“Larry woke up at half past eight to sunlight and the sound of birds. They both freaked him out.”

Both of the birds. Each of them was freaky. In its own way. 

I’m quoting too much. It’s hard to resist, especially in the Nick and Larry / Rita chapters. That seems to be where King finds the most compassion and humor. Gobbling aside. Larry growing up late and Rita trying to stay sane while they injure and help and cling to each other. It’s a hell of a read. Especially garnished with phrases like “a good old All-American fuck” and “you were darned tooting he was.” It’s a weird affect, but it works. Larry’s throwing out this enthusiasm and randy cornballness, and the sick world doesn’t laugh with him. So he keeps at it. Real death of a clown stuff. 

Stop that. 

...

And then Rita is dead. 

Jesus. I’m not sure how to react given what I just wrote. It was the very next page. Pills, vomit. Quiet choking. Unkindest cut. Forth of July. 

Did I mention there’s something about this book where the anvilicious and cheesy setups turn into the most affecting moments and the edgy and cynical into dumb cartoons? 

Larry can’t bury her. He zips up the tent with her inside and flees. Steals some new clothes he didn’t wear next to her, and flees some more. Like he’s the anti-Frannie. Which he kind of is. He has a terrified internal debate, and loses. He imagines the burial. Frannie wins, and lives it. I think they are just about the same age. People can be very different amounts of grownup. 

RIP Rita. 

“Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.”

Glen the prophet of crank has stayed behind while Stu has kept on going. All the heroes except Nick are now puttering around or toward central Vermont. I bet they will never meet. They will pass by and affect each other in cheekily clever ways like Magnolia or Pulp Fiction. 

If that actually happens, I will throw this book at a fire. 

Fortunately for this out of print cinderblock, Frannie and Harold ride up. Harold is spastically afraid that Stu will rape them. Which is a nice thought uniter. 

They join up after half a chapter of Stu talking Harold down from being a total spaz. It’s said that two wolves war in the heart. Here those are “Harold” and “Whack Off Monster Boy.” Which is the saddest, stickiest wolf fight. 

“Lloyd looked like a man who had embarked on a radical crash diet. His prison coverall hung on his body like a limp sail.”

I looked up Bernie Wrightson the artist who contributed these drawings. He has a pretty cool history. Started out in newspapers, and has made his career in comic books and horror novels. Go figure. You can buy and view some of his collections online, including this one. The set he did for a special edition of Frankenstein look amazing. 

“So he hated, and the hate commanded him to live.”

Flagg comes to collect Lloyd only after he has starved enough to start eating the other prisoners. So, his stops so far include one deathbed dream about fucking centaurs, one 1975 Buick and a wendigo. I admit, this does sound like Satan’s road trip. All that’s missing is human sacrifice and the Mass Pike.

This is the second time Team Evil has specifically eaten a sandwich with “Gulden’s Spicy Brown Mustard.” This mustard gave King the thundershits on a date once. I’m sure of it.

“The next moment the lockbox fell at Flagg’s feet, tendrils of smoke seeping from it.” 

Mustard vendetta aside. The man does write a good devil scene. 

... What is it with the smiley face though? Of course Flagg has a smiley face pin. Flagg, Private Joker, Lieutenant Dan, The Comedian, and others I’m forgetting. Whenever baby boomers think of 60′s-80′s paranoia, they can’t resist putting a yellow smile pin on someone violent. Seems way too easy. But I wasn’t there. 

Nick is now: Deaf, mute, mugged, beaten, shot, eye-gouged and abandoned. If he gets any more Chosen he’ll be hit with a damn meteor. 

The nightmares and visions get fleshed out, and we meet Mother Abagail. The devil spawns in Idaho, and the prophet in Nebraska. “West of Omaha and a little north of Osceola.” I don’t want to alarm anybody, but there are very few people left and it looks like they’re gearing up to have the Ragnarok in goddamn Wyoming. Everyone is going to get lost. 

“This creature, whatever it was, performed no free miracles.”

