Recent Reading: "The End of the World As We Know It"

The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King's The Stand

Edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene

Editors Golden and Keene assembled a large, talented group of writers to create stories set in the universe of Stephen King's classic plague novel The Stand. Some of the stories take place as the superflu is emerging and decimating the world's population, some as dream and nightmare-plagued characters are compelled to head to where they've been called by either good (Mother Abagail in Nebraska) or evil (Randall Flagg in Las Vegas). There are also a few stories set well into the post-Captain Trips future.

 

The good news: the authors did a uniformly great job of creating well-developed characters who come to life vividly and who mesh seamlessly into the world of Captain Trips. In fact, I'd say the book's strongest suit is how well the authors were able to recreate the world and the feel of The Stand.

The bad news was neatly explained by a YouTube video review of this book that I stumbled upon early in my reading. Unfortunately, I didn't bookmark it and I can't remember the account name so I can't link to it, but the YouTuber's overall assessment was that while a lot of the stories in this book are good,  none are really great, and that was exactly my experience. Maybe it's the sheer number of stories, but while some were interesting, there isn't one that is haunting me the way the source material did. I'm hard-pressed to remember more than the most recent ones as I write this. 

 

This is a massive book - 765 pages, 34 stories, forwards by Golden and King, and an afterword by Keene, plus an About the Authors section. I started it in late August and finally finished it last night. 

 

Fun factoid: With the exception of Randall Flagg and Mother Abagail (who appear repeatedly) of all the original characters in The Stand it was Larry Underwood - and his apparently immortal song "Baby Can You Dig Your Man" - who is name-checked the most in this collection. Wasn't expecting that, but Larry and his lone hit record pop up a lot.

NOTE: I bought this book prior to King's comment on X/Twitter about Charlie Kirk following his murder - an accusation that was false, acknowledged as incorrect, deleted, and apologized for. I had already started the book and since King already got my money, I wanted to finish it partly because I was curious as to how the authors responded to the assignment, and also because as a published short story author I was intrigued by the thought of what kind of story I would have come up with had I been a participating author.