“ The Stand ”: retracing the epic of Stephen King through its many changes

“The Stand”, as he explained, was born out of two disappointments. The first was an unfinished novel about the kidnapping and brainwashing of heiress Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army and its leader Donald DeFreeze. The second was a long-standing desire to write an American response to “Lord of the Rings” – a desire he had never found a way to fulfill. “The Stand” is, in part, a synthesis of these divergent ideas.

Two reports kicked off King’s book, one a “60 minute” segment on chemical and biological warfare and the other a he remembers report on a chemical spill in Utah. who had killed a flock of sheep. If the wind had blown the other way, King wrote: “The good people of Salt Lake City might have had a very bad surprise.

Thinking about what earth might be after humanity, King, who lived in Boulder, Colorado (where much of the novel takes place), took inspiration from George R. Stewart’s post-apocalyptic novel “Earth Abides And the fire-and-brimstone intonations of a preacher on a local radio station, who spoke ominously of plagues. King became fascinated, meanwhile, by a ghostly FBI photo of DeFreeze taken in the middle of a bank robbery, in which the leader’s face was blurred. He wrote the lines that would serve as the foundation of the novel: “A Season of Rest,” “A Dark Man Without a Face,” and, quoting the preacher, “Once in every generation a plague will fall among them.”

“And that was it,” King recalls in “Danse Macabre”. “I spent the next two years writing a seemingly endless book called ‘The Stand’.”

Evolution

The roots of “The Stand” run even deeper than the novel’s two years of writing suggest. His 1969 story “Night Surf” (a revised version of which was published in early 1978 as part of the “Night Shift” short story collection) introduced the concept of the flulike virus dubbed Captain Trips, in dubious homage to the singer of Grateful Dead Jerry Garcia. King’s 1969 poem “The Dark Man” was seen as an anticipatory exploration of the character traits that would be poured into Flagg, himself dubbed “The Dark Man,” in the novel.

When “The Stand” finally arrived in October 1978, the version King had originally given to his editor was 400 pages missing. The changes were a consequence of publishing logistics rather than quality control, writes King in the preface to the 1990 version of the novel: Based on its sales history, its publisher came up with a price for the book that required heavy modifications to reduce page count and make the book financially viable. King made the cuts himself.