My Pandemic of Preference: Three

A Lynchline Special, Part 3 of 4: February 6, 2023

Do you remember when you were finally old enough for your parents to have The Talk with you? I mean, of course, The Talk about how we define horror and its spectrum of emotional effects. Oh, wait, you never had that talk? Well, if you’re a parent now, you absolutely should sit down with your kids for a frank and honest exploration of the topic, because if you don’t talk about horror with you kids… someone else will. Probably this guy, in fact:

King, in Danse Macabre (and later in various interviews and asides and Facebook posts) established a theoretical hierarchy of horror sensations: “…terror on top, horror below it, and lowest of all, the gag reflex of revulsion.” Although characterizing it as a ladder, he also adds in DM: “My own philosophy as a sometime writer of horror fiction is to recognize these distinctions because they are sometimes useful, but to avoid any preference for one over the other on the ground that one effect is somehow better than another.”

King sorts these sensations by “fineness,” which he takes to mean whether the engaged response seems to come more from the intellect (finer) or the gut (meaner). Terror, in his connotation, is purely intellectual, revulsion purely visceral, and horror flits about somewhere between the two. It is a useful conversation to begin, and I disagree with it only in the most amiable fashion. As with most categorizations of aesthetic experience I find it difficult for someone to be entirely wrong and very easy to be incomplete.

Even Arthur Machen, who probably most closely described the qualities I prize in horror fiction (for me, the finest sensations of horror are akin to a sort of awe, the expectation and the receipt of disquieting revelation; Machen describes this ideal as “ecstatic” and catalogs it as “…rapture, beauty, adoration, wonder, awe, mystery, sense of the unknown, desire for the unknown”) was more dancing and hand-waving around his own feelings than describing an all-encompassing matrix of possibilities. So it goes! I still think it’s useful hand-waving, thus:

When trying to define horror I sometimes use the terms “the cold thrill” and “the warm thrill.” The cold thrill is the horror of comprehension, of grasped implications, of putting evidence together to realize some awful truth. The warm thrill is adrenalized and immediate, the shock of something appearing at a window, of something chasing you, of proximate threat. Neither sort of experience is, in my opinion, 100% intellectual or 100% glandular; that’s really the primary point on which I diverge slightly from King’s taxonomy.

Imagine that you are floating at leisure in a warm aquamarine surf just off some tropical island, and a prowling shark gives your foot a curious nudge. That’s the warm thrill, the sudden explosion of nervous energy, possibly the sudden explosion of bladder contents into the water. Now imagine that you make it back to shore and later see drone footage of the area you were paddling in, and you note the sleek gray shapes of dozens of sharks going about their business in the surf, and you realize that you were all but surrounded by them the whole time you thought you were having an idyllic float. That’s the cold thrill, the dreadful realization, 2+2 equals “holy shit, that was close.”

(This example is of course unkind to the shark, which is more malicious in our imaginations than in reality, but the imagined shark is very definitely an object of horror and I don’t think I need to tie myself in too many apologetic knots for having cast our finny friends in the role of menacing figures. )

The cold thrill, the warm thrill, and the gross-out. That’s a tolerable summation of the horror writer’s most basic toolkit. Throw in some essential flavors of atmosphere, of course. Eeriness, malaise, disquiet, and so forth. I love a good eeriness that never quite rises to the level of a concrete supernatural threat, or at least manages to put off doing so for as long as possible, and although he rarely seems to talk about it Stephen King has always been excellent at delivering that particular sensation. His Dark Tower sequence, in particular, is saturated with it— a sense that every corner of every world is haunted by something, or threaded with lines of unseen power.

Cold terror, warm horror, the squicky gross-out, a few crucial atmospheric stylings… that still leaves one important concept, a sort of junior partner to the major sensations, but perhaps the most difficult to consistently deliver— I think of it as “spookiness.” Sometimes we seem to get a glimpse of hidden layers of reality. We catch the far-off hum of machinery rumbling away at an unknown purpose. That’s what defines the spooky… it’s a hint, a peek, a chilling apprehension of something almost there, something perhaps plausibly not there, something we might prefer not be there.

Many years ago, a relative told me he’d been spending some time in the hospital with one of his wife’s older family members, a man who’d had some sort of major emergency (a heart attack, if memory serves). Each day, my relative and his wife would visit, bringing that day’s newspaper (this was before smartphones, kids, and before the internet as we know it) with them, and each day the man seemed to be steadily improving. One day, as the visit was drawing to its customary close, my relative stood up and set the newspaper atop the man’s bedside table. The man smiled, and in a completely calm and conversational tone, said thank you, he appreciated the visits, and that it was the last time they’d need to bring him a paper. My relative thought nothing much of the remark— perhaps the man hoped to go home soon? The next morning, his wife received a phone call informing her that her family member had died in his sleep.

Now, any number of things could have happened here. Least plausibly, but not at all impossible— my relative made up a ghost story on the fly. Or perhaps the man in the hospital told someone something like that every day as a matter of conversational habit. Or perhaps he’d really hoped to leave the next day, and by sheer coincidence died instead. We’re pattern-matching creatures, and we all say idle things like “cripes, I’ll probably get killed tomorrow,” and we readily forget the ten thousand times such utterances don’t pay off, but we never, ever ignore the rare instances they do. So, coincidence and observational bias—

Or perhaps the man really knew something, somehow.

It’s spooky, you see? Something happened, but was it a hoax, a misunderstanding, a perfectly natural phenomenon, or a tiny glimpse of something operating beyond the rules of life as we commonly understand it? I suspect that spooky moments have a special sort of resonance because they’re the closest most of us will ever come to having a breach with accepted reality while we’re alive. Few, if any of us, have ever been attacked by a werewolf or chased by an acidic blob from outer space. But we have all had those moments when the hair on the back of the neck goes up and a chill seems to settle in our bones, because maybe, just maybe, there was something…

Anyhow, Stephen King is also fairly reliable at crafting such moments in his fiction, like little chips of uncanny chocolate in the weirdness cookies. The Stand contains one or two of his very finest spooky bits, and in a pleasant (and not at all common) turn of events, the 1994 miniseries keeps them alive through the adaptation process.

One that I neglected to remark upon actually came near the end of the last episode. After a pleasant dinner, Mother Abigail adopts a “now down to business” tone and asks her guests how they knew where to find her house. “Through the dreams,” Nick and Ralph reply, and she nods gravely, as though not quite surprised yet still digesting the magnitude of the information. I had quite forgotten about this nuance since my last viewing of the series, this hint that the dream Abigail and the flesh-and-blood Abigail are partly overlapping but not entirely congruent phenomena. The real Abigail has not actually been privy to every word of every conversation; she is part of a force that has used her face and her voice in ways that even she does not quite understand. Now that’s proper spooky, the idea that there are hidden aspects and mechanisms at work even in the guidance our protagonists are receiving from some higher power. There is still room for mystery and disquiet, even while the plot is driven forward by this magic. That’s a deft little touch— once again, not one every creative team would take the time to preserve. Let that thought carry us on, past the halfway point and into episode three…

III. THE BETRAYAL

A moody in medias res opening, as we find Stu and company somewhere in middle America, performing an emergency appendectomy on a fellow traveller by the light of half-a-dozen gas lanterns. Stu, scalpel-wielding and sweating buckets, is so far out of his element it would be hilarious if his hands weren’t red to the wrists. Franny crouched beside him with a medical textbook completes the miniature horror tableau— so much for the glorious, freewheeling adventure of post-apocalyptic life, eh?

This highlights one of the most interesting things about the “chosen one” narrative (an extremely reductive and lazy shorthand in this case, but it’s a common term of art and I’m not submitting this newsletter as a master’s thesis, so neener neener) in The Stand— the protection it offers has pretty hard limits. Survivors are granted immunity to the plague, a limited subscription to some disturbing dreams, and a pat on the back. After that, they can still get hurt, even for foolish or anticlimactic reasons. Dream-Abigail doesn’t tell Stu “don’t worry, kid, God’s got a plan for you”— she tells him he’s close to death and needs to get ready to fight. In the novel there’s an entire brief chapter dedicated to telling little stories of survivors who made it through the flu and subsequently kicked the bucket like trees falling in the woods while nobody was around to hear. A little girl who fell of a bicycle, a man dying of tetanus, etc. Our poor appendectomy patient joins their ranks, bleeding out by the Coleman light, but his sacrifice highlights an intriguing artistic choice— everyone caught up in this mess is still potentially vulnerable.

The next day, while Harold simmers bitchily beside the campfire and Glen heads off to town to scrounge for CB radios with newly introduced supporting character Judge Farris (Ossie Davis), Stu and Fran have a conversation in the woods. Fran mentions that the previous night’s dreams were the worst yet, full of people crucified alongside roads and highways. Stu says he’s been having the same dreams, and that the crosses seem to be made of barn beams and telephone poles. This is the second conversational mention of the idea that Flagg and his people are crucifying anyone who stands against them or violates Flagg’s rules, and it’s an interesting way to get past the obstruction of the network standards and practices people, who stood firm on the edict that visualizing crucifixions was a no-go for prime time in 1994. I can only imagine Mick Farris and Stephen King giggling all the way to production- “We can’t show that? Oh, don’t you worry, no problem at all. We won’t show a thing. We’ll just keep bringing it up explicitly in dialogue, over and over again, so nobody could possibly miss it or avoid imagining it… suckers…”

Frannie also confesses that she is two months pregnant (the ex-boyfriend writes, and having writ, moves on to die offstage of the flu), and she and Stu have a lingering romantic encounter that starts gingerly, tentatively and ends with passionate release. In Stu’s presence Frannie is allowed to finally shed the wobbly girl-woman act and pick an age and stick with it, and it’s about goddamn time.

