Review: The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King's The Stand, edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene, at Locus

Like a lot of genre fans of my generation—and perhaps several generations before and after—I had a Stephen King phase. The adage that the golden age of science fiction is thirteen might just as easily be applied to the mega-prolific horror-meister, who, besides being a gifted scribe with an eye for both the sentimental and the absurd, is a good entry point for young readers looking to explore darker, more disturbing topics. And, also like a lot of King fans, I reached a point in my early twenties where King's work started delivering diminishing returns, and where other authors—some of them, like Shirley Jackson or Daphne du Maurier, he had originally pointed me towards—turned out to have more to offer.

I am—once again—most likely not alone in being encouraged to revisit and reevaluate King by the excellent podcast Just King Things, whose hosts, Michael Lutz and Cameron Kunzelman, are reading and discussing King's works in publication order. It's been interesting to be reminded of the things he does well, as well the writerly tics that I find more than a little exhausting. Though I fall short of Michael and Cameron's admiration for him, they have encouraged me to read some King novels I had missed, some old (Salem's Lot, Dolores Claiborne, The Tommyknockers) and some more recent (Duma Key), and discover that they are pretty consistently not just readable and entertaining, but so effectively, efficiently moving and disturbing, that you understand all anew why this man has straddled American popular fiction like a colossus for more than fifty years.

Thinking about King naturally made me want to write about him, but instead of opting for one of his recent novels I thought a more interesting project would be to review The End of the World As We Know It, an anthology of stories inspired by what is often considered King's definitive work, The Stand. I am not a huge fan of The Stand (fun fact: I have only ever read the original, 1980 edition, which I found in a used bookstore and sold on before realizing how unlikely I was to ever come across it again). But there is no denying that it is a uniquely American epic fantasy that has become embedded in the pop culture of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. I was curious to see what authors writing 45 years on would make of its premise and setting.

It's an enticing concept, but right away one begins to sense that Golden and Keene's brief to their authors might have been too vague. The Stand's opening segment, "Captain Trips", de­scribes the accidental release of a bioengineered superflu, which quickly brings about the collapse of human civilization. These chapters are widely acknowledged as the novel's best and most af­fecting, and it is thus unsurprising that fully half of the stories in The End of the World As We Know It – there are 34 in all, making a volume that is nearly as long as The Stand's 1980 edition (though only half as long as the expanded edition released a decade later, to which King restored multiple storylines and characters) – focus on their events. If Golden and Keene did not feel able to encourage more diversity of topics among their authors, however, they might still have avoided the choice to group the stories themati­cally, front-loading what are essentially a series of attempted outtakes from "Captain Trips."

What these stories reveal, above all, is how hard it is to do what King does. Few of them manage to recreate his inimitable blend of pulse-pounding plot, genuine pathos, and unabashed grotesquery. Ideas repeat. Two separate stories focus on disaffected teenage boys who are their family’s sole survivor, as they wander their de­populated home towns. Nearly half a dozen are set on islands, which offer mingled safety from the flu, and an increasingly dangerous isolation. Again and again, one encounters the insistence that survivors can be cleanly slotted into good and evil camps depending on which figure – the saintly Mother Abagail or the devilish Randall Flagg – appears in their dreams.

There are exceptions, of course. Meg Gardiner's "Bright Light City" establishes from its opening line – "'Close the cabin door. Close it.' The gate agent sprinted aboard the United 737" – its setting in the last guttering hours of modern civilization, following a stranded flight attendant and an un­accompanied minor passenger through a world transformed beyond their recognition. Catriona Ward retells the collapse of human civilization through the eyes of the titular "African Painted Dog", who from the vantage of their zoo enclo­sure view all humans with suspicion, and must find a way to their own promised land. Poppy Z. Brite offers a rare acknowledgment of the actual pandemic that raged in the '80s and '90s in "Till Human Voices Wake Us, and We Drown", whose protagonist tested positive for HIV mere weeks before the flu arrived.

The End of the World As We Know It turned out to be challenging book to review—even more so than most themed anthologies, which are by far the trickiest of review subjects. For one thing, it is monumental, straining Locus's word limit to the breaking point. For another, it forced me to consider what I was looking for from a project like this: did I want stories that felt just like The Stand, or like continuations of it, or like responses to it? I'm pleased with how the review turned out, and I think it manages to capture both the parts of World that I found admirable, and some fundamental issues with its basic project.