If you were to stand in the room that currently serves as my bedroom, after everything that the room contains had been laid out so that nothing was obscured by books or cupboard doors, mirrors or boxes, and make a slow and thorough observation of the room, you would discover somewhere in the region of thirty novels by Stephen King. One of my favourite authors, I have consumed volume after volume of his work with varying degrees of appreciation ever since my dad first handed me his 1,443-page copy of The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition, somewhere back in March of 2003, and to this day it stands out as one of my favourite of his and any works (surpassed on both counts by It, but that's beside the point).
I was so captivated by the book that I not only read the whole thing in under two months against a backdrop of Year 10 schoolwork and mock GCSEs, but, in the nearly nine years (including more than six spent in full-time academic study) since first opening it, I have worn into my fourth copy and approximately dozenth reread (not to mention all the times I've dipped into it when I've had time to spare and my gaze has happened to chance upon one of the various copies - one of the ones still legible, of course - still populating various bookshelves around the house). The latest of these rereads has been in earnest progress since Christmas, when I received a new copy as a gift from my parents.
I have thought about the various implications of the book on numerous occasions, the philosophy, the theology, the sociology, the geography, the history and the physics, and have even contemplated writing a dissertation on the works of King and perhaps the themes of The Stand or It to be more specific. Indeed, I feel confident that, if asked for or sufficiently desired, I could fill a book at least half as long as The Stand itself with a literary analysis of it.
As of right now, my insomnia plaguing me again, I sit here typing this note in a cobwebbed and paper-strewn back room with the TV on Sky Sports News live paused at the beginning of an article in which I have no interest (an interview with Sir Alex Ferguson on the Liverpool-Man Utd game tomorrow: I'll just be hoping Liverpool win and to hell with the preamble), and as the clock on my aged and failing laptop reaches 02:55, I remain gobsmacked by the fact of, in all the sleepless nights and monkish devotations to the art and piebald, necrotid, heartsick romance of procrastination, the thought which has just occurred to me, as I chanced once more upon Randall Flagg, a man as dark as the night outside is now, sitting and brooding on the epic failures of his endeavours over a campfire in Emigrant Valley, a lonely and disturbing somewhat-man with the wolves at his door and a leering fire in his heart; the fact that I myself had fallen victim to an epic fail unbecoming of a triannual university literature student, even one with the relatively centrifugal end grade of 2.2, an epic fail whose awesome magnitude is diminished only by the thus-far apparent total across-the-board uniformity of the human race, including the instrument of Gan Mr. King himself (I've looked on the Internet and can't find anything), in accompanying me along the long and Lovecraftian road towards a facepalm of Saul/Damascan proportions.
The facepalm in question, put simply, is this: as the above title suggests, where the hell are the rest of the characters?
In one of the prologues to The Stand's uncut edition, Mr. King expounds on his belief, and it's one which I share, that the bare bones of a story, even if they get the essential plot points across, are insufficient to describe adequately to full scope of its meaning, and so, I will proceed to elaborate, in order to avoid, if it's not already too late, this story becoming, in the words of Mr. King's selfsame prologue, "a loser"; in my case, perhaps, the kind of loser which if human would sit awake at 3.03 of a January morning in their parents' house taking a thousand years to address a simple point of literature. And thus, without further ado, unless it pleases my sleep-deprived and commonsense-resistant brain to create some, is the elaboration, or the illumination, if you will: the falling away from the scales from my own literary eyes.
The basic premise of the novel, for those of you not in the know (and, despite my thesis here, I recommend the book): a plague decimates the world, worse than literally, wiping out 994 in every thousand people, and leaving approximately 1.32m survivors in the continental US, less 16% for those who die of unattended emergencies = 1 milion 108k 800 (calculably out of 220m original - the book was set in 1990 & written in the late 70s). The central point of the book is then devoted, over somewhere in the region of seven hundred pages and all the many philosophical musings described above and more, to the establishment of a central principle: the survivors are all having 2 deeply scary dreams that compel them towards an evil bloke in Las Vegas and a "good" chick in Nebraska/Colorado. Ultimately, some of the characters wax lyrical about how the awesome power of the dreams is going to compel around half the remaining million or so people to each new civilisation. The plague happens in June, and by the end of the following June, the bad guys have been wiped out by a nuke and the good guys are up to not quite 20k people. Less these and that leaves around 960k survivors (non-continental-Americans notwithstanding; we can dismiss them, as the book is enough of an examination into the American psyche to draw parallels with the later American Gods, and thus has no real need of other people) who have had no role in the book whatsoever, despite the entire events being treated throughout as a semi-apocalypse. On the travels of the main characters across vast swathes of the country, great big deals are made of the fact that they pass through town after town which is virtually empty. Now, I type here from a so-called village of somewhere in the region of 5k people, which means that even within three miles of where I sit there would be, according to the law of averages, around 29 others still living, and yet a similarly sizeable seaside town in the novel is depicted as bearing two survivors, and being so quiet that you can hear a typewriter from 1.5mi away.