Afterward, Frannie and Stu, making no effort to conceal their affection, approach Harold for an uneasy confessional. The uncharitable interpretation of this scene is that it perpetuates the treatment of Frannie as a prize to be contested by Stu and Harold; the charitable view is that Stu and Fran are doing their unpolished best to preserve amity and honest communication in their travelling party. Perhaps it’s a little of both, but the unalloyed good here is that as with Fran, these events serve as a catalyst for Harold (who secretly watched the new lovers having their tryst), who finally comes into his own now that his vague sense of persecution and betrayal has something concrete to build upon. Nemec immediately banishes tediously sullen boy-Harold; the new guy is smoother, more charming, more manipulative, and absolutely seething for payback.

In Vegas, life is far from sunshine and giggles. Under the glare of armed guards, the good citizens of Randall Flagg’s city are sweeping bodies and debris from the streets. A profoundly sun-lashed Trashcan Man wakes up in a hotel room, his oozing wounds bandaged. He is obviously more damaged and delicate than ever. His welcoming party consists of Lloyd Henreid and our old friend the Rat Man, who is wearing fringed gauntlets and what can only be described as some kind of studded leather adventuring harness. I don’t, uh, know what’s going on here. I’m not sure any human being does, but Rick Aviles, to give the guy his due, swaggers around in this stuff with a credible level of don’t-give-a-shit. It’s the end of the fuckin’ world, nerds, and he’ll dress like a man who memorizes Bard spells every morning if he feels like it.

Trashcan Man is to get dressed and properly meet Flagg at last. After just a few moments in Trash’s presence, the Rat Man turns to Lloyd and whispers, “Dude’s crazy!”

“Like we’re not?” Lloyd growls. It’s interesting that there’s no honeymoon for the Vegas side of the storyline. Even Flagg’s most loyal lieutenant, from the very start, seems to be admitting that their version of paradise exists on borrowed time. Still, he does his job, ushering Trash into the austere marble penthouse suite Flagg haunts when it seems to suit him.

What follows is a quiet, excellent scene, once again strangely close to touching, showing the perverse way this inhuman entity drags Trash along with manipulation that is still the closest thing to support he’s ever known in his life. The symbol Flagg offered to Lloyd Henreid was a jail cell key; the token he dangles before Trashcan Man is a Zippo lighter. Matt Frewer’s eyes follow the flame with sublime absorption, until the fire in Flagg’s hand becomes a magic stone. I am doubly convinced now of my earlier assertion that Frewer is at his very best when Trash isn’t saying much; as he takes the stone there are no hysterics, just an impossibly shy “I love you,” as though the words are bubbling up from somewhere inside Trash that has been sealed by pain for decades.

These few scenes emphasize the nature of Flagg’s approach in this game between the forces of light and darkness. Flagg’s kingdom is inherently unstable, and his chosen agents are broken and hungry people. He doesn’t offer them reciprocal love or even respect— he offers them structure, fulfillment, blood, vengeance. Flagg taking Las Vegas as his seat of power isn’t just a commentary on the American cultural landscape, it’s a reflection of his willingness to take huge risks. Even before the agents of the opposition have begun to interfere with his schemes, he’s betting everything he has on a set of weapons that could easily turn in his hands. This is a bit of that, whadayacallit, foreshadowing stuff, I think.

Stu and company make it to Boulder, Colorado where Mother Abigail receives them and their dumbass questions with an extremely polished set of wordless “Bitch, please” glances from the fabulous Ruby Dee. Meanwhile, Nadine, still dreaming of a dark and gruesome romance with Flagg, is making her own way in that direction as the passenger of Teddy Weizak, who is played by none other than lil’ Stevie King himself:

The push-pull going on in Nadine’s heart is illustrated by a nice little bit where she sees a crow perched atop an abandoned car, and sticks her head out the window to look at it with something like haunted longing as Teddy drives them on past.

Time has jumped forward a bit. We find out that it’s now August. Nick, Glen, Stu, and Ralph are having a congenial sit in a deserted Boulder amphitheater. Glen needs reminding that today is the day they’ll be attempting to restart a power plant. Ralph asks how he could have forgotten, and Glen snaps that he didn’t forget— he blocked it out. He gives a little speech that, in less capable creative hands, might have just been an irascible character detail, but here highlights one of the ongoing philosophical conundrums of the story— with the vast majority of the human race so freshly stuffed into its grave, is the rush to start the old business up again really such a bright idea? All those gadgets and devices left littering the landscape, as Glen points out— everything from can openers to cobalt bombs, waiting for God-knows-who to pick them up.

RALPH: Aw, hell, professor— what’s so bad about puttin’ the rocks back in peoples’ Scotch?
GLEN: It’s the Old Way. And the Old Way was a death trip.

In 1994 that was interesting enough speculation, but from where I now sit in 2023, watching the unfolding set of global jackpots we’ve stumble-fucked our greedy collective way into, these lines have a vivid prescience. Ray Walston once again bats .1000 as Glen Bateman, incisively puncturing the relaxed and genial atmosphere as only a good actor playing a good teacher can. What the hell are we really doing here, he asks— how is it that we’ve all been brought together by collective dreams, on the word of an impossibly old woman who claims to speak for God, and while we’re all waiting for the next revelation in that sequence of apocalyptic events, we’re all back to tinkering with plumbing and electricity and cars and furniture and so forth, as if life has just been temporarily disrupted rather than hurled off its previous foundations?

As if to stress the weirdness and ambivalence of the situation, the very next scene features Mother Abigail laughing herself hoarse as she plays with a radio-controlled lawn mower (a device that looks almost insanely dangerous to my inner first responder). Larry Underwood and Joe are seen to have arrived in Boulder, and they are present to witness a huge caravan of new arrivals, including Teddy Weizak and Nadine, pull up in front of Abigail’s house. Nadine, urged on by the inner voice of Flagg, presents herself to Abigail, who takes an immediate set against her. Even Harold’s existence was brushed off by Abigail without a comment, but Nadine seems to be too deeply wound up in the Dark Man’s affairs to be given a neighborly chance. Though the confrontation is little-noted by the crowd (and confusing rather than threatening to the few who pick up on it), Nadine and Flagg aren’t making any real effort to conceal Nadine’s true allegiance. This isn’t subterfuge, it’s a flex.

Next, Boulder’s small crew of engineering nerds successfully brings the power plant back to life. The cheers of the spectators and the upbeat music are humorously contrasted with a montage of desiccated corpses whose appliances suddenly spring back to life. You thought your washer and dryer had a frustratingly long cycle? Imagine being this guy:

With the lights back on, the good people of Boulder convene a town hall at which they sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” with a mix of hope and uneasiness, continuing the theme of grappling with possibilities in this liminal time and space. Spotted in the crowd— “Teddy Weizak” and his buddy, miniseries director Mick Garris:

The primary agenda item is the ratification of a “Boulder Free Zone Committee,” based on a set of names allegedly handed down by Mother Abigail: Stu Redman, Nick Andros, Ralph Brentner, Larry Underwood, Sue Stern, Frannie Goldsmith, and Glen Bateman. Stu introduces Glen to the crowd as hailing “from Woodville, New Hampshire,” which is intriguing— if you’ll recall my snarky map adventures from last time, New Hampshire is a much more geographically likely place for Glen to have collected Stu as well as Harold and Fran. Was the “Attleboro, Massachusetts” caption one of those little production misunderstandings? Or did Glen Bateman just happen to know someone with the perfect summer house in which to crash for the apocalypse?

Once the matter of the committee is settled, there is a brief mention of one of my favorite details from the novel, the appointment of a “turning-off committee,” a group of people tasked with entering every structure in Boulder and turning off or unplugging every device left on when the power went out during the pandemic, lest any of them should burn out and start a catastrophic sequence of fires. The miniseries greatly compresses the power plant subplot from the novel, in which the power is not turned on until well after the meeting and the turning-off is a necessary prerequisite rather than an afterthought, but I do appreciate even passing hints at the massive systemic challenges of maintaining a livable urban area following a civilizational collapse.

The meeting ends with the dramatic revelation that Mother Abigail has gone missing. Frustrated, in her own way, with the same ambiguousness Glen Bateman alluded to, and excoriating herself for the sins of pride and self-indulgence, she has left a note explaining that she intends to walk into the wilderness and seek a vision from God setting her on the right path for whatever comes next.

In her absence, the committee trepidatiously sets about the business of dealing with Flagg. This meeting also folds up and compresses a lengthy section of the book, but some of the gist remains unchanged. The committee understands that knowledge is their most urgent deficit, so agents (referred to as ‘scouts’ or ‘spies’ depending on the mood of whoever’s talking) are to be sent west to gather intelligence about the state of Las Vegas and its surroundings. One of them is to be Tom Cullen.

Glen Bateman places Tom under hypnosis so the committee can give him his instructions. The committee is unnerved by how steady and resolved Tom is while in this state. Frannie is so disquieted that she asks, “Are you the same Tom that Nick met in Oklahoma?” To this Tom replies, “Yes. And no. I am God’s Tom.” This is a good spooky bit, but not as good as its literary counterpart. In the novel, Tom reels off a great deal about Flagg and provides an update on Mother Abigail’s situation, and Stu is the one who is prompted to ask him who he is. “I am God’s Tom,” is one of the most chilling moments in The Stand; Mick Garris actually does a bang-up job of keeping the energy and tension alive for a lengthy scene of people sitting around a kitchen table staring intently at Bill Fagerbakke, but I still wish so much of the scene’s original context hadn’t been adjusted or excised.

Next, we get another glimpse of essential housekeeping operations around Boulder, as the body clean-up detail (of which Harold Lauder is a part) prepares to empty a church of the dozens of corpses that have been sitting in its pews for nearly two months. Stephen King and Mick Garris are also members of this clean-up detail, which is a sly joke. It’s not too often that a creator will take on-screen responsibility for hauling out the bodies they put there.

Nadine, whose month is turning into a bit of a supernatural man-crow related trash fire, has been assigned the task of non-penetratively seducing Harold in order to channel his personal grievances in a direction Flagg can use. While they lounge together on the couch drinking wine, Harold remarks upon its similarity to blood. “I suppose that’s why they use it for communion rituals,” says Nadine, who then makes sure that Harold is clear on who they work for and what they must eventually do in their remaining time in Boulder. “Drink your wine,” she says, insisting rather than flirting, and the symbolism becomes clear— Lloyd his key, Trash his lighter, and Harold his skeevy creature comforts. Harold has no way of realizing that his pledge is one-way; no magical stone appears to be forthcoming for his service.

