Justin Cawthorne dot com

(March 17 – April 11)

Reading The Stand while the world continues to deal with a real-life pandemic is certainly a choice. King gets a lot of mileage out of otherwise innocuous coughs and sneezes, which we readers quickly learn are signalling an inevitable death several pages further along. As such, there were plenty of occasions over the past month where the sound of nearby coughs or sneezes had me wondering: “Covid? Captain Trips…? Nothing to worry about? Are you sure??!!”

Fun times.

I’m not alone in including The Stand among the ranks of a select few novels that I like to revisit occasionally, but it’s been quite some time since I last delved into its pages. Inevitably, one of the things that I can’t get over while reading it as part of this project is that it’s only his fourth novel. We’re not even close to the teens of King’s career and already we’ve come to one of his most revered novels. Undoubtedly there are still highlights yet to come, but it’s hard not to see this as a significant peak of King’s career.

And at such a young age …

With the sequence of King’s novels in mind, I also caught myself trying to figure out how we get from The Shining (a relatively self-contained tale) to something as sprawling and ambitious as The Stand. Certainly there are some threads leading into it from earlier works: the large cast of characters from Salem’s Lot; the sense of looming evil from The Shining; the religious angle from Carrie. There’s also a nice nod to The Shining whereby a character has the same telepathic gift as Danny (and it even gets referred to as ‘the shine’ at one point). Otherwise we have a seemingly unfathomable leap forward in King’s bibliography.

There are some additional clues hidden in the forewords / author’s notes to his previous novels. Salem’s Lot is inspired by Dracula. The Shining is inspired by classic haunted house tales such as the Haunting Of Hill House. The Stand is (openly) King’s attempt to do a modern American version of Lord Of The Rings. Perhaps the scope of the book was simply determined by the goal.

On the subject of scope, I am, of course, discussing the expanded edition here (released in 1990 and slightly updated from the original 1978 edition) but as far as I’m concerned this still counts as his fourth published novel given it’s (more or less) the version he would have released had his publishers not insisted on making him cut 400 pages the first time around.

And it’s hard to imagine the novel now without those 400 pages. There’s no sense that the book is overly padded (despite a slightly meandering middle section). Every character King has crafted is vivid and distinct, and getting to spend more time in their company is absolutely a bonus. I have to give special mention to good old Harold Lauder, who remains one of the most fascinating, compelling, tragic and occasionally grotesque characters that King has ever created. Perhaps more than any of the other main characters, it’s Harold’s story that helps make The Stand such a page-turner.

It’s not all flawless, however. Like many King novels the ending is … something that happens at the end of the book. The novel wraps up in a perfectly satisfying way, but I’ve always found the way that the central narrative concludes to be … I don’t know. Convenient? Eccentric? Abrupt? Unconventional? It’s a curious one. Not a bad ending in the same way as It, but certainly one to ponder.

It also has to be said that this is, of the four King novels I’ve reread to date, the one that has made me cringe the most. In particular, one character being repeatedly described as retarded plunges the novel thoroughly into the uninformed past (slightly mitigated by another character objecting to the term ‘retard’). There is also some potential, albeit mild, homophobia. And you can’t read The Stand without concluding that King has quite the obsession with breasts; it may well be my personal reading, but I don’t believe any male body parts get the same degree of attention. I suspect if I read the novel again with a more critical eye, I’d also come away finding that almost all of the female characters (however strong and otherwise well-crafted they are) are predominantly in the shadow of the male characters (think, here, about Nadine’s function in the story, for example). 

Otherwise, I think the most notable thing about The Stand is that it’s not actually a horror novel. It undoubtedly has horrific moments, but it’s our first example of King simply telling a good, dramatic tale and not worrying too much about what genre it sits in. Of course, he won’t shake that horror label so easily.

The Adaptations

Not including the comic (which I’ve not read) there are two main adaptations of The Stand: the 1994 miniseries, and the more recent miniseries. Both are perfectly good, but neither (in my opinion) quite does the novel justice.

The 1994 version, while a game attempt, is hampered both by network prurience and the limitations of 1990’s era television visual effects. It’s about as good as it could have been for the time, and Gary Sinise in particular is perfectly cast as Stu Redman. I will definitely have to give it a rewatch sometime soon.

The recent CBS miniseries is actually the inspiration for this King Revisited project—watching it made me want to reread the novel, but I wasn’t convinced I’d have the reading discipline to get through it, so I figured I start with some shorter novels first.

