Well shit, here we are, finally nearing the end of the blazing train-wreck of 2020, and really, there’s no end in sight for either Covid or all the political bullshit that is slowly tearing apart the United States. Good times indeed. So why not take on a new and possibly mind-bending project right out of the gate to keep me distracted? Sounds good!
I have to admit to feeling what might actually be anticipation for the upcoming TV adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand. If you’ve not seen the trailer, go see it now — the cast looks amazing, and I must admit to never thinking I would utter the words “Whoopie Goldberg, fuck yeah!” but here we are.
The Stand is my favorite King book, at least of those that I’ve read. I should do an analysis of all his works that I’ve read, but for a good chunk of the mid-80s he was all that we knew. Before I even heard of Lovecraft, I knew King and all that he brought in the first ten years of his career, which even then was vast and influential. The Stand, then, as its Tolkien-like epic battle between good and evil, also stood above the rest as the best King gave.
I read The Stand sometime in high school, and then he went and re-released it with an additional 400 pages, making the long version his longest book. And sometime in ’90-91 I read that whole thing as well — I was in college at the time but it must have taken me a couple months. My ADHD helped me become a very fast reader, but only in short bursts, and while I don’t have a specific memory of reading it for a second time, I know I did.
And now suddenly it’s 2020 and not only has CBS redone the series but somehow presciently finishing it right on the cusp of the worst global pandemic in 100 years. So yeah, I gotta read it again.
Now that I’m all tied into MUP and doing a lot of individual podcasts for them, I’m always looking for the next set of projects, so why not re-read The Stand but but take a new and perhaps fresh look at it. The Nerdist wrote a great piece on King’s Lovecraftian villains and Flagg-as-Nyarlathotep is right at the top.
With that correlation, The Stand becomes a Cthulhu Mythos story, perhaps the greatest one ever. In the reality of The Stand, Nyarly-Flagg is successful in bringing down the downfall of humanity, or at least wallowing in it once it’s done. So what better way to re-read The Stand than through the lens of the longest single Mythos story ever told?
I didn’t mean to buy the whole Complete and Uncut version of The Stand, which rolls in at ~1200 pages in a massive FUCK YOU to my unwillingness to read books more than a few hundred pages long. Now that I think about it, the last long book I read was The Great Influenza, which is so ironic I need to take a moment and reflect on that. I read it way back in 2013 and I can distinctly remember understanding the impact of a) that another massive pandemic was bound to happen sooner or later, and that b) we were nowhere near prepared for it. Heyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. I was right. Golf clap and death for everyone.
This plague-thing then starts to hit on many lenses, and it just seems right that I would start reading The Stand again now, taking a much different path for the process. Rather than just cracking open to page one and losing myself in the story, I’m going to take it to the next level and also:
- Perform an investigative analysis of the story of Randall Flagg through the lens of Flagg-as-Nyarlathotep and ask the question: is The Stand the greatest (by which I mean longest and most impactful) Mythos story ever written?
- What is it about the story that makes it my (and legions of King fan’s) favorite King story? Is it just the scope and scale? Or is there something else that works alongside to hold it together? 30 years after the Uncut version was released, does it still hold up? And will I literally die reading The Stand (by which I mean get Covid and die from it)?
- And how does it work as a parable for our modern times, because, hey, we’re living through a plague right now and how can we reflect this story to our own? Fortunately (if that’s the right word) Covid-19 is nowhere near as lethal as Captain Trips, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t seeing correlation between The Stand’s world and our own. How does The Stand’s world relate to our own and what does that mean for us?
So yeah, let’s do this. I’ll be not only blogging here but also recording small podcasts that will first be available to MUP Patreon backers and then eventually come out to the public at large. I’ll post links here as they come out, but a good way to get front row seats is to back MUP Patreon.
I’ve got front row seats to the worst disease in a 100 years, and I’m going to spend the time during the third and (so far) worst surge nose buried deep in what could very well be my last book, that was written by a fellow alcoholic and Lovecraft-fan, and tells the story of the last plague and the ascendance of a God-like man to extreme power over his cult-like following… what could go wrong?