Shortly after they shack up together, Flagg sends Harold a dream revealing the location of many, many boxes of dynamite, and Harold’s last great arts and crafts project begins. This leads to one of the most singular bits of the entire miniseries. Harold is seen sweating in his basement, building a bomb, listening to The Sylvers’ “Boogie Fever.” Nadine wanders in to check on him, turning off the music to do so. “What the hell are you doing?,” he yells. “Don’t SCREW with my DISCO, Nadine!”

Nadine does not screw further with his disco, and when the bomb is completed, she, although possibly the most conspicuous enemy agent in the history of enemies or agents, manages to place it in a closet at Fran and Stu’s place, where the committee will be having one of its regular meetings that night.

Just after nine o’clock, while Free Zoners play in the park and the committee gathers for its seemingly endless list of action items, Harold and Nadine climb a hill to have a good view of their bouncing baby fireball. Nine-fifteen sharp is Harold’s plan.

However, Mother Abigail comes back from the wilderness just then, absolutely beat to hell. The folks in the park run to catch her before she topples over. Props to the props and makeup people; Ruby Dee looks like she has been run over by a combine harvester.

With seconds to spare, Mother Abigail sends a psychic warning to various members of the committee. While nearly everyone else is running around in terror or confusion, Nick Andros hurls himself at the closet and frantically digs around for whatever must be hidden there. As a result, he is holding the bomb about a foot from his chest when it goes off. The resulting explosion is, in my semi-expert opinion, not bad at all, considering. It’s a little too liquid-y like many Hollywood explosions, but the staging is ambitious and quite a few stunt people are in frame when it goes ker-blammo out the windows of the house.

A striking scene follows in which Frannie wakes up back in the sunset light of the Hemingford Home cornfield. Dream-Abigail sits on the porch. Frannie worries that she has died, but like Gene Hackman’s character in Unforgiven, it turns out she’s just in Nebraska. Abigail has very little comfort to give, just directions, and Frannie is understandably pissed off, but Abigail is inflexible. The ritual to break Stephen King’s writer’s block (I’m not even being snarky, people, his story about how and why he decided to blow up the Free Zone committee is pretty famous) requires an old-timey Abrahamaic show of faith, a sacrifice to God’s will with no guarantees that the sacrifice won’t become literal. There’s nothing at all here about how much God loves anyone or how special He thinks they are, just a straightforward command— Randall Flagg must be confronted, and it must be done in this manner, and he will never allow anyone in the Free Zone to survive if any lesser accommodation is sought.

Harold’s bomb managed to get Nick Andros and Sue Stern, as well as a short list of Sir-or-Dame-Not-Appearing-in-This-Miniseries types, leaving the four surviving male members of the committee to walk out of town, unprovisioned and unprepared, and keep on walking all the way to Vegas. A bold move— we’ll find out next week if it pays off for them.

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HOUSEKEEPING NOTE: I am grateful for your indulgence as we enter the home stretch of this lengthy dissection of one of my old hobbyhorses. I apologize for not getting this up as I intended to last night; while proofreading I began experiencing frustrating migraine-like symptoms, and I noticed that my typing and concentration had become so bad that, like a cat walking over a keyboard, I was actively installing fresh typos rather than removing them. I giggled, decided to play it smart, and went to bed. I’m still not great skull-wise today, but I seem to be improving.

Next week on The Stand— Stunts! Arwen’s life-force is now linked to the Ring! More stunts! Little pink motorbikes! Floating severed heads! Atomic cock!

My Pandemic of Preference: Two

A Lynchline Special, Part 2 of 4: January 30, 2023

You could spend years arguing about why Stephen King made such a dent in the popular consciousness, particularly the American popular consciousness, so early in his career. Setting aside the element of luck (which includes a sequence of striking and successful film/TV adaptations) and even the element of skill, if I had to participate in such an argument I would highlight two specific factors in King’s chosen approach.

One, if you look at the first decade or so of his ever-lengthening bibliography, emphasizing the novels, there’s a distinct absence of period pieces or far-off settings. Certainly, The Gunslinger and The Eyes of the Dragon are otherworldly fantasies but both had limited, specialized print runs for their first public appearances and didn’t really fit into (or disrupt) the pattern of his commercial successes. Each of those successes interfaced with the modern American landscape in some way, and even flashbacks tended to be flashbacks to the 50s and 60s, the recently-lived experience of people King’s own age. No deep-sea expeditions, no journeys to other planets, no haunted house historicals; King wrote about the world of suburbs and mortgages, high schools and automobiles, radios and computers and highways and landfills. No matter how strange his dark plot devices were, they lived in the same world his readers did.

Two, and quite relatedly, while King moved into financial comfort as quickly as he moved into national fame, he has never set aside his memories of or sympathy for the experience of being financially uncomfortable. According to his assorted autobiographical natterings, he knew his family was perilously close to the wire at several points before Carrie was sold, and the surreal whiplash of going from toiling in an industrial laundry to cashing six-figure checks peeks out from nearly everything he wrote for years afterward. Nobody in King’s stories is haunted by vampires, werewolves, psychic phenomena, etc. without also being haunted by bills and tight schedules and shitty bosses and stalled dreams. Even his more affluent characters tend to suffer or at least note the pressures of the rat race. King’s career-defining stories didn’t just take place in a known American landscape, they grappled with the familiar American experience of slow-boiling desperation.

The Stand, despite its eventual transition to a haunted post-apocalypse, is no different. The survivors lived in a world ruled by bank examiners and debt collectors. From that they stagger directly into an existence in which there will never again be credit ratings or charge cards or stock markets or waiting in hope/dread while someone “runs a few forms through the computer”— at least not in their lifetimes. None of our protagonists are survivalists eager and equipped for a life of heroic battle; most of them have just had every life skill they possess rendered obsolete. Simultaneously, of course, every debt weighing them down has evaporated, and the resulting sense of ambivalence and displacement is crucial to The Stand’s unique power. Most of its cast were dead-enders or fuck-ups in the Before Times, either running from something or trapped in place. None of them ever had the words Most Likely to Succeed printed beneath their picture in a high school yearbook, which is part of why putting the fate of the human race in their hands is so interesting.

Now, let’s put a pin in those thoughts. I’ll return to them later when I discuss the 2020 adaptation of The Stand, and why I thought it was, to get highly technical, something of a fucky-wucky whoopsy-doodle car crash. But back in 1994, the transitional period is ending. The bodies have hit the floor, the liminal space is narrowing, and our cast of survivors now has to deal with…

II. THE DREAMS

In Maine, Frannie stitches her father up in canvas and plans to bury him in the back yard. Harold reappears just in time to help her lug the body, and to later segue from “so your boyfriend is dead” to “maybe I could—” which leads immediately to one of the harshest “we’ll always be friends” in the history of human fiction. Ordinarily I detest the term “friendzone” as toxic, falsely entitled minimization of the concept of actual friendship but, uh, in Harold’s case I’m willing to allow it. Harold has absolutely been sent to the Friendzone (Frandzone?) like a fantasy adventurer banished to some sort of pocket dimension for pissing off a wizard. Harold, my dude, there is no saving throw from this facial expression:

Despite that memorable moment, this scene is eleven gallons of awkward in a ten-gallon hat, because once again for some reason this adaptation is pitching Fran’s behavioral affect as quite a few years under Ringwald’s visible age. While skimming The Stand in preparation for this little project I was struck by how few lines King takes to establish Frannie as a grown woman with adult concerns. None of that shows up here— no wariness, no calculation, no sense of personal power. Even generously allowing for the effect of grief and disbelief on the character, even with dad freshly interred in his garden, there’s just nothing going on with this girl/woman yet.

Frannie does, however, kick off this episode’s musical opening by diegetically playing Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream it’s Over,” which then slips out of the frame and plays over a montage of deserted places, empty streets, and unmoving corpses. As with “Don’t Fear the Reaper” it’s not a subtle choice, and as before it friggin’ rocks. There’s nothing flashy to this series of bleak minimalist shots, and once again I find myself impressed by the confidence and cleverness of the economy on display. Once the rights to “Don’t Dream it’s Over” were paid for, the rest of the sequence must have cost about five bucks, and it delivers its message perfectly.

In New York City, the enemy of perfect continues to be “Larry Underwood.” Larry wanders Central Park looking like a man who has lost all of his undershirts and picked a hell of a week to quit sniffing glue. He meets Nadine Cross (Laura San Giacomo), who is nervously sharing a park bench with a loaded gun. Larry assures her that he’s harmless, then immediately undercuts this declaration by sitting next to her and rhapsodizing that “he can smell her perfume.” Larry, my dude, there is very much a saving throw against this facial expression:

This scene is awkward, too, but at least it’s an adult awkward. Larry and Nadine are both about one loud noise away from leaping out of their own cheekbones. Storke continues to impress with his array of tics and nuances, while San Giacomo is alternately quirky and brittle but always seeming to push something off the conversational table. Larry eventually confesses to Nadine that he’s been having dreams about an old black woman in Nebraska; he’s nonplussed when he discovers that she hasn’t, while she seems deeply uncomfortable to be discussing dreams at all. In his short life, Larry has no doubt struck out several times when hitting on women who “played for the other team,” but Larry, sweetheart, this time you have finally met a woman who is literally playing for the other team.

In Arizona, we continue this theme by checking up on Lloyd Henreid, who is the only soul left alive in a maximum-security cell block. Wincing, Lloyd checks on a dead rat he has stashed under his mattress. He has no sense of optimism about the way his week is turning out.

In fictional Powtanville Hills, Indiana we meet the Trashcan Man (Matt Frewer) for the first time, and there are… issues. The miniseries continues to try making “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” happen by having assorted characters sing it badly as a sort of running gag—these are Trash’s first lines— but as the song was never great to begin with one might wish they had been less whimsical and more won’t-sical.