There’s a lot to like about the new adaptation: the casting, for one thing, is pretty much perfect across the board (Owen Teague absolutely knocks it out of the park as Harold). It looks great, as most major TV productions do these days, and there are some efforts to freshen up the plot a little by going for a non-linear structure. 

There are some things that didn’t work so well for me. As with the novel there’s a fair bit of dawdling in the middle, and things rush a bit towards the end. I’m also not quite convinced by Flagg’s Vegas here: the horror of it all is far more subtle in the novel, whereas it’s all on the surface here (Nadine’s corpse-like appearance near the end is just one example of the series being way too on the nose). I feel there was a missed opportunity to play a bit more on the “wait, these people are just like us” angle which is hinted at in the novel.

So, as good as it was, I’ll continue to wait (probably forever) for the adaptation that truly does The Stand justice.

The Reading Experience

I vividly remember my first time reading The Stand. I was in an airport waiting to board a flight to the Seychelles (lucky me!) and I needed a book to read. I had a few King novels under my belt by then (summer of 1986) and when I saw The Stand sitting on a carousel in the airport bookshop I figured I was ready for the big leagues.

I have no idea how much of it I read on the plane, but I still remember meeting Trash Can man for the first time; I remember Lloyd being stuck in his prison cell; I remember the trip-trap sound of Randall Flagg’s with boot heels. I may well have spent the entire flight reading.

(As a side note I also remember with equal vividness my fear upon seeing how damn short the runway at our destination was – literally a strip cut into the side of one of the islands, with both ends seemingly running right into the ocean. How we landed safely I’ll never know. I guess these pilots know what they’re doing.)

As I mentioned, I’ve read this novel several times over the ensuing years (most of those times being the expanded edition) but I was somewhat anxious about tackling it again. My reading discipline has declined over the last decade or so. Attempted re-reads of both The Shining and It have stalled and I wasn’t convinced I could make it through The Stand. 

So I decided to ease into it …

Maybe it’s something to do with reading physical paperbacks once again, but I didn’t stumble once on this reading. Sure it took me a month to read, but I read consistently. Even the sections I previously found a bit of a drag (most of Frannie and Larry’s backstories) kept me perfectly engaged. The bits I remembered well I was able to enjoy from a whole new perspective; details I had either missed or forgotten came to the fore.

The short version is I was able to enjoy The Stand all over again.

Coming next: There’s a signpost up ahead … next stop: The Dead Zone

(March 3 – 16)

If Salem’s Lot was the prototypical Stephen King novel (as I definitively claimed in my last blog post) then The Shining is surely the first undisputed King Classic. It shares a lot of common ground with one or both of its two predecessors (a slow descent into supernatural-fuelled catastrophe; a main character who’s an author; the spectre of alcoholism; the additional spectres of a tortured past bearing down on a troubled present).

Still, there are also some new things going on here, the biggest of which is that we move away from the classic small town setting which, in turn, gives us a rather more limited cast. Sure we get visits from various other characters, but the majority of this tale is told from the perspective of the three members of the Torrance family.

This nudges us into the main narrative evolution this novel represents. In his introduction (as written in 2001) King talks about finding himself presented with a choice when developing this story: the choice was whether to make one of the characters a straight out bad guy, or to make them a bit less black and white than that (and, no, it’s not the character you’re thinking of). The decision to take the more complex route is, I think, what transforms The Shining. There is horror afoot, but it is made all the more horrific because we really get to live inside the heads of these characters along the way. It is here that King steps away from backstory and surface motivation and delves into something much deeper. He may not have kept up to this level for every one of his future novels, but I suspect we wouldn’t have classics like Misery and It without the ground that King broke here.

The Adaptations

There have been three adaptations of The Shining. Foremost is, of course, the iconic Kubrick movie—which has injected itself into popular culture even more deeply than the novel (when you think of ‘The Shining’ do you not picture Jack Nicholson first? The snowbound maze? That carpet?). Despite King’s misgivings, the movie is a a horror classic and stands as a perfectly sound version of the story.

There is also a 1997 TV adaptation, made with King’s direct involvement. I have not not seen this and am honestly not hugely motivated to do so. No offence to those involved.

But what’s the third adaptation, you ask. Well, I’m cheating a bit here but I’m referring to the beautifully designed board game that came out last year (and is, strictly speaking, based on the film rather than the book). It’s a co-op game where all players have to survive a winter at The Overlook, a challenge made all the harder by regular bouts of possession and murder. There is, appropriately, a variant where one person (secretly) plays as a Jack Torrance type character whose goal is to ensure that none of the other players ever get to leave …it’s a great game, and highly recommended for fans of either book or film.