My central question, then: simply put (at last):
If the dreams impact so profoundly as they are said to, then how come the vast majority of the people left appear to have done absolutely nothing about them?
Much is made of how important the good guys' society is going to become, but no mention whatsoever is made of the fact that, even when you do a few quick estimations, the good guys are going to end up with about 10% of the continental American survivors. Midway through the book one character says, essentially, "Remember how I thought there'd be dozens of new societies & now there's been these all-but-overwhelmingly powerful dreams? Well now they mean that there'll only be two societies." Looks like you were right the first time, dude - shame you won't be around to find out and help the others deal with this apparently rejected complication, what with having been shot in the face towards the end of the novel. Your very own last words were "you don't know any better". Well, it seems, neither did you - or at least, you did but then you squashed it. What worries me (from a fictional perspective - I'm not crazy, even though my mother didn't have me tested) is that, as the book comes to a conclusion, two of his friends head out entirely alone except for their toddler son and the foetus in her womb, all the way from Colorado to Maine, a supposedly mostly empty stretch of around 2k miles. I have, accordingly, spent the last hour imagining these two people, the Frodo and Sam of the King universe, being suddenly ambushed by the spear-carrying masses of Lord of the Flies/Red Dawn-comparison-drawing face-painted savage types the book itself foretells of being dominant in a couple of centuries or so. If I'm right, way to get the timeframe a bit wrong.
Then again, if I'm right, that's a lot of people who can apparently withstand the book-long pressure of having it be slowly (and eventually explicitly, by a sociologist of all people) asserted that rationality, in their case at least, is wrong and dangerous: perhaps the vision, to be drawn from King's subconscious, is that there is a much greater proportion of essential agnostics, if not outright atheists (or, at least, rationalists, which, after all, is the Kiplingian principle of sanity in the face of chaos, compared to atheism, which, if you understand it, at least the way I, a self-described atheist, do, is nothing so noble, but merely a recognition of what the world is if you actually unflinchingly look at it) in the continental US than anyone realises. In that case, one might imagine that, even in the event of multiple societies, they might actually prove the sociologist's worst pessimism wrong and not blow each other to bits over a difference in the availability of technological commodities. Perhaps King's point is, in the face of years of my disapproval of what I thought to be the opposite, that rationalism is not so much the "deathtrip" the character says it is, but a "lifetrip" after all. After all, he's dead, and the guy who nursed a guy with a broken leg and pneumonia back to health with Western medicine is alive.
There's a principle in science that everything that can happen, does happen in some alternate universe, including all fiction. Running with that: in whatever universe The Stand happens in, I hope that they can keep the power on and the people flocking in to the rough region of Boulder, Colorado; I hope that their Free Zone doesn't fall apart, or at least nowhere near as much as they predict towards the novel's end; I hope that the nine or so societies that are statistically likely to spring up elsewhere aren't run by the little Hitlers the sociologist predicts they might be, and that, over there in The Stand's version of 2012, Fran Goldsmith (who doesn't look like Molly Ringwald) and Stu Redman (who does look like Gary Sinise) are enjoying a healthy start to their respective forties and fifties, and that their two kids are living the relatively carefree life desired and sometimes achieved by the stereotypical Western early twentysomething. Perhaps they even have extra siblings; who knows. Stephen King, or Gan, perhaps; I hope that I'll be able and interested enough to iron out the various novel reference I haven't been bothered to explain in this essay (Gan, for example, is the possibly-internal Cthulhu-like (see Lovecraft or South Park) dude King supposedly gets his inspiration/information from) if I ever hope to present it in a serious, possibly professional way - or even on the first rung of the stepladder that is amateur sharing with strangers - writing for Den of Geek, for example, which I've applied to do - maybe I'll be able to submit this essay, or a massively truncated and more sensible version, for example; above all, I hope that I'll eventually be able to stop starting every subclause with the phrase "I hope", but then again, I did watch The Shawshank Redemption (another work of awesomeness originally made possible by Stephen King) again a couple of days ago, and, although this is not a strange place, and although I can't speak for every last man, I feel freer for having written it, even if, like Andy's note to Red in the Maine hayfield under the quartz rock, it goes unread. I'd understand, given how ridiculously fucking long it is, and the fact that I don't need to send it anywhere for career enhancement (though, to borrow the words and inflection of the titular character from The Parole Officer about whether he'll pull the trigger, I might.) Let's call it the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain.
I'll leave you with the words of Chris Griffin from Family Guy, voiced by a man who once played my favourite and most me-like Stephen King character in a film that was absolutely terrible when compared to the book: "Ah, movie references."
One of the reasons I write such ridiculously long treatises, even in situations such as this where there is no lecturer's mark awaiting me at the end of its publication, is because, once I start up the cobwebbed and largely recently unused spam factory that is of late my brain, it takes sufficiently long to warm up that, once it gets going, I find it very difficult to persuade myself to stop. So, taking another example from Family Guy, I'm just going to end everything in the middle of a sen