Also, this is not Indiana. It might be fucking Wales, but it sure isn’t Indiana.

Frewer, probably most famous as the embodiment of Max Headroom, is an interesting choice for the role of Trash but portrays him as a sort of Manic Pixie Dream Bomber, a few twitches too theatrical for the surly menace and vulnerability of the character as originally written. Frewer is expressive and entertaining, and there are moments where he lets something special shine through (his wordless scenes are much more interesting than the ones where he is giggling or muttering) but generally speaking the impression he gives is that a live-action roleplaying game somewhere is missing one of its Malkavians.*

Frewer is also significantly older than the novel Trash; overage Trash in this respect becomes an odd reflection of overage Frannie. Trash is distracted to the point of debilitation by his memories of people mocking him for his history of arson, and most of the voices we hear are kids. All of Trash’s traumas, as presented onscreen, are childhood traumas, unchanged from the book. This lines up nicely when the guy is about twenty, but this version seems to imply fifteen more years of life to fill, and simply doesn’t fill them. No use is made of the age difference to add anything interesting to the character and the result is off-putting, perhaps not so much a deficiency of performance as a conspicuous missed opportunity.

What isn’t off-putting is that the Dark Man, the Walkin’ Dude, the Hardcase, has actually begun to speak to his people. We first hear him in a glimpse of Nadine’s dreams, and then we hear him speaking directly to Trash to banish the voices that still torment him. “There’s nobody there, Trash. They can’t hurt you now. They’re all dead.” This is a fabulous little bit. Trashcan Man has never had a real protector before, and in a way, this scene is strangely touching. It’s a sinister, manipulative support the Dark Man offers, but it’s support nonetheless.

It’s interesting to reflect on how the Dark Man is shown handling his people; Nadine and Trash get nudged and whispered at, but Lloyd Henreid, slowly starving in his locked cell, doesn’t get a peep. Is it that the Dark Man thinks Lloyd can get along just fine without pep talks, or that letting unrelieved reality grind him down for a few days will make him a more eager convert when the time comes? Or is it simply that Lloyd’s situation is only psychologically interesting as long as he doesn’t know help is on the way? Sometimes symbolism is just a fancied-up term for the author’s fingers on the keys.

In Hemingford Home, Nebraska we spend a few low-key minutes with Mother Abigail, whose running conversation with the Lord God Almighty commences with gruff appreciation for the prunes that have just moved her centenarian bowels. Bringing Abigail down out of the clouds for a moment is affecting; we are reminded that while she is a paragon of a supernatural power she is also a tired, grumpy old woman who has to keep house, feed herself, and occasionally excrete. The contrast to the Dark Man is intriguing— evil strolls around at will, having fun, breaking rules. If Randall Flagg shits it’s purely because he wants to; if he so desired he could teleport his waste from his butt to Poughkeepsie with the snap of his fingers. Good remains tethered to responsibility, voluntarily demonstrating limits. Flagg exerts raw power at a distance, even killing people, while Abigail sends the psychic equivalent of encouraging e-mails.

Abigail continues her monologue with God, mentioning how the doctor told her to cut out coffee. Then she laughs, takes a sip, and notes that he’s dead and she’s still alive. We stan an absolute queen.

Abigail does one other important thing in this scene, which is to express the opinion that God has possibly gone a bit overboard with His tribulations this time. She affirms that she’ll do His will, but vehemently adds that she doesn’t much like it. I’ll have eventual cause to further dissect this adaptation’s treatment of religion, but for now it’s enough to note that at this point Abigail isn’t too far off from her literary self, with an obedience that is feisty and grudging but ultimately inevitable. Abigail’s God isn’t a gentle figure for the Precious Moments mindset. His demands are hard, and while she would have gone complaining all the way, Abigail, like Abraham, would have bound Isaac and taken him to the altar for sacrifice.

Her Isaacs are just starting to make their way across the country toward her, on motorcycles and bicycles and sneaker soles.

Without any further ado, it’s time to finally meet the reason for the season, Randall Flagg himself, out of the shadows and loving it. In Arizona, a fried and frazzled Lloyd hears the tap-tap of cowboy boots approaching his dark and lonely cell block.

Jamey Sheridan was doubtless a risky choice to play such a central role; most of the other names I’ve seen thrown around as casting possibilities were actors with much bigger names at the time. Well, whatever else might happen in the hours to come, Sheridan absolutely hits this initial scene out of the fucking park. Brightly gleaming eyes, insincerely gleaming smile, a big and well-fed man in a world of the shriveled and starved— his Flagg is both hypnotic and disquieting. He has one of the best lines in the miniseries when he playfully says: “I never even introduced myself, did I? Pleased to meet you, Lloyd. Hope you guess my name.” Lloyd mutters his lack of comprehension. “Oh. Nothin’. Just a little classical reference,” Flagg smirks.

If miniseries Trash is turned up a few notches from the literary Trash, miniseries Flagg is turned down at first, probably for the best. He’s still strange and menacing and perpetually amused, but a quick glance at the corresponding scene in the novel shows that Flagg, as originally written, was more overtly needling and condescending toward Lloyd, and had a freewheeling theatricality that easily could have gone over the top and canceled out some of the tension. Sheridan’s Flagg seems fine-tuned to work in concert with Ferrer’s version of Lloyd. My understanding is that they were friends in real life, so perhaps they put more work into the mix than other actors in their situation might have. Pure speculation, of course. At any rate, mullet or no mullet, I think Sheridan earns his paycheck and then some.

Elsewhere— Larry and Nadine have a spat while preparing to enter the Lincoln Tunnel on their way out of NYC, and Larry’s petulant side gets it’s clearest showing yet. Larry continues the journey alone, for a while, and the sequence inside the tunnel, with its lines of stalled cars and dead bodies, is an excellently calculated study in tension. Even a brief jump scare in which Larry (apparently) imagines a corpse opening its eyes is in the spirit of fair play, as the supernatural elements of the story are steadily growing more concrete. I can’t say enough about the lighting and staging of this tunnel sequence, or about the music, which has dropped to something barely louder than ambient noise. Every crawling-through-a-tunnel sequence in any movie or video game made in the last thirty years owes something to this one. Larry has a cathartic moment of completely losing his shit, after which he reunites with an equally rattled Nadine and they continue their dysfunctional journey to the broad sunlit uplands of… ah, shit, New Jersey.

The moving camera films, and having film’d, moves on to Attleboro, Massachusetts, where we meet Glen Bateman, an older fellow enjoying a spot of landscape painting while singing a version of “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” that is if anything worse than Trashcan’s. Stu Redman walks up behind him, carrying a rifle and somehow not using it. After getting past the initial awkwardness of Glen’s singing and Stu’s heavy weaponry, they become fast friends.

Glen is played by Ray Walston, noted star of film musicals but also known for My Favorite Martian and as Boothby, the groundskeeper of Starfleet Academy in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Walston fills his role with the same natural ease Sinise does, and Bateman is a charming old coot. “Superflu took most of the dogs,” he says, in introducing Stu to Kojak, who might be the last dog on the continent. “Along with their idiot masters. Most unfair!”

Out of idle curiosity, I looked up Attleboro to see how close it is to my home. Stovington, VT is fictional (as is Powtanville Hills, IN) but Attleboro is a real place, and it’s not at all where I expected. In fact, it’s tucked away in the far southeasterly reaches of the Commonwealth (God save it!), just above Rhode Island. This raises a fascinating issue, because it doesn’t matter where the imaginary Stovington is— every single inch of Vermont is far to the northwest of Attleboro. This means that Stu Redman, having received supernatural guidance directing him to Nebraska, has somehow immediately headed far enough southeast to nearly reach the Atlantic Ocean. Great job, buddy.

Somewhere in the woods in Pennsylvania, Larry applies his smoothest moves to Nadine and discovers that they only work to a certain point. Larry doesn’t take this well; Nadine says she likes him but needs more time. This is of course a strategy to keep herself unattached so she can fulfill her secret destiny as the devil’s helpmeet, but in light of the fact that six billion people have just died and they’ve spent days running and hiding for their lives, it’s also a perfectly reasonable fucking way to be. Larry only grudgingly avoids having major consent issues. As they sleep, we see that they are having different dreams. While Larry is stepping out of Mother Abigail’s cornfield, Nadine is receiving orders from Flagg to ditch Larry before the last of the East Coast playboys inadvertently makes it past second base. When Larry wakes up, he finds Nadine has been replaced with a Dear Larry note. The camera lingers for a surprising length of time on his reaction, with brief anger turning to hopeless misery. Larry is, of all the people we’ve met so far, perhaps the most terrible at being alone.

In Oklahoma, Nick Andros seems to be doing just fine by himself, coasting along on a ten-speed, hat discarded, wearing a t-shirt rather than hiding under flannels. His situational awareness hasn’t gotten any better, however, as he nearly runs into Tom Cullen (Bill Fagerbakke) in broad daylight. I won’t dwell too much on the subject of Tom’s mental disability right now, but I will say that there was a lot of daylight between 1978 and 1994, just as there has been between 1994 and now, and Fagerbakke is putting a very soulful and sympathetic effort into portraying what would now be regarded, in all fairness, as an outmoded or quasi-fictional depiction of a general learning disability. If my understanding is correct, the “child trapped in the body of a man,” as Cullen is partly characterized, does not really exist as a phenomenon. There’ll be quite a bit more to say about this later.

In frankly beautiful Attleboro, Stu and Glen and Kojak are chilling on Glen’s front porch, which is just about the chilling-est spot imaginable. I don’t often see a location in a TV miniseries that makes me say “gee, I wish I could fall through my screen and end up there,” but whoever scouted the location for Glen’s idyllic brookside house found a real treasure. Attleboro continues to be a weirdness magnet, too, because Frannie and Harold just happen by on their way to the very disease control center in Stovington, VT that Stu recently escaped from. Let’s go back to the maps! Ogunquit is a real town in Maine, on the far southern coast, not far north of the Massachusetts border. Yet, in order to go west, Fran and Harold have for some reason not just segued a teensy bit south but passed through the entire Boston metro area and ended up nearly in Rhode Island. It’s a rhetorical question in the 21st century to wonder how people operated before GPS and computerized maps. The Stand offers a bold and simple answer— like shit.