Interesting thing. Nick and Stu and Frannie get a choice. They dream both of Randall and Abagail. Whereas Lloyd and Trash are stuck with evil. I guess they were already violent assholes. But man. When they pledge allegiance, Trash is mentally disabled and Lloyd is trapped and starving. Neither got a chance to dream of corn and redemption. I guess they have to go to hell, to serve destiny’s big plan. Judas clause.  

That’s everyone we’ve met so far. Either dead or on their way West. Because of course they are. Looks like we’ll formally finish Book I in the next post. So I’ll do a wrap up after that, and finally tackle the Curse of Ham issue. Should be interesting.

Stu time. 

“He did not expect to run across marauders, but had a vague idea that it might be a good idea to have a gun. Fresh meat, maybe. Well, he had seen fresh meat yesterday, still on the hoof, and he had been too amazed and pleased to even think about shooting it.”

So he raped it. 

Okay, okay. I’ll stop. 

“He came around the bend and there was the dog, an auburn-colored Irish setter.”

It immediately raped him.

OKAY. 

Though now that Stu has his companion, there’s A Boy And His Dog vibes all over this. That isn’t helping. The world is full of sick people. I’m only one of them. 

Kojak the dog comes with Glen the man. I think he’s the survivor I mixed up with Frannie’s dad. Glen too is a wise old man with quirks. Though he is a painter not a gardener. 

“We’ve become so used to the idea of the flu [...] that no one but the historians seems to know that a hundred years ago it didn’t exist.”

Can that possibly be true? Seems at best like one of those technically trueish things that relies way too much on a lack of accurate medical knowledge and good records. Maybe ... 

(Checks)

Pffft. Okay no. It’s not even slightly true or debatable. Heinleiny old man character: 0. Facts: 1. 

They sit down and discuss the eenie-meenie-miney way this flu kills some mammals and not others. Which species will survive, which will run rampant. You know, this is a huge book. There could be a whole section that’s World War Z with housecats. God I hope there is. 

“In the post-flu world, technological know-how is going to replace gold as the most perfect medium of exchange.”

The discussion of people and societies is the best of their discussions. Especially how all the infrastructure and fuel and weaponry lying around creates weird paradoxes. Too few people with almost too much power. Unevenly distributed by who knows how to use it. The prospect of ‘Rusty little nuclear exchanges’ between camps. Then housecats mob the survivors. 

Daunting. 

“If the cops ever got a search-writ for the house [...] Allie would go away until the new moon turned to gold.”

The next chapter is a litany of survivors dying from despair, neglect, stupid accidents. People in empty towns succumbing to gangrene. Locking themselves in freezers. Drinking or doping to death. The omniscient narrator says 16% die this way. “The unkindest cut of all.” 

1) The miniseries is now dead and gone. No great loss. The heart of this story is clearly in sections like this. And lullabies to dead moms in little apartments. Rare dogs. Burned potatoes. By (necessarily) cutting them, a couple-of-hours movie became a cheesy, brief, Chosen One romp. Something completely different. Not every story can be “adapted” and they should not have tried. RIP, scared kid in Georgia with a broken leg. RIP referring to the irrelevant TV thing. 

2) What to make of Chosenness, then? The Devil is loose. The virus was otherworldly. Immunity unsolvable. People have oracle dreams. But thousands of immune people still die from ordinary things? No dreams. No destiny. No Stand? Where does that leave this world. 

Big I guess. A big world that’s hard to understand, and running out of people. 

“So much had changed, so much was out of joint, that it was impossible not to think of it in terms of fantasy.”

Larry and Rita hit the road. The first thing they encounter is a man who wants to barter with him for permission to rape her. 

... Ookay. 

First, isn’t everyone who is still alive now part of the Great Plan? So okay maybe The Fuckmonger will end up in Vegas. But ... I’ll get back to this. Second, this is a big problem in collapse stories. Too often the first / only thing women heroes will do is avoid rape, and the first / only thing men who aren’t the hero will do is rape. Women don’t get other conflicts or problems, and the world is full of men who don’t have other desires. Rape is Job One. 

One example: this is just like the paper scene from Waterworld. Mixed gender protagonists meet a random dude. What does each character have to do? 

