess, King can be a lazy writer. Much of the novel I read on autopilot; for as long and weighty the book is, it's easy—too easy—to read. Complexity, density, ambiguity is out; useless puffery and bloat is in. I skimmed pages because King was repeating himself, describing things I already knew: someone grimacing, people gossiping, everybody walking every goddamn place, Stu calling Glen "baldy," Flagg grinning, Fannie crying, I mean sweet Jesus Fran crying. He uses simple phrases over and over, engages in sophomoric philosophizing, his details about character behavior ring false: I lost count how times someone laughs till tears stream down their cheeks, uses someone's name more than once in a conversation, is described as being "naked except for shorts" (i.e., not naked), etc. And how much do you like reading about car-crash pileups? There are more of those here than in a J.G. Ballard novel. Where was everybody going?

And where's the mass breakdown of society? That's what I felt the '78 edition was lacking, why the story felt abbreviated. I expected more in the complete edition, but King takes the easy way out. Rather than do the heavy lifting of imagining and describing the political and social fallout as the world's population succumbs to a man-made disease, King presents his scenario as fait accompli. There's more of the military scientists realizing the enormous oopsie they've done and their futile attempts to fix it, which I liked as it was precisely the kind of approach I felt was missing from the '78 edition. I can't help but think this was a huge miscalculation, leaving out the nitty-gritty of not only world-building, but world-destroying. I needed a bigger bang, not this whimper. Ironic to say this about a 1,200-page novel, but I wanted more.

 Later Signet reprint with iconic Eighties typeface

It's all too easy today to see the creaky underpinnings and cracks in the foundation of King's scenario. Again, I needed more social apocalypse. If you're gonna have superflu-sick black soldiers dressed like pirates take over a TV station and begin to execute white soldiers on live broadcast television, you better bring some wit, irony, or satire to the proceedings; just slapping it down bald-faced on the page makes you seem oblivious to the racist tropes you're invoking... or maybe not even oblivious. It's dangerous ground, and if you're gonna tread on it, know what you're doing. Have a bigger, more audacious plan. Reveal the racism, the sexism, the classism and all the other -isms that permeate American society, that have festered and eaten us from within, and which now have exploded in the advent of the end of the world.

Speaking of racism, what of Mother Abagail Freemantle, the century-old black woman who is the locus of the survivors' dreams and visions, a wizened, hearty Christian woman of the Midwest who knows well the time is nigh and perhaps the Lord in all His infinite wisdom and glory will show her a way to guide these good people in their final confrontation with the Walkin' Dude, the hardcase, the Man in Black, please allow him to introduce himself, Randall Flagg? While King gives her a real backstory, strength, and fortitude, the fact that she is the only black character is conspicuous. I feel this is narrow-mindedness on King's part, a lack of imagination in a work that is intended to be the opposite!

Finnish translation, 1994

King has never shied from letting it all hang out (something he may have gotten from goodbuddy Harlan Ellison). This book was written by a guy of his era, a Cold War kid. It's a book of its era too; that is, the late 1960s and 1970s. Its creation was inspired by the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. The death of flower power and the downfall of Nixon propel its engine (indeed, The Stand is so of its time that it presages both Three Mile Island and the Jim Jones mass suicide in Guyana). The lyrics of Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Jim Morrison float through the prose and dialogue and epigrams. Springsteen too, but he's a '70s guy, so it fits that zeitgeist I'm talking about. Larry Underwood's rock star burnout reads more like late '70s scenario too... Warren Zevon, anyone?

Our villain Randall Flagg's nickname is the Walkin' Dude, and he walks like a hitchhiker, but hitchhiking was vastly out of public consciousness by the time the '90s arrived. Hitchhikers weren't killers on the road, despite what the Doors said; hitchhikers got picked up by serial killers. So changing the dates to 1990 and switching in Bush for Carter and so on is just that: it changes only the dates and the names, not the psyche of the characters, and country, involved. Like Glen Bateman's estimation of Randall Flagg himself, this aspect of the book was a big nothing. And Flagg is a big nothing, but not in a horrific way: nah, he's just a grinnin' fool, like Bill Paxton in Weird Science or something.