I suppose everyone has to meet up somehow, so maybe we can just say it was the dreams. Except, in Kansas a few days later, we catch up with Nick and Tom taking a break on their own journey to Nebraska. Feeling snarky, I pulled up Google maps again and double-checked, and actually… these boys are doing just fine. Nebraska is the second state north of Oklahoma, passing through Kansas is exactly how you’d do it. The world’s least situationally aware man and a guy who literally can’t read maps are somehow less confused than the entire surviving population of New England.

Tom has a sour stomach, so Nick investigates a drug store, where he has a close encounter with Julie Lawry (Shawnee Smith), a cruel and unstable young woman who mocks Nick and Tom for their disabilities. As her hostility escalates, Nick forces her away at gunpoint and scribbles her a note that leaves no room for misinterpretation: “We don’t need you.” Something new is definitely alive inside Nick in this post-apocalypse. Although there are no more dubious legal protectors to be relied upon, there’s also no system of prejudices and proprieties urging him to be small or stay hidden. I appreciate this scene for demonstrating what we would call “establishing good boundaries” thirty years later. Julie runs off and establishes some boundaries of her own, showering the boys with badly-aimed carbine fire as they hightail it out of town.

Somewhere near Des Moines, Larry Underwood sits on the hood of an abandoned car, jamming away at an acoustic version of the mid-60s protest song “Eve of Destruction” while the city smokes and smolders behind him. He encounters a woman named Lucy Swann (Bridgit Ryan) and a taciturn, knife-happy boy called Joe (Billy Sullivan). These characters, originally introduced earlier in the novel under much more complicated circumstances, are disentangled in the miniseries from everyone except Larry.

Larry and Lucy have a chat about the burning city in which she reveals that the conflagration started when someone apparently blew up an oil tank farm, leading the audience to understand that the Trashcan Man recently passed through on his way west. Larry wonders why anyone would just burn down a city, and I have to say that in his shoes, in the middle of a mass die-off, I’d be much less curious about big fires on a city-by-city basis. In fact I’d be more surprised by the ones that hadn’t burned.

Next we see Trashcan himself stumbling along the highway in “the Utah badlands,” which look just a touch like “the somewhere-near-Utah merely okay lands,” but I could not say for sure. Feeling snarky yet again, I went to Google Maps, and was once again edified— like Nick and Tom, Trash is steering a flawless course toward his objective. This despite the fact that he is hallucinating cities of gold on the horizon. Perhaps the crows watching him are offering tips? A hell of a way to walk hundreds of miles, but it’s still Flyover Country 2, Eastern Standard Time 0 in the game of making straight lines.

Nick and Tom make it to Hemingford Home at last, in the company of a crew of amiable bumpkins, one of whom is an extremely Hallmark Family Movie little girl who calls Abigail “granny-lady.” There is a strange blending of tones taking place now; nice clean white folks are doing nice clean white folk things while Abigail tells them, as plainly as one might discuss the weather, that they are in a bloody war and God will ask terrible things of his chosen ones. There’s another war brewing, the war between the Old Testament flavor of the source material and the Church of Network Standards and Practices. This war will claim some casualties before the miniseries is over.

The company does not stay long in Nebraska. Abigail tells everyone that it’s time to move on, to the site of their real operation, in Boulder, Colorado. Once her things are packed, Nick (artfully shirtless for the viewers at home) pounds a sign into the lawn telling follow-on dreamers where to go next. Abigail gets another lengthy scene of humanization, confessing to Nick that she has lived here so long, through trial after trial, that she is distraught at the idea of leaving. For so many years she’s been the last living holdout on the last unforfeited parcel of her father’s original land— once again, she is ready to do God’s will but once again she is torn with sorrow.

In Las Vegas, a scorched and exhausted Trashcan Man has finally reached his destination. After soaking in a courtyard fountain, he enters a vast and nearly deserted casino and immediately goes to sleep on a a green gaming table. The camera artfully captures him framed there, half vulnerable child and half feral animal.

A group of men playing a desultory hand of cards has watched all of this. One of them is Lloyd Henreid. When another man asks what they’re meant to do with the newcomer, and where Randall Flagg is, Lloyd responds: “Flagg’ll be around, he’s been waiting for this guy. This guy’s somethin’ special.”

NEXT WEEK ON THE STAND: Sex! Hypnosis! Author Inserts! Bombs!

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*I am of course kidding, no LARP has ever missed any of its Malkavians.**

**This comment unfair to many subtle, knowledgeable players of Malkavians who worked hard in the 90s to keep things real.***

***I can make these comments because I fuckin’ played Tremere all the time, I have no moral high ground, I was a jazz-hands wizard vampire dork from hell.

My Pandemic of Preference: One

A Lynchline Special, Part 1 of 4: January 23, 2023

In the summer of 1989, faced with the prospect of enriching my body and soul with vigorous exercise in the forests and waters of Northern Minnesota, I did what any sensible 11-year-old would and buried my face in a book for days. That was how I met The Stand.

I spent a lot of my early youth buried in books, but the majority of them were non-fiction, gamebooks (Choose Your Own Adventure, Which Way, some random fantasies that slipped past the school district busybodies during the panics of the 80s) or coffee-table books about all the awesome alien monsters that would kill us in the future. The Stand wasn’t just my introduction to Stephen King— it was the first adult novel I ever read cover to cover without skimming or halting. And that’s clearly why, thirty-three years later, I’m such a completely normal person!

I can best sum up how I feel about The Stand by admitting I have never successfully gotten rid of any copy of it that has fallen into my hands. I believe I now own six of them, including three of the edition I had with me that summer, the Signet paperback with the Don Brautigam cover: blue light glowing behind dark hills, baleful eyes staring out from the mingled shapes of man and crow. I still think about that cover sometimes, when I’m driving on rural roads or I’m out on the highway as the day’s light is sinking. The eerie promise of that blue light remains threaded into my subconscious conception of America— just over the horizon there’s something waiting for us all, something huge, something strange, maybe something terrible.

Here’s the very object, braced with some archival tape but still forever at or near my desk, a third of a century since I first opened it:

I must have picked the book up because the back cover mentioned a plague. I was intrigued by that sort of thing—worlds ending, civilizations falling, normal weird kid stuff— but the plague was actually the least fantastical of the concepts The Stand had to offer. Reading it was like climbing the wall that separated my world from adulthood and taking my first long peek over the edge. Here were grown-ups with jobs and finances and frustrations and relationships, grown-ups interacting with all the systems of being grown up, and not a viewpoint kid in sight to shepherd me along as I tried to grasp it all. Then, while my mind was still reeling from the strangeness of their normality, normality was snatched away. The systems collapsed, the cities and nations died, all the known lines of power and authority dissolved. Ironically, the post-apocalypse was an easier place for my mind to dwell. It was full of concepts I understood— running, hiding, fighting monsters, dreaming of hopes and terrors. The Stand was a story in which the world of my parents’ and teachers’ rules melted into a world where the rules of my imagination had more practical application.

In May of 1994 the last few weeks of my sophomore year of high school were ticking away and CBS aired a four-part adaptation of The Stand. Network TV miniseries were still a big thing in those days, as I suppose coin-operated zoetrope machines and cave wall paintings once were. I grew up on stuff like V, V: The Final Battle, North and South, War and Remembrance, and even the previous big Stephen King adaptation, It. For unguessable reasons, The Stand had not led me to a Stephen King reading habit (I did not become a full-on fan until after high school) but I did have an abiding fixation on that single book, and so I watched the whole miniseries raptly. I’m not ashmed to admit I must have watched it a dozen times over the last thirty years in various formats. It’s an odd duck— some of it is absolutely magnificent, some of it is earnest and awkward, some of it is goofy as hell. It’s full of little treats, starts well, waxes even better in the middle, and all but flies apart at the end. Warts and all, it has gradually become one of my favorite pieces of media of all time.

The reason for this is largely personal. I was a freshly-minted sixteen when this aired, and I was growing comfortable in my own skin again after a couple years of grueling, stumbling adolescence. My freshman year in high school had been an emotional disaster, the tortures of the Inquisition with bonus hormones, but here at the close of year two was a real sense of possibility and movement. I had a fantastic girlfriend, I could finally get a driver’s license, I could get a proper job. I was meeting the world, and the thing about the 1994 The Stand is that I’ve never seen anything else that looks so perfectly of that time. Every car, every building, every stitch of clothing screams middle America in ‘94, so it’s a memento of both a beloved book and a beloved passage in my life. Which is why I’ve been itching to absolutely uncork a massive stream of in-depth yammering about it! Here we go, episode by episode, in a rambling, informal, profoundly fussy recap annotation and dissection of 1994’s The Stand, commencing with:

I. THE PLAGUE

One of the most interesting conceits in King’s world is his nightmare network of dark sites, secret projects, grim laboratories, and government bunkers that pervades the American landscape. Certainly, these things exist in real life but in King’s work they have metastasized to mythic scale. These are the miles and miles of dusty but power-haunted tunnels Roland traverses in the Dark Tower stories, the Arrowhead Project of “The Mist,” the well-manicured lawns and tasteful farmhouses that conceal the goon squads of the Shop. Here we open with Project Blue, a biological warfare lab four hundred feet beneath a drab collection of unassuming government buildings, one of a thousand unsavory little secrets tucked away in the countryside. This just happens to be the one that hatches the end of the world.