1) Male Hero: Pilot the boat. Figure out if rapist is working for the villain. Barter. Try to get a look at his paper to see if it has useful information. Accomplish this while not getting anybody raped. Fight rapist. 

2) Female Hero: Try not to get raped. 

3) Male Stranger: Rape. 

And since Kevin Costner’s other stuff is all red herrrings, He ends up with: 

1) Male Hero: Fight rapist. 

That’s. It. They brought three of the terribly few people on earth together for this. Three whole characters, two whole boats, all the dry land and Dennis Hopper and deciphering the map plots hanging out there. All the things all of them constantly need to cut deals for in this desperate world.  And the imagination and effort and potential was all blown on "um ... rape.” This cheapens and shrinks the hell out of the woman characters. It also cheapens the world, the story, and the underlying ideas of what people are capable of.  

Rape is obviously a part of life even when the lights are on and the police answer phone calls. Like starvation and murder, it also gets to be a bigger, more expected threat the dimmer those lights get. But even if you’re writing The Stand you only get so many scenes. So many kinds of moments to take in so many directions. And if you end up choosing every time that the first / only thing a man you don’t know wants is rape, and the first / only problem a woman will have is rape, then everything involved is shrunk. 

Back to our random bad guy! Even if he is a shitty person. Even if he’s going to Vegas. We know for a fact that: 

a) Everyone he loves, hell everyone who knows his name, is almost surely dead. 

b) His entire society and way of life has collapsed. His plans and dreams are gone. 

c) He is one of the few people chosen to survive. He is part of a cosmic plan. 

d) He is alone. 

e) He has just encountered not one, but two healthy human beings. Who have supplies. 

The thing he chooses to do at that moment. Is ask if he can maybe rape one of them. Denied, he leaves.  Rita’s only value in the scene is to maybe be raped. Larry’s only value is to say “that’s not cool man.”

See what I mean about this trope weakening the story? Lowering the stakes? Shrinking everyone? The fact that’s it’s a wider tic makes it worse. It’s “have every alien beat up Worf” except way more depressing.  

On the plus side, Rita makes a reference to The Millionaire. So now I know what that was! Good run of trivia in this section of the book. 

“At the intersection of Thirty Ninth and Seventh, they met a young man wearing cutoff denim shorts and nothing else lying atop a taxi.”

Pretty sure you could run into that right now. This is not an apocalypse thing. Bonus: he doesn’t try to rape anyone! 

Their attempt to leave Manhattan goes completely to hell. The Lincoln Tunnel is a horror sausage stuffed with corpses and cars and rats eating the corpses. They are wearing dress shoes. They have no flashlight. They lose their shit and abandon each other. They panic and try to find each other. They frighten and almost kill each other. All of it happens in a dark underground mile full of dead neighbors.  

They need Kurt Russell more than anyone has ever needed Kurt Russell. 

After the best horror scene in the story so far, the next chapter is Frannie enjoying a sunset in a park. Good call Steve. 

Fran has just buried the last person in town besides Whackoff Goblin. She is now alone with Whackoff Goblin. They will go to Vermont, looking for that dead CDC center. Whackoff Goblin is turning human quickly, so I guess I’ll call him Harold. 

“And we’ll need guns, of course.”

“Why do we need guns?”

“Because the police and courts are gone and you’re a woman and you’re pretty and some people ... some men ... might not be ... be gentlemen. That’s why.

His blush was so red now it was almost purple. 

he’s talking about rape, she thought. Rape. but how could anybody want to rape me. I’m pregnant. But no one knew that, not even Harold. And even if you spoke up, said to the intended rapist: Will you please not do that because I’m pregnant, could you reasonably expect the rapist to reply, Jeez lady, I’m sorry, I’ll go rape some other goil?

My theory that this book can hear thoughts and rewrites itself to mess with the reader if they criticize or make fun of it? Confirmed. 

Enter the Trashcan Man. A schizophrenic who lights fires and eats “a big sloppy sandwich of peanut butter and jelly and tomatoes and Gulden Diablo mustard.” The book is now reveling in these characters and giving them silly names before I can. We are in a dance. 