The Reading Experience

This is my third book in this reading project, and I returned to The Overlook with a small amount of trepidation. I’d attempted a reread last year and had bottled out at about 80 percent through. I remember reading it effortlessly during my teen years and thinking it probably the scariest book I had ever read (at the time, a friend had found The Exorcist similarly terrifying, so we swapped books; neither of us found the other’s novel quite as scary). I do wonder how much my shift in perspective might impact my reading—I come to the novel now as a father and an esrtwhile writer (though not, fortunately, an alcoholic); no longer the hormonal teenage schoolboy who first tackled The Shining.

I did wonder, given my relative familiarity with its pages, if I would struggle to make it through this book. It demands more of the reader than Salem’s Lot. Far from a whistle-stop tour of an American town, The Shining is a claustrophobic, constricting read that forces you to dwell in some very dark places.

But it’s also a more rewarding read in many ways. King’s choice (as elaborated above) results in the richest characters he’s crafted so far. Jack’s descent into insanity is entirely convincing, and there is a steady, inevitable, tragic build towards it. It also, of course, has some real scares in it. 

In the end I tore through the book, especially towards the end. Whatever stumbling block I encountered in my last reread did not manifest here. Somehow, once again, reading this as a physical book rather than an ebook has transformed my reading experience.

Up next … it’s time to make a Stand!

(February 21 – March 1)

There’s a well-informed school of musical thought which claims that the first real David Bowie album is The Man Who Sold The World. There are those who might then point out that Bowie actually had a couple of self-titled albums out before then, but people who know what they’re talking about typically feel that The Man Who Sold The World is where “it started to happen” for Bowie.

It’s in similar fashion that Stephen King may have published Carrie first, but it’s Salem’s Lot that better serves as the prototypical Stephen King novel. Both may deal in supernatural forces and tell stories that that end with the destruction of an otherwise innocuous American township, but Salem’s Lot is where the some key tentpoles of the Stephen King Novel truly get driven into the ground.

For starters, it’s a relative chonkster (at 600 pages). It’s filled with characters who come into the tale with an entire life history behind them—and who all get their moments. It’s got a main character who’s an author and, in a slightly darker reflection of King’s real life struggles, this is the first (and far from the last) to feature characters who conspicuously struggle with alcohol.

In the foreword to the edition I read (written in 2005–the foreword that is; not the novel) King ponders his own youthful ambition in trying to combine the classic vampire novel (i.e. Dracula) with the schlock sensibilities of the E.C.Warren comics he grew up reading. It’s somewhat ironic that this was an aspect that I was, in fact, too young too young to pick up on when I first read Salem’s Lot (which may well be the first King novel I ever read … or it may not). There’s a sense that he remains slightly shocked that he had the audacity to attempt such a thing.

While this novel is still better than anything I’m likely to ever write, there are certainly signs of the fledgling novelist at work. The plot is relatively pedestrian (in the sense that it ambles along in uncomplicated fashion towards its conclusion). There are a few too many scenes which revolve around little more than people sitting around and explaining events to one another. There are also adverbs and other literary flourishes which would doubtless get excised from later King novels.

That said, there is plenty to admire here. The creeping, fatalistic sense of menace for one thing; and the vivid characterisation. There is a standout chapter chronicling a day in the life of Salem’s Lot, from sunrise to sundown, which flits from character to character and truly makes you feel like a guest in a rich tapestry. I also appreciate that King has never shied away from treading the darkest possible path for many of his characters. There’s never a guaranteed happy ending when you’re in a Stephen King story.

It’s a solid tale and, accordingly, there have been two adaptations of Salem’s Lot starting with the 1979 miniseries starring David Soul, which I remember being fairly decent for it’s time, and may well check out again sometime soon. There was also a 2004 TV adaptation starring Rob Lowe, which until last week I had quite honestly forgotten even existed, and am happy for it to return to that status. I feel there’s definitely potential in here for a good, modern adaption akin to the recent version of The Stand. However, I’m not holding my breath.

One of the goals of this ridiculous project was for me to rediscover the joy of settling down in bed with a good old-fashioned paperback. Reading this one has certainly achieved that, to the point where I was keenly looking forward to each night’s reading session and quite probably staying up later than I should. I certainly enjoyed my visit to Salem’s Lot, even if it didn’t end well for most of its residents.

Next up: who fancies a winter vacation …?

