The Stand

bits of storytelling. They change what could have been a dull piece of work into a tale which has charmed and terrified readers for over a hundred years.

I suspect nothing added here is as good as Hansel’s trail of breadcrumbs, but I have always regretted the fact that no one but me and a few in-house readers at Doubleday ever met that maniac who simply calls himself The Kid… or witnessed what happens to him outside a tunnel which counterpoints another tunnel half a continent away—the Lincoln Tunnel in New York, which two of the characters negotiate earlier in the story.

So here is The Stand, Constant Reader, as its author originally intended for it to roll out of the showroom. All its chrome is now intact, for better or for worse. And the final reason for presenting this version is the simplest. Although it has never been my favorite novel, it is the one people who like my books seem to like the most. When I speak (which is as rarely as possible), people always speak to me about The Stand. They discuss the characters as though they were living people, and ask frequently, “What happened to so-and-so,”… as if I got letters from them every now and again.

I am inevitably asked if it is ever going to be a movie. The answer, by the way, is probably yes. Will it be a good one? I don’t know. Bad or good, movies nearly always have a strange, diminishing effect on works of fantasy (of course there are exceptions; The Wizard of Oz is an example which springs immediately to mind). In discussions, people are willing to cast various parts endlessly. I’ve always thought Robert Duval would make a splendid Randall Flagg, but I’ve heard people suggest such people as Clint Eastwood, Bruce Dern, and Christopher Walken. They all sound good, just as Bruce Springsteen would seem to make an interesting Larry Underwood, if he ever chose to try acting (and, based on his videos, I think he would do very well… although my personal choice would be Marshall Crenshaw). But in the end, I think it’s perhaps best for Stu, Larry, Glen, Frannie, Ralph, Tom Cullen, Lloyd, and that dark fellow to belong to the reader, who will visualize them through the lens of imagination in a vivid and constantly changing way no camera can duplicate. Movies, after all, are only an illusion of motion comprised of thousands of still photographs. The imagination, however, moves with its own tidal flow. Films, even the best of them, freeze fiction—anyone who has ever seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and then reads Ken Kesey’s novel will find it hard or impossible not to see Jack Nicholson’s face on Randle Patrick McMurphy. That is not necessarily bad… but it is limiting. The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.

Finally, I write for only two reasons: to please myself and to please others. In returning to this long tale of dark Christianity, I hope I have done both.

Stephen King

October 24, 1989

Outside the street’s on fire
In a real death waltz .
Between what’s flesh and fantasy
And the poets down here
Don’t write nothin at all
They just stand back and let it all be
And in the quick of the night
They reach for their moment
And try to make an honest stand
But they wind up wounded
Not even dead
Tonight in Jungle Land .

Bruce Springsteen

And it was clear she couldn’t go on!
The door was opened and the wind appeared ,
The candles blew and then disappeared ,
The curtains flew and then he appeared ,
Said, 'Don’t be afraid ,
Come on, Mary .'
And she had no fear
And she ran to him
And they started to fly …
She had taken his hand …
' Come on, Mary ;
Don’t fear the Reaper! '

Blue Oyster Cult

WHAT’S THAT SPELL?
WHAT’S THAT SPELL?
WHAT’S THAT SPELL?

Country Joe and the Fish

THE CIRCLE OPENS

We need help, the Poet reckoned .

Edward Dorn

“Sally.”

A mutter.

“Wake up now, Sally.”

A louder mutter: leeme lone.

He shook her harder.

“Wake up. You got to wake up!”

Charlie.

Charlie’s voice. Calling her. For how long?

Sally swam up out of sleep.

First she glanced at the clock on the night table and saw it was quarter past two in the morning. Charlie shouldn’t even be here; he should be on shift. Then she got her first good look at him and something leaped up inside her, some deadly intuition.

Her husband was deathly pale. His eyes started and bulged from their sockets. The car keys were in one hand. He was still using the other to shake her, although her eyes were open. It was as if he hadn’t been able to register the fact that she was awake.

“Charlie, what is it? What’s wrong?”

He didn’t seem to know what to say. His Adam’s apple bobbed futilely but there was no sound in the small service bungalow but the ticking of the clock.

“Is it a fire?” she asked stupidly. It was the only thing she could think of which might have put him in such a state. She knew his parents had perished in a housefire.

“In a way,” he said. “In a way it’s worse. You got to get dressed, honey. Get Baby LaVon. We got to get out of here.”

“Why?” she asked, getting out of bed. Dark fear had seized her. Nothing seemed right. This was like a dream. “Where? You mean the back yard?” But she knew it wasn’t the back yard. She had never seen Charlie look afraid like this. She drew a deep breath and could smell no smoke or burning.

“Sally, honey, don’t ask questions. We have to get away. Far away. You lust go get Baby LaVon and get her dressed.”

“But should I… is there time to pack?”

This seemed to stop him. To derail him somehow. She thought she was as afraid as she could be, but apparently she wasn’t. She recognized that what she had taken for fright on his part was closer to raw panic. He ran a distracted hand through his hair and replied, “I don’t know. I’ll have to test the wind.”

And he left her with this bizarre statement which meant nothing to her, left her standing cold and afraid and disoriented in her bare feet and babydoll nightie. It was as if he had gone mad. What did testing the wind have to do with whether or not she had time to pack? And where was far away? Reno? Vegas? Salt Lake City? And…

She put her hand against her throat as a new idea struck her.

AWOL. Leaving in the middle of the night meant Charlie was planning to go AWOL.

She went into the small room which served as Baby LaVon’s nursery and stood for a moment, indecisive, looking at the sleeping infant in her pink blanket suit. She held to the faint hope that this might be no more than an extraordinarily vivid dream. It would pass, she would wake up at seven in the morning just like usual, feed Baby LaVon and herself while she watched the first hour of the “Today” show, and be cooking Charlie’s eggs when he came off-shift at 8 A.M., his nightly tour in the Reservation’s north tower over for another night. And in two weeks he would be back on days and not so cranky and if he was sleeping with her at night she wouldn’t have crazy dreams like this one and—

“Hurry it up!” he hissed at her, breaking her faint hope. “We got just time to throw a few things together… but for Christ’s sake, woman, if you love her”—he pointed at the crib—“you get her dressed!” He coughed nervously into his hand and began to yank things out of their bureau drawers and pile them helter- skelter into a couple of old suitcases.

She woke up Baby LaVon, soothing the little one as best she could; the three-year-old was cranky and bewildered at being awakened in the middle of the night, and she began to cry as Sally got her into underpants, a blouse, and a romper. The sound of the child’s crying made her more afraid than ever. She associated it with the other times Baby LaVon, usually the most angelic of babies, had cried in the night: diaper rash, teething, croup, colic. Fear slowly changed to anger as she saw Charlie almost run past the door with a double handful of her own underwear. Bra straps trailed out behind him like the streamers from New Year’s Eve noise-makers. He flung them