The Stand  

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"The ultimate twentieth century parable of abandonment is Stephen King's The Stand (1978)."--Sholem Stein

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The Stand is a post-apocalyptic horror/science fiction novel by Stephen King originally published in 1978.

Stephen King said of The Stand, the greatest allegory of good vs evil since Heart of Darkness: "I love to burn things up," . "It's the werewolf in me, I guess.... The Stand was particularly fulfilling, because there I got a chance to scrub the whole human race, and man, it was fun! ... Much of the compulsive, driven feeling I had while I worked on The Stand came from the vicarious thrill of imagining an entire entrenched social order destroyed in one stroke."

Plot

An extremely contagious and lethal strain of influenza is developed as a biological weapon in a secret U.S. Department of Defense laboratory in northern California. It is estimated to be 99.4% fatal. The Complete and Uncut Edition includes a prologue detailing the development of the virus and the security breach that causes its accidental release. Security guard Charles Campion manages to escape before the facility is locked down and takes his family out of the state.

After a couple of days, his car crashes at a gas station in Arnette, Texas. Bystanders and ambulance workers become infected by the dying Campion and his dead wife and child. The United States Army attempts to isolate Arnette, going so far as to execute civilians attempting to flee, but in vain; the virus, christened the "superflu" or "Captain Trips", spreads across the country. The government then has its agents (unknowingly) release the virus in the USSR, its satellite countries and China to guarantee their destruction as well. When martial law fails to contain the virus, a global pandemic of apocalyptic proportions kills nearly the entire world population within a month. Society collapses with the near-extinction of humanity. Some of the few who are immune also die, unable either to accept the loss of their loved ones or to survive in a world where they must fend for themselves.

Stuart "Stu" Redman, one of the Arnette residents who encountered Campion, proves immune to the virus. He is forcibly held in a research center in Stovington, Vermont, in the hope that a treatment can be found. Stu escapes after the staff become infected, killing one man in self-defense. He meets sociology professor Glen Bateman and his dog Kojak, pregnant college student Frances "Frannie" Goldsmith, and overweight teenage nerd Harold Lauder. Stuart and Frannie are drawn to each other and eventually fall in love, then enter a marital relationship. This enrages Harold, who has an unhealthy obsession with Frannie. He then becomes sociopathic and schemes to harm the couple.

Most of the survivors experience essentially the same two dreams. In one, a friendly 108-year-old black woman living in Hemingford Home, Nebraska, "Mother Abagail" Freemantle, invites them to her farm.

They also dream of a terrifying "dark man" who calls himself Randall Flagg, among other things. People seek out one or the other. Stu and his group eventually meet Mother Abagail, who is convinced God has chosen her to do His will. The group travels to Boulder, Colorado, along with other survivors. These include Larry Underwood, a disillusioned pop singer; Nick Andros, a deaf-mute; Tom Cullen, a kind-hearted, mentally disabled man; Nadine Cross, a teacher in her 30s who is still a virgin; and Ralph Brentner, a good-natured farmer. As survivors continue to trickle in, the group starts organizing the hundreds of residents. They establish their community as the "Boulder Free Zone", a democratic city-state modeled after the United States' former ideals.

Meanwhile, Randall Flagg, who possesses supernatural abilities, creates his own totalitarian society in Las Vegas with psychopaths as his lieutenants. His people worship (and fear) him as a messiah and submit to his iron-fisted dictatorship. He has drug addicts and others who incur his displeasure crucified. Flagg rescues Lloyd Henreid, a mass murderer, from his prison cell and makes him his right-hand man. A pyromaniac nicknamed "The Trashcan Man" blows up oil tanks in Gary, Indiana, and travels to Las Vegas with a homicidal madman named "The Kid". After Flagg sends a pack of wolves to kill The Kid because he intended to kill Flagg and take over, The Trashcan Man makes his way to Las Vegas and is sent to find stockpiles of weapons for Flagg, as Flagg prepares for war with the Free Zone.

Mother Abagail, believing that she has sinned by being proud, goes into the wilderness on a spiritual journey without consulting anyone. In her absence, the Free Zone's leadership committee decides to secretly send three people to spy on Flagg, but Flagg already knows who two of them are. One, Judge Farris, dies in a shootout with Flagg's men, and the other, Dayna Jurgens, is captured, but manages to kill herself to avoid revealing who the third spy (Tom Cullen) is.

Harold and Nadine secretly give their allegiance to Flagg. In fact, Flagg wants Nadine to be his wife and the mother of his child. Harold plants a bomb in the house where the committee is to meet. The explosion kills seven or eight people, including Nick Andros and Susan Stern, but the other committee members are saved by the commotion caused by Mother Abagail's unexpected return and Frannie's too-late warning. Before dying, the extremely emaciated Mother Abagail reports God's will: Stu, Glen, Larry, and Ralph (all of the surviving committee members except for the pregnant Frannie) must go to Las Vegas on foot to destroy Flagg. She also states that only three of them will get there.