The opening of the miniseries is by most measures closely faithful to the events described in the 1990 “complete and uncut” edition of the book (about which I’ll say more later); an accidental release of a deadly pathogen at the aforementioned Secret Underground Fun Lab sets off alarms and causes the token above-ground guard to panic. This scene is exciting, featuring handheld camera work in an unbroken shot that follows this poor bastard as he runs into his house, rouses his family, and hauls them out to the car not realizing that they are already Patients Zero, One, and Two of the coming mess. Budget limitations rear their head in the form of the world’s flimsiest alleged anti-vehicle gate (seriously, you’d be hard pressed to guard a middle school tennis court with that thing, electrified or not— behold as it wobbles into the road on its little bitty wheels of doom:)

but despite this, director Mick Garris and his people send a clear message that they will shake out their full bag of tricks to give this production some energy. This impression continues as the camera drifts into the deserted guard shack, approaches the monitors showing heaps of dead scientists in the lab below, and “enters” a monitor to transition down to that set while a surprisingly kick-ass tune plays over the credits— my first conscious exposure to Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper.” Sure, you could call this an obvious choice, but the thing to do with obvious choices is execute them with gusto. These first few minutes are a 10/10 for gusto.

As the song continues playing, we take a leisurely journey through labs, offices, and cafeterias and gaze upon the very surprised corpses now filling them. Again, big mood, a gripping opening, but it does raise a pedantic question that has bothered me since the very first time I read the book. Namely, what the hell is meant to have killed all these people so fast?

The cause of the plague is an engineered influenza variant with a 99.4% excess mortality rate in the general population, and while it’s awful and inexorable, its victims take several days to die. Now, exposure to a massive viral load would speed that process up considerably, but still, you’re not going to get immediate knockdown of a live human being with a virus like this. That sort of effect requires a science-fictional pathogen like the Andromeda Strain, total displacement of all atmospheric oxygen, or a potent chemical agent. People are seen piled up against doors, pitched over at their desks, sprawled at tables— and even though some of them have been made up with this adaptation’s visual cues for superflu, the flu didn’t kill these people. Molly Ringwald did.

Well, possibly. I mean, it’s not likely, but in a contest between Molly Ringwald and the flu, only Molly Ringwald actually has the slightest chance of causing multiple rapid deaths, and yet there’s no left-behind axe or gun visible in any of these scenes. So, somehow, our imaginary flu has dropped these people in their tracks before migrating 400 feet up to the surface, where it suddenly needs 36-72 hours to get the job done. Huh?

In my head, I always fixed this by assuming that the release in the lab complex was something very fast-acting, most likely a chemical, and that the escape of the superflu was just a pile-on consequence as people working with flasks and test tubes pitched over at their workstations. An even more elegant retcon I eventually cooked up was that the flu had already been released some hours previously (explaining how the guard and his family caught it despite being up on the surface) but the forces of darkness, who were orchestrating and watching the whole chain of events, needed to ensure that the guard wasn’t reported or pursued when he packed up his family and ran. Thus, an accident with a more virulent agent to set off the alarms, frighten him into leaving, and help him get away without interference.

“Oh Scott,” you might be saying, “you poor silly bitch, this is what you spend your time worrying about, in a world where levitating demons turn knives into bananas?” Listen, I’ve nuked every house I’ve ever lived in on Nukemap multiple times. Of course this is what I spend my time worrying about. Also, there ought to be a formal term of art for when a work of fiction is so broadly satisfying that its audience enthusiastically plugs all the holes in its credibility on their own time rather than sitting around whining. Little errors in good material can be a fun entry point for audience participation, and, uh, obviously, cough, that’s why writers uh, cough, make sure our work contains little errors. Yeah. Anyhow.

As the song nears its conclusion and we see our last few sprawled corpses, we also note that the cafeteria TV is playing an episode of a gameshow called BLACKOUT, a thing that really existed and ran for just one season, in 1988. The fact that somebody recalled that, got the required permissions, and used it as a morbid joke for the opening credits is one of those loving little touches that really polish this thing up. “It is only goodness which gives extras,” said Sherlock Holmes, speaking about a rose, and in the spirit of that speech I say: We have much to hope from these five seconds of BLACKOUT.

Time passes. Our hapless guard, now critically ill, swerves off the road and hits a row of gas pumps in a rainy slice of nowhere called Arnette, Texas. Here we meet Stu Redman as played by Gary Sinise, a casting choice that shoots straight to the top of this production’s asset column. Sinise’s Stu is wary but generous, grounded but not caricatured, reserved but deep. He shows what sort of man he is by holding a dying stranger in his arms, even when the man is obviously slick with mucous and pustules that have nothing to do with any car crash.

Once that poor bastard has given his cryptic utterances, passed the virus on to all of Stu’s buddies, and gone to the great guard shack in the sky, we shift our scene to an ominous military base that looks very much like a local TV station filmed from a clever angle. This is not at all a sneer— immense creativity and improvisation had to be deployed, especially considering the not-vast amount of money available, to weave a truly nationwide visual tapestry out of bits and bobs, and I am delighted by this production’s ingenuity.

Inside the local TV station we meet General Starkey, an uncredited supporting role for Ed Harris. Starkey has exhausted his supply of cope and is working to exhaust his supply of cigarettes and booze. He exposits vigorously for anyone who hasn’t read the book, explaining how thoroughly unlikely a successful containment is, given that the escaped guard must have had human contact to buy food and gas before finally skidding to a halt in Arnette. His subordinate retorts with a great point from an emergency response standpoint— they can’t afford to think like that. They must at least try to quarantine Arnette and the other points of contact. Too often in movies these sorts of scenes are written as an opportunity merely for the guilty heavies to double down on their evil, so I give two thumbs up to the presence of actual logic in this plot development.

In the transition to the next scene we get another neat extra, a full commercial for a fictional pallitative called Flu Buddy, complete with a sneezing businessman who breaks into dance when his symptoms are banished. This thing is an uncanny simulacrum of the schmaltzy energy of a real TV ad, and on first viewing I assumed it was an actual commercial break until the camera cut to a shot of the animated Flu Buddy dancing diegetically on a TV inside a gas station.

Next up we have one of the production’s many sly little random casting miracles. In the role of Texas State Patrol officer Joe Bob Brentwood, we have the one and only motherfuckin’ Joe Bob Briggs! Joe Bob as Joe Bob doesn’t hang around long, but he brings word that military aircraft are landing nearby and military convoys are on the roads.

The Big Green Machine rolls into town like a bunch of goons and starts throwing people into trucks. Ostensibly in charge is fussy scientist Dr. Herbert Denninger, well-embodied by Max Wright in a surreal turn for those of us who remembered him as the dad from ALF. The soldiers are all wearing a budget approximation of protective gear but for some reason they have neglected to wear gloves, one of the most basic components of infection control (look, I had to sit through hazmat operations refresher class literally ten times, this pedantry is bought and paid for), so even if the superflu were less contagious they’d be thoroughly boned. Boy, this shit hits a bit different in 2023, doesn’t it?

Everyone showing symptoms or confirmed to have been near a known case is packed off into a plane, bound for isolation and testing at a lab in Vermont. As he’s being marched to the flight line, Stu nervously says “Arnette’s been canceled.” A decade and a half before Twitter, no less.

This brings us to New York and our first glimpse of Larry Underwood (Adam Storke), a guy who would have fucked himself up to a comical degree if he’d had access to social media. I think Storke absolutely owns this role; everything from Larry’s hung-over nervous tics to his reflexive/defensive sleaziness to his projected sense of being lost and uncentered is perfect, as is the eventual emergence of his vulnerability and sincerity. As in the book, Larry is a chrysalitic pop star with a breakout single steadily climbing the charts (remember radio, and charts?), and he’s fled back home for a few weeks to lie low while his bank account catches up with his premature celebration. Here comes a brief flurry of pop culture nattering relating to the way this material has been stretched across adaptations.

You see, The Stand as originally written is ostensibly set in the heady future of 1985 but its fundamentally unchanged cultural references make it clear it’s really our 1977 wearing a hat and a fake moustache. Larry’s song “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” exists as just a few snippets of lyrics but his mother, when asked for her opinion of it, tells him that he “sounds like a n***er.” To which he replies “That brown sound sure do get around.” I’ve never been able to determine if this was a genuine pop culture aphorism or just a dumbass thing Stephen King made up. At any rate, it’s a half-assed joke, but it’s still somewhat plausible within the context of a 1985-that-is-actually-1977.

Larry’s mother doesn’t indicate that she thinks of all rock music as “black” music; she specifically references his individual sound. I don’t think Larry is meant to be a phenomenon on the Marvin Gaye or Stevie Wonder level, but he is obviously slick enough to play in the big leagues, so let’s say he could be something like a younger, less polished Luther Vandross. I do note King’s description of Larry’s Pocket Savior album cover makes it clear that he’s being positioned as a soulful loner, possibly in the Springsteen mode. “Vandross voice and Springsteen scruffiness”— probably the best approximation I can conjure of where Larry might fit into the world of music.

Anyhow, anyhow, the point is, if his mom thinks he sounds like a black man in a funk/soul/R&B inflected 70s radio landscape, it’s obvious he doesn’t sound like Andy Gibb or Conway Twitty, right? “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” works just fine in this context. But then… along came 1990, and the complete and uncut edition of The Stand, in which a bunch of expurgated material was restored (much of it really good) and the chronology of the story was pushed from 1985 to 1990. The conversation between Larry and his mom was tweaked, alluding to the differences in connotation between “sounding black” in 1977 and 1990. The exact same dialogue and “brown sound” bits remained, but hip-hop was at least referenced.

We now return to our discussion of the miniseries, already in progress. The miniseries version of Larry’s song isn’t smooth soulful loner music or even hardscrabble R&B, it’s a sort of overproduced adult contemporary, a Lionel Ritchie imitation being imitated over a long-distance phone line, that barely comes from 1994 and never even heard of 1977. And yet in the conversation with Larry’s mom the same old lines (minus the n-word) are back again— “You sound like a black man,” and “that brown sound sure do get around.” I’m not saying that casual racism is unrealistic in a 1990s setting (ha ha, wow, I am absolutely not saying that)— what I am saying is that this casual racism is now 17 years past its plausible pop-culture context, and I would like the waiter to take it back to the kitchen so some appropriate racism can be prepared in its place. Also, come on, lady! Larry’s song makes Billy Ocean sound like Ozzy Osbourne. Get a grip.

