Lower Decks

Everyone’s got their own personal mythology, made up of any number of things, little aspects of their past they keep that maybe they don’t understand but makes sense to keep around. One of mine is that I happen to have gone to Stephen King’s high school (had the English teacher who told him he couldn’t write) and then to his college. It wasn’t actually that big a deal, just a part of those experiences I was aware of, didn’t quite seek (certainly not the high school, for obvious reasons), but was pleased to know. Trouble was, I wasn’t much of a Stephen King fan in those days. Even in college, I read only the one book, ‘The Gunslinger.’ It wasn’t until ‘Faithful,’ his chronicle of the 2004 Red Sox season written with Stewart O’Nan that I began to feel anything of a real kinship with this spectre of my early life, and it wasn’t until ‘Lost’ that I even considered picking up ‘The Stand.’

A few prison movies, ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ and ‘The Green Mile,’ had started the process, unknown to me. I wasn’t quite aware that ‘Stand by Me’ was also based on one of his stories, but then I had never really seen that one. I decided during the summer of 2004, before I had even read ‘Faithful’ (before the season had concluded, in fact, so memorably), to collect the six volumes of the ‘Green Mile’ experiment I’d read about in 1996 but was in no shape to be interested in at the time, and devoured them. When I moved to Colorado (not quite in step but definitely in the echoes King had left behind about thirty years earlier), I had already read ‘Different Seasons,’ the story collection where a number of the film adaptations had come from, and during a bleak transition period become enthralled with a version of ‘The Shining’ no filmed version has quite captured. But ‘The Stand’ was still waiting.

After about a year in the new home, time was not only ripe but begging me to take notice. Marvel Comics, having found success with its adaptations of ‘The Dark Tower,’ had turned its attention to ‘The Stand,’ and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa made the decision to do this one straight, called his first mini-series ‘Captain Trips,’ and finally completed my journey of discovery. I’m not really a post-apocalypse kind of guy. I’m not really a zombie or horror guy. Any number of experiences would seem to deny this fact, but it’s true. I’ve found a lot of pleasure reading comics like ‘Y: The Last Man,’ ‘Wasteland,’ ‘Walking Dead,’ and ‘Zero Killer,’ watching movies like Zack Snyder’s ‘Dawn of the Dead’ (yeah, the Zack Snyder who has since gone about making some of the most famous comics into some of the biggest blockbuster films), ‘28 Weeks Later’ (haven’t seen the first one yet), and ‘Doomsday.’ I’m familiar with the rules of the game. I have such an interest that I know ‘World War Z’ is a must-read, but haven’t, and might never.

Originally published in 1978 (though expanded to most of the original manuscript in 1991), Stephen King’s ‘The Stand’ is a sort of granddaddy to the current crop of survival stories. It’s one of his earliest and without a doubt essential books, and is a prime example of why he ought to receive a lot more respect in the literary world. Whatever else he’s done, he’s tapped into an authentic vein of culture, discovered a direct line to the popular consciousness, not just as it seeks to entertain, but to simply make a living in the modern world. He’s now about a generation removed from the zeitgeist, but when you talk relevance, he’s still right there, he still understands what it means to write a story that has real meaning for the reader, for the world they live in and as they’ve learned from living memory.

More than anything, ‘The Stand’ is a sprawling testament to King’s ability to make that distinction. There’s very little artifice to be find within the book, just simple experience, in some of the most extreme circumstances possible. That’s why he invariably tends toward horror, I guess, because it’s a genre that doesn’t mince many words, allows people to see what they’re really made of, after seeing what they thought of themselves. Written under the shadow of the Cold War, which King was uniquely suited to experience and write about, the fear he was born into and not simply the politics of it but the possibility that it really could unravel so easily, reactions borne out of the worst suspicions, which don’t blame anyone in particular but rather a general feeling that when push comes to shove, everything gets squashed in the middle.

I’m only three hundred pages in at this point, just about past the point the ‘Captain Trips’ comic reaches, and now starting to see the transition from the Superflu portions (reading this part will make you paranoid of any cold symptoms you encounter around you), with a mere eight hundred or so to go, but in 1994, King adapted the book into a teleplay, the DVD I was able to track down last week (unknowingly, I had become familiar with the film, both from a vague awareness that may in fact turn out to be connected with a ‘Langoliers’ film made around the same time; some Sci Fi Channel commercials a few years back definitely from it; and an attempt to track down some more details about the fictitious pop song found in the story, coming across a YouTube video that turned out to originate from it). Aside from a dated quality, it’s actually still worth checking out, starring Gary Sinise and a performance from Molly Ringwald that eerily recalls Maggie Grace’s Shannon from ‘Lost.’

Right, I mentioned that already, didn’t I? In fact, watching the film, at least, leaves a lot of connections in the air (Sam Anderson, who portrays Bernard on ‘Lost’ has a small part in it, too), some story-wise, some even music-related. Anyone who’s been following ‘Lost’ will know that its creators have had a lot of previous mind-bending stories as inspiration (and I’ve added to that particular mythology in this column!), so it’s not as surprising as you would think to find out.

Reading a story, and not even a long one like ‘The Stand,’ if you’re not an especially fast reader, is not unlike watching a serialized show like ‘Lost.’ Even with the similarities (pregnant Claire from ‘Lost’ resembles pregnant Fran from ‘The Stand’) aside, I would enthusiastically propose someone adapt the whole book as a series, not to selfishly get the whole thing filmed, but because by its nature it would still be as compelling as a story we don’t already know. Just following King’s characters on a weekly basis, experiencing their lives and tragedies, would be enough.

But as I said, if you don’t read particularly fast, reading something like this almost adds up to watching a weekly series anyway. I’ve now pretty much spoiled the story for myself, but it doesn’t really matter. The experience of reading the comic book ‘The Stand: Captain Trips’ didn’t spoil reading much of the same material in the book itself, nor did either spoil watching much the same events unfold in ‘The Stand’ movie. There are more comics to come, I know already, and I’ll be reading them, and hopefully, I’ll be done the book long before much more of them arrive, but such has been my experience so far that I cannot imagine that ‘The Stand’ can avoid becoming something even bigger, a classic, something future generations will read not just to experience to find out what some kooky horror writer who never got much respect in his own time thought Armageddon would look like (which reminds me, among still more descendents would be those ‘Left Behind’ books), but because it’s a timeless exploration of human nature.

All of which isn’t to say that I’ve suddenly become a Stephen King fanatic who will read any and everything he’s written, but that I’ve grown increasingly comfortable with the knowledge that I’ve spent a good deal of time with the spectre of a writer who has given us something substantial on a number of occasions, a connection any good author will always be able to make, regardless of whether or not they’re accorded due respect.