I think Trash will join Team Villain. But I mostly feel sorry for him. Because he is mentally ill, and because at least put some pickles on that. 

King enjoys writing his idea of a madman’s narration. Trash wanders his dead town scavenging and blowing thing up and losing minutes of awareness and having flashbacks to a violent and fucked-up childhood. I’m holding off on nature / nurture theories of mental illness and trauma. Nature can screw you up and people can screw you up. Trash has had both. 

It would be interesting to compare everyone’s Lonely Aftermath scenes. King makes sure to give each character a parallel moment like this. The morning-after moment. Trash’s is ... anti-Nick. Nick wanders a small highway town, pointlessly trying to repair it. Trash wanders a small highway town, pointlessly destroying. Nick is attacked by an angry man, Trash is attacked by angry ghosts. Both suffer severe disabilities. I know you can do this kind of 5th grade take on anything. But it stood out right away. We’ll see if I’m crazy or if this goes anywhere. 

“And you can’t send a kid of ten to reform school. Not unless you want him to come out with a size 11 asshole, not unless you wanted your new wife to divorce you.”

It’s a good line. But I’m wondering the same thing you are. 

There’s another line about how burning down a church is like ejaculating in your pants at your own wedding. I am not quoting it. I am thwapping it with a newspaper until it thinks about what it did. 

Larry and Rita are alone in Manhattan and in lust. But, the power’s going and ten million people are rotting underneath them. It’s like the first and second halves of Dawn of the Dead made into a sandwich. 

These two are both kind of bastards. And both their clingy kindness and their petty bastardness is being shoved forward by the horrors they are living through. Ever hear the music Neil Young made for Dead Man? That’s what these scenes feel like. 

They decide to leave, for some reason. 

Cats do not get superflu! And they are taking over the streets of towns. King bothers to mention both. It is hard to genuinely make jokes about this book. The book keeps making my jokes real plot points. 

“Christopher Bradenton struggled out of delirium like a man struggling out of quicksand.”

Sorry Chris. I have completely forgotten who you are. 

(Flips around.)

Seriously who is this guy. The Wiki on him is in German. Oh well. He’s about dead anyway. We’ll press on and see if this comes clear.

“Across from you stands the most beautiful boy in the world, tall and tanned and straight, he is wearing lemon-yellow bikini briefs which cling lovingly to every ridge and hollow of his precious buttocks and you know if he turns his face will be like a Raphael angel and he will be hung like the Lone Ranger’s horse. Hiyo silver, away.”

I had to write that down.

Flagg barges in, throws water at Chris and demands a car. Which Chris provides? Because they had set this deal up in advance? Then Chris finishes dying. Bye, Chris! I hope you are in heaven fucking centaurs. Where and under what circumstances did you meet the Devil and agree to loan him a car. I’ve heard of bargains at the crossroads. But I didn’t know there was a Ford dealership there. And why is The Lord Of Darkness even traveling via hoopitys he borrows from random guys in cabins who watch The Lone Ranger with their pants off? 

The world is full of questions. 

Back with Lloyd trapped in prison. Everybody is dead and Flagg is probably coming here next to collect him. So they can buddy road movie it in Flagg’s very confusing car. The idea of being stuck in a cell at the end of the world is ... unnerving. It reminds me of version #2 of that two sentence story. 

“Your mother’s in charge of blowjobs at a whorehouse in Asshole, Indiana!”

“Indiana” really makes it. 

Nick is busy fighting off the last survivor from that gang of locals way back. That would be the way it goes. Armageddon happens, and the last guy to croak is your nemesis. Fuckin’ Murphy. 

“There was strawberry pie in the fridge.”

FEEL THE APOCALYPTIC TERROR. 

Frannie’s mom and dad are both gone. Odd, I thought I remembered her dad surviving the plague. Good to start being surprised. She is eating a breakfast of pie and french fries. Whether because she’s pregnant or in mourning or fuck it the world’s ending let’s have a heart attack, it does not say. But good choice. 