None of this, incidentally, should take anything away from the late Mary Ethel Gregory, who uses her brief screen time to powerfully portray a woman whose love is buried under a brittle crust of lifelong disappointment. She and Storke are excellent foils for one another, a miniature working-class drama one-act .

Moving right along… in Vermont, all of Stu’s friends and townfolk are dying while he alone remains completely healthy. Smarmy guys in lab coats are puzzled, and increasingly frustrated by their inability to figure out why their overachieving flu virus won’t touch him.

In Maine, we meet Frannie Goldsmith, played by Molly Ringwald, who might have been better for this role in theory than in practice, at least for this version of the role. In the novel we meet Frannie as she’s breaking the news of her pregnancy to her boyfriend Jess, then struggling with both the ambivalence of his response and the realization that her feelings for him have definitely waned. Jess is cut out of the miniseries, so Frannie is introduced just sort of hanging around her dad’s house. Ringwald, then 26, is five years older than the literary Frannie but playing a version of her that feels five years younger, a big teenager rather than a woman facing the sort of personal crossroads that rapidly ages you beyond your years.

Corin Nemec’s version of Harold Lauder also suffers from his introduction, in which he is sketched broadly and afflicted with pantomime zits. The literary Harold, though a more immediate and obvious creep, is also more deeply drawn and thus both more menacing and more sympathetic. These characters will bloom a bit later, but their first appearance is not promising.

The easy, natural pacing of the first part of this episode is abandoned for a while as we flit across the landscape, piling on new character after new character. Now we meet Nick Andros, played by Rob Lowe with an unflattering blue baseball cap jammed down on his head, concealing what a pretty fellow he is. In fact, all of his clothing seems slightly too large, which could be a canny way to indicate his feelings of isolation and alienation, his desire to conceal himself from a world full of jackasses and would-be tormentors. Nick can neither hear nor speak. I’m not sure what to say about the way he’s strolling down a rural highway in the middle of the night with less situational awareness than any of the deaf people I know in real life. All of them are deeply invested in not getting hit by cars, and are quite skilled at it. Anyhow, Nick has not concealed himself inside his clothes as well as he might have liked, so he gets jumped and beaten unconscious by a serving of locally-sourced artisanal rednecks.

Nick wakes up in an eerie field of corn and realizes that in this place he can hear and talk. He follows the sound of guitar strumming and meets Mother Abigail Freemantle, played by the late great Ruby Dee as a sort of gender-swapped Old Testament Yoda. More, much more, on her later. Mother Abigail semi-explains that this is possibly a dream and possibly not a dream, a sort of shared space, a supernatural bulletin board where the powers of good and evil can coax people along or have little flame wars, as they see fit. One thing to note is that while Nick’s ears and voice have been magically restored, he still has the swollen and bleeding eye his muggers just gave him.

That seems like a pretty shitty deal, and there’s a lot to unpack here! If Nick’s senses are restored because the powers of good in this place give him a “perfected” version of his own body, why can’t they do something about the blood running from his swollen shiner? If this is Nick’s own idealized version of himself, why is he fixated on senses that he has gone without for his entire life rather than the immediate damage to his face? If Mother Abigail is a prophetic power who can speak in thoughts and dreams (she is, and she can) why does Nick have to have a hardware upgrade to converse with her, rather than her simply meeting him where he’s at? A more generous assessment might be that retaining the injury serves as a reminder that Nick’s time in this place is limited and that the harsh physical reality of the waking world still has him in its grip.

Ultimately? I think it’s most likely that he has the injury because someone just thought it would look cool. So it goes.

In Vermont, the men running tests on Stu are treating him with the scientific effectiveness of angry drunken clowns and the social sensitivity of angry drunken clowns. Everyone else from Arnette has died, and the stress in the lab is obviously climbing. Stu is very anxious indeed.

In New York, Larry has a pair of strange run-ins, first with The Rat Man (played by Rick Aviles), who can only be described as a sort of evil video arcade gangster pirate; this is the most normal and restrained we’re ever gonna see this guy:

After that, Larry strolls onto the street, where he is literally seized by a bell-ringing doomsday prophet who somehow knows Larry’s name. In another bit of fabulous stunt casting, this is a cameo from NBA legend, novelist, and airline pilot Kareem Abdul-Jabbar:

In Arizona, we catch our first glimpse of Lloyd Henreid, played by the late and much-missed Miguel Ferrer. I’m going to put my cards on the table and note that I fucking love Ferrer in everything I’ve ever seen him in, and I think he’s outstanding in this miniseries. At first, Lloyd seems very much in the shadow of his loud, domineering, intemperate partner Poke, with whom he’s roaring across the state on a beer-fueled robbery and murder spree. Poke is removed from the stage immediately after taking a bullet during a convenience store hold-up. Lloyd survives, but while being wrestled and handcuffed to the ground he thinks he sees a man sitting on top of a nearby telephone pole, watching him. When one of the police officers handling Lloyd looks up, he sees nothing but a crow in the same place. Good stuff.

At the sinister government local TV station, General Starkey now looks like his guild’s only healer after a three-day World of Warcraft bender. Things in the wider world are definitely souring, and Starkey receives word that reporters have acquired uncensored videotape footage of flu victims and mass body disposal operations, as well as information on government plans. He orders forces dispatched to nip this in the bud. We get a bit of shaky video documentary next, as a TV news crew films their own interception in the middle of Wyoming by hostile soldiers demanding their cameras and tapes. “You don’t seem to understand the situation here, ma’am,” says the officer in charge. “Martial law has been declared— we don’t have to put up with you and your pinko friends anymore!”

When I was a kid, I thought this scene was over the top and anvilicious, but in the last few years I’ve come to believe that I never actually had the luxury of being so naive.

The beshitification of the world grinds on! General Starkey admits that the game is more or less up and recites a bit of Yeats (pronouncing it “yeets”), ruminating on how the center cannot hold. Ed Harris is an absolute champ in this scene (“I didn’t understand that poem when I was in college, but… I must be getting smarter in my old age, because I understand it now…”). Elsewhere, the men who tormented Nick Andros are dying off by assorted means, and Larry Underwood’s mom is in a bad way. The most extensive “final throes” makeup work for flu victims is really something, perhaps not as gross as, say, a David Cronenberg film but still a solid notch or two above expectations for network prime time in 1994.

Times Square is on fire, people are doing random Hollywood looting and Hollywood apocalypse shenanigans. A crowd tips over a police car straight out of Hill Street Blues and dances on top of it. General Starkey invites a friendly bullet to stay in his chest cavity. In Maine, Frannie’s dad (Ken Jenkins, later justly celebrated as Dr. Kelso on Scrubs) is circling the drain while he and Fran listen in horror to a call-in radio host named Ray Flowers (another uncredited cameo, this time from the one and only Kathy Bates), who is defying government attempts to shut down all mention of the true scope of the emergency and inviting callers to tell their gruesome stories. After a few minutes she’s gunned down on the air. Full props to Ringwald and Jenkins for really selling this scene.

In burning NYC, Kareem Abdul-Jabellringer hollers “Bring out your dead! He’s here! The dark man is here!” and yes, at last, the boots of destiny are heard clicking down a quiet desert highway. In… Maricopa County, Arizona? Fuck me, 1994, this stuff’s getting kinda personal, don’t you think?

Out of the darkness comes Randall Flagg, still mostly hidden by shadows, but we can see that he is tall, bedenim’d, and majestically bemulleted. Flagg is one of the things I love the most about The Stand, an antagonist conjured out of the American mythscape, a dark prince of empty highways, a little bit country and a little bit rock-n-roll. Appropriately, he comes from somewhere else, but America with its blood and its greed and its big inviting horizons has made something new of him. He is of a kind with Ray Bradbury’s Mr. Dark: “…where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars.”

The dark man points his finger at a deer and kills it with the power of his mullet. Somehow, resonating from thousands of miles away, he hears Abdul-Jabbar’s doomsday prophet trying to warn people about him, so Flagg summons a burst of psychic energy, whispering into Kareem’s ear: “My dad says you don't work hard enough on defense. And he says that lots of times, you don't even run down court. And that you don't really try... except during the playoffs!” Kareem immediately has a heart attack.

Next we see Stu Redman wandering in the dream-corn, following the sound of Mother Abigail’s guitar. They talk as if they already know one another, and Ruby Dee has a great bit where she makes Abigail come down off the metaphorical mountain and ditch the mysterious wizard demeanor. “Stuart… those folks who got you won’t leave you to live much longer. You know that, don’t you?” It’s a quiet moment of humanizing connection, and it’s all the more powerful as a disquieting revelation, because it clarifies that Mother Abigail is not just sending out random or abstract utterances, that she is responding to real events.

Stu wakes in Vermont, just in time to thwart the foretold attempt on his life. He leaves his cell and wanders barefoot around the unfamiliar institute, sanity all but dribbling out of his ears, increasingly desperate to get away from the slumped corpses and locked doors. As he runs down a flight of stairs, a figure lurches out of the darkness beneath and grabs at his ankle. “Come down and eat chicken with me, beautiful,” says a scientist who is clearly hallucinating in the last short while before his death. “It’s so dark.”

(PICTURED BELOW: If you see this man, do not accept his offer to descend and consume poultry products with him.)

I wonder what the original provenance of that line is. Did it come to King in a dream? Did one of the kids mutter it in the grips of a childhood fever? Or was it just random inspiration pulled from what a writer buddy of mine once referred to as “the anal vortex?” This bit is straight out of the novel, and it works in the novel. Maybe it even works here, but it’s still an unfathomably weird line to see delivered onscreen.

Stu finally makes his way out the front door of the beautifully lit building, onto the inviting shadows of the cool lawn, where he is all alone save for the chirping of the crickets. I love this scene, the pure catharsis of seeing him stretched out on the most improbably peaceful stretch of turf, gasping in the night air and gradually recovering from the well-staged run through the gleaming tile halls of the dead. The voice of Mother Abigail echoes in his head, urging him on, and so he wanders barefoot into the night, onto a deserted suburban street, until his shadow stretches far behind him and the episode ends.