German translation, 1985

People like to read about themselves, about regular people in extraordinary situations, and King has always provided that pleasure. Larry Underwood's grueling passage through the Lincoln Tunnel is certainly an all-timer sequence in King's output, and there are many scenes of dire heroics, such as the shootout between our heroes and the men who've been keeping several women as sex slaves is quite good: Four men, eight women, Fran's brain said, and then repeated it, louder, in tones of alarm: Four men! Eight women! Nadine Cross's college experience with a Ouija board, in which Flagg contacts her years prior to the book's events, was a nice touch too in the expanded version. But these sequences are very few and far between, which I was not expecting at all. For such a long book it is curiously empty of import.

In fact I found the latter half to be tighter in every aspect, and that climax, long-maligned, not nearly as disappointing as I'd recalled. Reading about Flagg and his coterie of boot-lickers and hangers-on in Las Vegas who've formed a cult around him that would make Charlie Manson jealous is infinitely more interesting than those goody-two-shoes Free Boulder folks. Many readers have complained of the deus ex machina, virtually a literal "hand of God" (even noted as such by Ralph in the final seconds) that brings about the climax. It has nothing to do with the travails of Mother Abagail, nor any of the people of Boulder, so there is no ultimate confrontation between good and evil as the medieval-style cover art suggests.

French J'ai Lu editions, 1992

It was almost a relief, not having a giant ending that exhausts readers. This is, I know, the opposite of many readers' experience, who prefer the first half of the book. The 1990 edition expands, after their witnessing the nuclear doom of Flagg's Vegas, Stu and Tom's hard road back to Boulder, a bitter denouement that drags, I suppose, appropriately. So having Flagg reappear in the final pages struck me as pointless, a cheap twist...

Large-scale, good-versus-evil horror is not for me. My long-ago read of The Stand was the first inkling that I was outgrowing this pedestrian worldview. My other two big go-tos back then were Clive Barker and H.P. Lovecraft, who didn't deal in this kind of Manichean duality; I preferred ambiguity and agnosticism, subversion and confrontation, certainly not King's idea that "horror is as conservative as a Republican banker in a striped suit." Today I've outgrown completely this "tale of dark Christianity" as King himself puts it in his intro.

While I wasn't actively reading the book, I was also watching HBO's devastating historical drama Chernobyl, an all-too-relevant coincidence. The show's images of abandoned houses and tower blocks and burnt vehicles and starving pets and the dead and dying bodies were utterly haunting, heartbreaking, gut-wrenching. Never once did King's descriptions of similar ground-zero landscapes affect me the same way; he's unable to scale the heights of his imagination with his pen. These grievous oversights and failures actually angered me: ask my wife about the rant I went on about how displeased I was with the book during our drive to a relative's house on Christmas Eve! Or rather don't ask my wife about my Christmas Eve rant. I mean and I wasn't even high.

It comes down to this, and I'll admit it seems almost churlish for me to say so, but I can not recommend either version of The Stand. The 1990 uncut edition expands on the weaknesses of the 1978 version, making that book's faults even more obvious, while adding new ones. Despite random strong passages and scenes, there is so much shallowness, naivete, and lack of commitment to the central idea—a grand battle between good and evil that never comes to pass—The Stand left me disappointed in a very deep and lasting way. This surprised me a lot; I was unprepared for how very little I enjoyed this book.

While my rereads of two other King novels I was never fond of, Carrie and The Shining, were surprising successes, The Stand remained as I'd found it nearly 35 years ago: foundering under its own weight and undone by a banal, half-baked theology. On this reread I noticed how larded it is with middlebrow observations of human relationships, American culture, and societal ties; and not nearly as profound as it thinks it is: all in all, a deeply superficial account of the end of the world. As a fan of vintage King I don't understand the novel’s esteemed status, other than nostalgia by fans who first encountered it as inexperienced readers. It pains me to say all that, but here I am, making my honest stand.