I’ll get to the black power loincloth army shootout during the Curse of Ham sidepost I haven’t been able to tackle yet. But damn. King’s depictions of race and white paranoia and the counter culture seem to range from “frank and human” to “H.P. Lovecraft Describing Brooklyn” levels of bizarre. The fact that we can spend half the book in NYC and Alabama without even a minor black character does not help. Then again, I’m starting to worry that if we did, King would name him Shakka. 

“The motion to escort sick summer people out of town was defeated by a comfortable margin.”

Still couldn’t decide what to do about that damn shark.

I hate to keep saying that King does families and grief really well. But it’s true. And this first section is wall to wall families and grief. So once we’re firmly in post-apocalypse this will probably take care of itself. 

There’s a mention of pre-existing gas shortages and high gas prices. 1991, y’all! 

Oh god. Enter Harold. A well-rounded character. He is ugly, fat, nearsighted, badly dressed, does not bathe, has terrible acne, is mean, and leering, and pretentious, and a compulsive masturbator and worst of all a bad writer. 

I’m serious. After giving him everything but tentacles, King spends the most time describing how sub-par Harold’s high school short stories are. “In the present tense or in the second person or both.” Or both. Jesus. I don’t even want to analyze this. But, we have a new Aristocrat! I may call him Harold II, or Fauntleroy. Haven’t decided. Or Whack Off Monster Boy. Enter Whack Off Monster Boy.

You must be this tall to ride Whack Off Monster Boy.

Peter is buried and Frannie lies dreaming of Flagg. Another illustration ends the chapter. This one of Frannie carrying her dad to the garden. I clearly missed a bunch of these on my flip through. Two out of three so far have been laying parents to rest. 

Stu is in what’s left of CDC quarantine in New Hampshire. Watching the fires outside and waiting to be purged. Musing on Watership Down. It’s a heck of a scene, actually. 

“The thought that there would be precious few left he could tell their secret to had probably never even entered their computations. He was a loose thread held hostage by a bunch of tight assholes.”

1) There’s an image. 

2) I really hope this will be the last time I have to be annoyed by how nihilist and dumb the government stuff has been. We’re almost out of government! But. For the last time. Cynicism is not the same as a raging farce where every single Military or Government Man dies fragging the soldier next to him, shooting his own dick off, or clubbing a journalist/student/baby seal. Taking time on page 250 to comment on how ridiculous you’ve been does not solve the problem.  

Anyway the last of the Top Men try to shoot Stu instead of escape, or live. So Stu gets the opportunity and does both. 

“The elevator door had shut and the car was already moving downward when it occurred to Stu that it might be booby-trapped. That would be just their speed.”

Can’t argue with ya, buddy. 

“Some campus group, probably either Students for a Democratic Society or the Young Maoists ...”

Yeah guys it’s totally 1991.

We open with questions finally answered, as a news crew re-take their station from special forces and actually put the apocalypse on the news. And independent papers carry the Story That The MSM Won’t. As they’d say these days. But it’s so late in the outbreak that nobody is helped by any of this. Censorship, not publicity, is still a bizarre choice for The Man to have made here. Never mind how they did it. 

“Advance copies of the President’s speech indicate that he will ‘spank’ the American people for overreacting.”

Okay now I believe it’s the 90′s. 

The soldiers in charge of shooting all the reporters are now shooting each other over shooting the reporters. This policy has been very productive! Say. You know what’s really easy to quarantine? Military bases. You know hundred of thousands of healthy people who could have survived this with their families. If you didn’t send them chasing after Ron Burgundy.

“It was like sending a man with a whisk-broom to clean out the Augean stables.”

The army is now deserting and fighting the special forces. And they’re all giving each other the plague. They clearly share my opinion of their very stupid orders. 

By the by, this plan was actually called Operation Carnival. 

Back with Larry in the ruins of New York. 

Apparently, monkeys can also get Captain Trips! So that’s humans, dogs, guinea pigs and monkeys, all getting symptomatic from one strain of one virus. Makes me wonder about dolphins. Is the superflu spreading to the oceans via Sea World? 

Hey, another drawing! This time of some kind of werewolf in a polo shirt. I don’t get it. 

Rita enters the story, packing heat.