Fiction Reviews
The End of the World As We Know It
Tales of Stephen King's The Stand(2025) edited by Christopher Golden & Brian Keene, Hodder and Stoughton,
£25, hrdbk, iixx + 779pp, ISBN 978-1-399-73867-5
The Stand by Stephen King, first published in 1979 and expanded in 1990, is one of Stephen King’s best-regarded works. It is also one of his most intimidating, being 823 pages in its original form and 1,153 pages in the expanded version.
Inspired by this weighty tome is this equally weighty anthology. At just under 800 pages, it is a bit of a monster itself. It has 34 all-new stories written by authors inspired by King’s original novel, and an introduction written by King himself. It is the first anthology as such to be authorised by King himself.
Living in these post-CoVID times, the basic story of The Stand is pretty relatable and fairly straightforward. A super-bug virus is released (whether accidentally or on purpose is a point of debate.) Known as ‘Captain Trips’, its global effects quickly spread and about 95% of the world’s population is killed by it. The survivors are plagued by dreams of either a mysterious old woman known as Mother Abagail or a demonic man named Randall Flagg, the consequences of which are global apocalypse.
Obviously, there’s a lot more to it than that. The anthology itself is divided into four parts. Part One is titled ‘Down With the Sickness’ and shows us the initial effects, as the virus spreads. Part Two is ‘The Long Walk’ (no relation to the Stephen King novel of the same name or the recent movie) and has stories about what happens when the survivors, encouraged by their dreams, to travel to Nebraska or Boulder Colorado (where Abagail appears to be) or Las Vegas (where Randall Flagg resides.) Part Three is named ‘Life Was Such A Wheel’, dealing with how the survivors rebuild societies after the plague event, whilst Part Four is entitled ‘Other Worlds Than These’ and has stories that are a little more unusual.
Being such a large book, it is difficult to review each story individually, or even each part.
And this may be the book’s weakness. As you might expect in such a large story collection, it is generally expected that some stories will work more than others as they read, and that this will vary from reader to reader – what is one reader’s favourite may be another’s most disliked, and vice-versa. You are bound not to please everyone.
However my favourites were Tim Lebbon’s 'Grace', about what happens to a Space Shuttle with a nuclear payload in orbit, Richard Chizmar’s 'Moving Day', which seemed to encapsulate the Stranger Things-type innocence often seen in King’s work, Cargill’s 'Wrong Fu¢king Place, Wrong Fu¢king Time', which tells of two young survivors who combine looking after their town with watching horror video rentals and Catriona Ward’s 'The African Painted Dog', which tells of the consequences of the plague on two African Painted Dogs that escape from a zoo. Nat Cassidy’s 'The Unfortunate Convalescence of Superlawyer' was one for Stephen King fans, highlighting a thread deleted from The Stand in the edit, that King’s ‘constant readers’ may recognise. David J. Schow’s 'Walk on Gilded Splinters' looks at the idea of 'The Stand' being part of a religion in the far future, which reminded me a little of Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. Catherynne M. Valente’s 'Came the Last Night of Sadness' is an impressive tale about a survivor wandering through the post-apocalyptic landscape.
Less successful for me was 'Prey Instinct' by Hailey Piper, which felt like one of those self-knowing literary pieces that goes nowhere and Poppy Z Brite’s 'Till Human Voices Wake Us', which made me feel like Poppy hadn’t read the brief properly – it was less about the virus and more like a seΧualised version of The Shape of Water.
Half of the book’s stories are in the first part of the book. With such a large number of stories on one basic plotline the issue of repetition is to some extent magnified. There’s a lot of repetition of the basic plot points here, especially that of the dreams with Abagail and Flagg, or the gross effects of the virus on bodies, for example. The mention of mucus was in pretty much every story that I remember. And crows.
Towards the middle of the book the repetition becomes all about the apocalyptic dreams involving Abagail or Flagg. Clearly, I’ve been watching too much television lately, as I kept thinking all of the way through this part, “Are you a traitor or a faithful?’ The only story that seems to try and fill in a character’s backstory is Wayne Brady and Maurice Broaddus’s 'Abagail’s Gethsemene', which tells us more of Abagail Freemantle’s past and her earlier meeting with Randall Flagg. I was expecting more like this through the collection, but didn’t get it.
By the end, reading all of the stories was becoming a bit of a slog. I actually found that the book worked best when I read two or three stories at a time before having a break. The book is SO big that the stories can become unremittingly bleak if read continuously, and actually lose their impact.
This also made me wonder, as I was reading the stories, whether this is a book just for The Stand fans. To start with, I felt that reading King’s original was not essential – post-CoVID, the plot is pretty straight-forward, after all, and most of the stories are self-explanatory or stand-alone. Having said that, the further I got the more I kept feeling that I should have reread the original novel beforehand in order to appreciate what is here more.
The End of the World As We Know It is a book that deserves credit for effort, but is less successful in its execution. It is understandable that so many good writers want to write in Stephen King’s world, but I couldn’t help wondering if a more judicious pruning of the book would have meant that the stories would have been more memorable overall. The difficulty would be, of course, choosing the ones to keep and those to go. Don’t get me wrong – this tome is a valiant effort and a worthy tribute to King’s original work, but I do feel that the editors may have missed a trick or two. More variety is really needed in order for the stories to be memorable. Although there are some stories set in places other than the USA, some more global tales would have been nice, and perhaps more use of some of King’s original characters would not have gone amiss.
Summing up, think of the collection as a literary equivalent of the Beatles’ The White Album – a victim of its own excess, mostly good and even excellent in parts, but ultimately numbing in its cumulative impact overall. Sometimes less is more.
Mark Yon
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