Stu, my man, get some fucking shoes, you’re really freaking me out here.

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NEXT WEEK: Episode 2- The Dreams.

HOUSEKEEPING NOTE: I have been wrestling with Substack to get this up for several hours. I was worried that I had reached an unpublishable length or something, but apparently not. Although the full text will not automatically appear in e-mail inboxes, there ought to be a clickable button to immediately load whatever’s missing. I am still having an issue uploading my bonus audio chat for subscribers, but hopefully things will have settled down after I wake up.

Guinness Signs and Sidewalk Truth

Subscribers' Lynchline 28: January 16, 2023

It’s Monday! I sort of detest Mondays, as all creatures of neutral good alignment do. And yet here I am, getting all up in your Monday, adding my pixelated song-and-dance to your cares and travails. What’s that you say? “Lynch, why not give me a nice paper cut and pour lemon juice in it while you’re at it, eh? Maybe put more of your long-haired goofball noise in my inbox to drive my blood pressure up as I settle in to recommence pushing my boulder up its hill!” Well, sure thing. Henceforth and possibly forever, the regular issues of this newsletter will be a Monday affair!

I have been vacillating for weeks now on whether to aim for Thursdays or Fridays, but then I realized that everyone with a good newsletter already covers the end of the week, leaving a wide opening on Mondays for a bargain-basement operation like this one. Lucky you! We’ll start our weeks together for a while and see how it goes.

In other housekeeping news, I have decided that for the immediate future (specifically, until I hand the next draft of The Thorn of Emberlain in to the kindly editors who want to adopt it) more of my newsletters than usual will be public. Subscribers will still get access to a bunch of cool little side projects and doodads, starting with an audio discussion of word origin/pronunciation in the Gentleman Bastard stories, and some of my thoughts on folding and spindling real languages to give Locke’s world its particular feel. That will be up next Monday.

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Now let me tell you a story or two about Ireland.

It was not particularly difficult, in a relative sense, for me and my wife to stay at home as the long weary months of the initial pandemic rolled on. We work here to begin with, and we have what you might call rich inner lives— we don’t go stir-crazy if we can get out to a bowling alley or the Rotary Club. We’re also fortunate enough to be able to shelter here for long periods of time, not an option that everyone’s circumstances allow. Still, once the vaccines and boosters were rolled out, we were happy to see people and take little jaunts hither and thither. In fact, we finally decided to do something we’d been planning and discussing for years— take a trip to Ireland.

Part delayed honeymoon component, part delayed 50th birthday celebration for my wife, and part sheer escapism, our sojourn in September of 2022 was the first time either of us had been on a plane for nearly three years. We flew with care, masked the whole time, with no dining or drinking at the airports on either end. Our plan was to be calculated and cautious, avoiding the most egregious opportunities for exposure without hiding from civilization completely. If you’re going to do that anyway, why leave home? We ate out among people, on rooftops and in the open air, and we dined indoors precisely once, on a quiet evening when we mostly had the room to ourselves. We tested ourselves frequently, stayed masked in shops, and in the end escaped infection by anything except a powerful urge to go back and do it all again.

This was a purely personal trip involving no publishing business, no signings, no appointments. Our primary residence was a rental cottage, tucked away in the hills near Cahersiveen in Kerry, selected for relative remoteness so that we might have a solitude in which to write, read, and be extremely lazy. In all three areas we triumphed; we stood atop the podium, shook our champagne bottle, and received our medals. I also spent much of the time knocking my brains from side to side trying to figure out what I was going to call Untitled Lynch Novella #1. If you had told me I wouldn’t come up with an answer until just after the new year, I would have groaned and mumbled “fucking figures.”

The afternoon following our arrival, I took a long walk. As I was returning to our cottage, a car rolled toward me on the narrow rustic road, gravel popping under its tires as it slowed. Down went the window as it stopped beside me, and then came… first contact. I cannot reproduce the noise involved, because if I broke what I heard down to discrete phonetic blocks it would not be incomprehensible enough, and if I rendered it in amusing gibberish I would fail to hint at the patterns lurking tantalizingly somewhere beneath the surface.

The driver of the car was a white-haired man, rugged, pleasant-looking. I think of myself as an experienced decoder of Irish and UK accents, but his was a pure encrypted transmission, as if, forgive me, a leprechaun had been squeezed through the rotors of an Enigma machine. I couldn’t I connect an instant of it to any meaning in my head. I hemmed and hawed, and he issued another stream of… issuance. This, then, was my first encounter with a deep old-time countryside Kerry accent, a wall of sound so thick it could absorb a laser beam. It makes Dylan Moran sound like he’s from Ohio.

I reacted awkwardly. I am, at the best of times, inept at making small talk with complete strangers and in Ireland this pattern kept repeating itself with older people in particular— I was as nervous as a shoeless teenager on an electrified floor. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t know if I can help you with that, I’m a complete stranger around here,” guessing that he was asking for directions. Of course he was not— he was trying to tell me that he was the neighbor from the next farm over, and the appointed caretaker for our rental cottage, and he already knew our names and was pleased to see us. All these concepts he eventually got across by slowing himself down another notch, repeatedly, until the jumpy misappropriator of shared language from across the sea could finally get the point. I don’t believe he took genuine offense, but I still felt like a complete asshole. He waved cheerily as he finally drove off; I was busy looking for a rock to hide behind for a few hours.

This pattern repeated itself across the week on our supply runs to town. I never spoke to anyone else so initially incomprehensible (though I heard many chatting nearby), but many Kerry folk of a certain age seemed to talk in a pattern that was entirely new to me— a sort of casual segue from standard pleasantries to soul-deep interrogation on harrowing subjects. The phenomenon would have seemed like a game or an attack had it not come across (in my limited experience) as so natural, so sincere. Here’s a quick only-slightly-exaggerated hypothetical to show you what I mean.

ME: Good morning.

IRISH HUMAN: Mernin ter yer. American?

ME: Yep.

IRISH HUMAN: Flew over on a plane then did yer?

ME: Yes, from Boston.

IRISH HUMAN: Lotsa people died in them plane crashes over the years.

ME: Oh. Uh… yeah?

IRISH HUMAN: Not ser good fer them then. Slán!

Near the end of our trip I was prowling around one of the near-ish villages for knickknacks and postcards. In the genteel ruins of a shop that had turned into more of a hobby than a business, I found a charming little Guinness sign. The sole proprietor and human cash register, a man of seventy-ish with a satisfied and settled look, was eating lunch in a chair on the sidewalk. Here he greeted literally every other person on the street by name as they passed, and then struck up a bit of conversation with me after I’d paid.

He’d been to America, as it turned out, visiting a daughter who lived there with her husband. San Diego, in fact, had I seen it? I had, and loved the place. What about New York City? I’d been many times, I told him. And what about Atlanta? He’d been there for two days on an extended layover en route to California. Now there I’d never been, I had to admit, though I hoped for a reason to visit eventually.

“Burned it to the ground then, didn’t they? Atlanta.”

I was not exactly caught off guard, thanks to experience. It was more that I had to stifle a giggle at experiencing this flavor of sudden conversational swerve yet again. I have tried to the limits of my ability, in what follows, to recreate our words nearly verbatim.

“Yeah, during the Civil War,” I said.

“That was Sherman, was it?” Though it was phrased as a question I can only say that he was not at all unclear. By asking, he was emphasizing that he was not asking.

“Sherman’s march to the sea,” I said. “Burned a big swath of the south. Tore up railroads. That was… 1864.” I admit that I pretended to have to think about the year. I sometimes do this, consciously or unconsciously, when discussing the Civil War or the Second World War with strangers. It’s a little bit of verbal mummery to ease them into whatever facts I’m rattling off. This guy did not give a shit.

“D’you reckon they deserved it?”

Now here I was caught off guard. Another swerve. Nothing about the guy seemed noncommittal. He was watching me, really watching me, as he waited for my answer.

“Now that’s… difficult,” I said. “Obviously I’m not delighted there was a war, but there was a war and it happened for a reason, and I think Sherman’s campaign was necessary.”

“It was about slavery then, was it? The whole thing. About slavery from the start?”

Well, of course it was. I know that, any honest person knows that, anyone who has ever studied the actual constitution of the Confederate States of America couldn’t miss it except through willful disobedience to reality. I was on guard, though— what was this guy’s angle?

“It was,” I said, carefully. “I believe that’s just plain fact.”

“So it was about them keepin’ slaves, then. And you reckon they did deserve it, then? The march and the burning and all?”

For a moment I felt that suffocating fucking bougie urge to be frictionless. It’s a drilled response, colorless emptiness masquerading as civility. On rare occasion it might save you from something tedious, like a solicitor at the door, but when real human conversation is a possibility I hate it and try to knock it back where it came from. I stared at the guy for a couple seconds, and a little voice in my head said: For fuck’s sake, Scott, you believe what you believe and you’re proud of it and if there was ever a subject to tell the truth about, it’s this one.

“I think that holding an entire people in bondage is an affront to God,” I said, “and if you do it, at some point you should expect blood in return.”

Jesus Christ, did I really just say that out loud in broad daylight to a complete stranger? This is surreal.

A moment passed, and then—

“An affront to God… and to man,” he said, and then he smiled broadly, leaning back in his chair. “We feel much the same way about things here in Ireland.”

The rest of our conversation was cordial indeed.

Boy, I’d go back to Kerry in a heartbeat. I hope the world actually lets us do so.

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Next week will be the first of a four-part series called My Pandemic of Preference, in which I’ll briefly mention how important Stephen King’s The Stand has been to me since I first read it at 11, and then go on at excruciating length dissecting the 1994 TV miniseries adaptation, which is in some ways wildly awesome and in other ways quite goofy and, for various reasons, remains one of my favorite things of all time. I also hope that, if my schedule holds true, I’ll be able to tell you that I’ve passed an acceptable final draft of More Than Fools Fill Graves on to its publisher and will have moved full-time to the last dance with The Thorn of Emberlain. Will I have a good week? Find out next Monday…