Harold and Nadine also set out for Las Vegas, but Harold suffers a broken leg in a motorcycle accident (caused by Flagg with his powers) on the way, and Nadine leaves him to die. After enduring several days and nights of his broken leg slowly becoming infected and gangrenous, Harold accepts the fact that he is going to die and commits suicide by shooting himself in the head. After traveling alone for a while, Nadine finds Flagg in the desert near Las Vegas and he impregnates her; the horrifying experience (his face changes into that of a demon) causes her to lose her mind. Flagg brings her back to Las Vegas as his bride, but she manages to goad him into killing her and their unborn child.

Stu breaks his leg en route to Las Vegas and persuades the others to go on without him. The remaining three are quickly taken prisoner. Glen refuses to grovel before Flagg, and when he taunts Flagg, Lloyd kills him under Flagg's orders. Flagg gathers his people to witness Larry and Ralph's executions. Moments before they are about to be torn apart via dismemberment, the Trashcan Man drags in a nuclear warhead (to try to atone for having blown up all of Flagg's experienced pilots), and an act of God detonates the bomb, destroying Las Vegas, as well as Larry and Ralph.

The inhabitants of Boulder anxiously await the birth of Frannie's baby. They fear that the child will succumb to the superflu. Soon after her son is born, Stu returns, having been rescued by Tom. The baby contracts the superflu, but manages to recover. Once Frannie is again pregnant, she and Stu decide to leave Boulder and move back to Frannie's hometown of Ogunquit, Maine, therefore founding an eastern settlement, and raise their children in peace.

The Complete and Uncut Edition includes an epilogue in which Flagg wakes up with memory loss on a beach. From the jungle emerge a dozen dark-skinned men with spears who eventually bow down and worship him.

Background

In Danse Macabre, King writes about the origins of The Stand at some length. One source was Patty Hearst's case. The original idea was to create a novel about the episode because "it seemed that only a novel might really succeed in explaining all the contradictions".

The author also mentions George R. Stewart's novel Earth Abides, which describes the odyssey of one of the last human survivors after the population is nearly annihilated by a plague, as one of the main inspirations:

With my Patty Hearst book, I never found the right way in... and during that entire six-week period, something else was nagging very quietly at the back of my mind. It was a news story I had read about an accidental Template:Abbr spill in Utah. (...) This article called up memories of a novel called Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart.
(...) and one day while sitting at my typewriter, (...) I wrote—just to write something: The world comes to an end but everybody in the SLA is somehow immune. Snake bit them. I looked at that for a while and then typed: No more gas shortages. That was sort of cheerful, in a horrible sort of way.

The Stand was also planned by King as an epic The Lord of the Rings–type story in a contemporary American setting:

For a long time—ten years, at least—I had wanted to write a fantasy epic like The Lord of the Rings, only with an American setting. I just couldn't figure out how to do it. Then . . . after my wife and kids and I moved to Boulder, Colorado, I saw a 60 Minutes segment on CBW (chemical-biological warfare). I never forgot the gruesome footage of the test mice shuddering, convulsing, and dying, all in twenty seconds or less. That got me remembering a chemical spill in Utah, that killed a bunch of sheep (these were canisters on their way to some burial ground; they fell off the truck and ruptured). I remembered a news reporter saying, 'If the winds had been blowing the other way, there was Salt Lake City.' This incident later served as the basis of a movie called Rage, starring George C. Scott, but before it was released, I was deep into The Stand, finally writing my American fantasy epic, set in a plague-decimated USA. Only instead of a hobbit, my hero was a Texan named Stu Redman, and instead of a Dark Lord, my villain was a ruthless drifter and supernatural madman named Randall Flagg. The land of Mordor ('where the shadows lie,' according to Tolkien) was played by Las Vegas.

While writing The Stand, King nearly stopped because of writer's block. Eventually, he reached the conclusion that the heroes were becoming too complacent, and were beginning to repeat all the same mistakes of their old society. In an attempt to resolve this, he added the part of the storyline where Harold and Nadine construct a bomb, which explodes in a Free Zone committee meeting, killing Nick Andros, Chad Norris, and Susan Stern. Later, Mother Abagail explains on her deathbed that God permitted the bombing because He was dissatisfied with the heroes' focus on petty politics, and not on the ultimate quest of destroying Flagg. When telling this story, King sardonically observed that the bomb saved the book, and that he only had to kill half of the core cast to do this.




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