WITH HIS NEW ENDING FOR THE STAND, STEPHEN KING ANSWERS ONE OF HIS FICTION'S OLDEST QUESTIONS

syfy ^ | 2/11/2021

[mylife]

King has been open in the past about his difficulties writing The Stand, the novel still considered by many fans (myself included) to be his finest work. In his memoir On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, he detailed how at one point the book almost went off the rails entirely because he'd run out too many narrative threads. He'd tripped himself up — until he realized that a bomb in the Boulder Free Zone was a handy way to curtail some of them and streamline his plot.

That's the most famous story of the book's struggles, but it's not the only one. Later in the same passage of his memoir, King explains that he also struggled to reach a satisfactory conclusion to the final scene, in which Frannie Goldsmith and Stu Redman put their son to bed and ponder for a moment what their struggle in the wake of Captain Trips meant.

In the book, this pondering ends with Stu asking Frannie if she thinks "people ever learn anything," a response to the battle against Randall Flagg that only ended when an atomic bomb (the world's great manmade devastator) exploded in the middle of Las Vegas. In that moment, Stu is thinking about the future, about their children, and their children's children, and worrying over whether or not they'll actually be able to rebuild the world without resorting to the old ways of mutually assured destruction.

[mylife]

Hard to wrap up all the complex character development in a neat package like Animal house... ;)

[Mr. K]

‘Misery’ came out before ‘The Stand’ didn’t it?

I did read it and I thought it was one of his better ones.

[x]

The question must be “Why doesn’t he just go away already?”

[rktman]

Now that he’s bashed bush are you still not a fan? LOL!

[wbslws]

I agree with you about him being a twit.

[V_TWIN]

I don’t know the chronological order.

[V_TWIN]

Yeah that was back when I thought W was on our side.

I know now king is a rabid libtard.

[Magnatron]

I really wish King would have stayed out of politics. He was one of the the reasons I took up writing and I loved reading his earlier books.

Now I wouldn’t pick one up unless I ran out of toilet paper...

[rktman]

Well, for sure they’re both ‘tards’.

[Larry Lucido]

JERRY: You know, this is like that Twilight Zone Stephen King where the guy wakes up, and he's the same - but everyone else is different!

KRAMER: Which one?

JERRY: They were all like that!

[zeugma]

Dean Koonz is a better writer. I heard a long interview with him on Art Bell's show way back when. Dean never does interviews, and was originally scheduled for about an hour. He was enjoying it so much that he went the entire 4 hour show. It was awesome. Art was a better interviewer than he often gets credit for.