Post-script: the edition of the book that I purchased (the 2011 ‘Iconic Terror’ Hodder edition, to be precise) comes with a few nifty bonus features. First of these is the short story One For The Road, which is also featured in Night Shift, and tells a creepy little tale set three years after the events of Salem’s Lot.

Next comes a more ambitious short story entitled Jerusalem’s Lot (which also appears in Night Shift). In the afterword to the novel, Stephen King writes about how taken he was with the epistolary format when he first read Dracula. It’s fitting, then, that he uses exactly that style for a tale delving into the past of our favourite little undead township. (Intriguingly, this short story is being adapted into a 10 part series starring Adrien Brody, and entitled Chapelwaite, which probably would have been with us by now if not for certain real-world pandemics).

Finally, about 70 pages worth of deleted scenes are included which, while not essential (deleted scenes get deleted for a reason, after all) are an interesting glimpse into different routes and sideroads that the novel could have taken.

(February 16 – 20)

One of the best things about starting a reread of every Stephen King novel from the start, is that Carrie is little more than a pamphlet on the King Scale. At somewhere around 250 pages it would be hard for it to intimidate even a poorly disciplined reader like myself.

As such it’s something of an outlier (in my opinion) in the King canon. Initially conceived as a short story, and written at a time when King had no idea if he’d be able to carve a career as a novelist (despite his short stories proving to be a steady source of income) it’s far more restrained and disciplined that most of his works. There is still extensive background detail provided for many characters, but it comes as exactly that: background, as opposed to the veritable biographies that we will eventually get for characters that often survive no further than that very same chapter.

The inner voice motif is also very much present (through which mechanism King’s third-person narration frequently gives us direct glimpses into a character’s immediate train of thought).

This is only the second time I’ve read Carrie; the first being some decades ago when I was most likely in my late teens. Consequently, most of my memories of the story come from the excellent Brian de Palma film adaptation, so there was some extra fun to be had here in picking out where the film and novel differ. While there are numerous divergences, I’d say the main thing I noticed was the character of Carrie herself. The film, quite naturally, wants to play up the horror aspect so we eventually get to Carrie as a scorned and vengeful spirit. The book, of course, ends up in the same place but there’s far more tragedy to it. We get a far better picture of a young girl just starting to understand her place in the world, and in the earliest stages of assert her own identity—before being irrevocably swept down a different path.

I read this one over five nights (which, despite its brevity, is good progress for me). One of my goals in returning to paperback books was the hope of rediscovering that very physical impulse of not wanting to put a book down (while obviously not wanting to succumb to that impulse for risk if inviting a night of insomnia). Carrie makes this fairly easy by not being broken down into chapters, though its semi-epistolary structure does offer frequent breaking-off points. The biggest joy was getting to bed and actively wanting to put my screen away so I could pick up my book instead and start reading.

Next up: Salem’s Lot.

A recent bout of insomnia (fortunately now on the wane, dear reader) has prompted me to reconsider my bedtime routine. For the last few years that routine has more or less involved going to bed at a reasonable hour, grabbing my iPad, catching up on a few blogs—and then sometimes, or sometimes not, switching to whichever app my current book format demanded, and reading a book.

Now, any guide to good sleep hygiene will be pretty consistent in telling us that screens at bedtime are a big no-no. Given that I am now mortally afraid of a repeat visit from the insomnia demon, I have inevitably been giving some thought to giving myself the best chance of a good night’s sleep. And so I’ve decided that it’s time to put the screen away and start reading real books once again.

Something else I’ve struggled with over the best part of the last decade is my reading discipline. We are all so easily distracted these days (and taking my iPad to bed makes it all too easy to dip into that primary source of distraction: the internet). Removing the screen will solve some of the problem, but part of my discipline issue stems from rarely jumping straight into a new book once I’ve finished my current one (mostly because I don’t always have my next read picked out). This gives me ample chance to slip back into bad habits and, before you know it, it’s been another month since I’ve ready anything that wasn’t published on a website.

The solution to a lot of these woes came as I was considering a reread of Stephen King’s The Stand (obviously, in the wake of having watched the fairly decent recent TV adaptation). I’ve read The Stand at least three times already, but I found myself a bit hesitant as some of my recent attempts to reread King favourites have stalled: I got about halfway through It on the last attempt, and abandoned The Shining at about 80 per cent through (both being books that I have read, enjoyed, and completed in the past).

So I thought to myself: why not build up to it? Why not start at the beginning? And that’s exactly what I’m going to do: read every Stephen King novel (and probably the short story and novella collections too) in order starting from Carrie. A lot of his earlier books proved to be favourites when I was growing up, and have had a huge influence on my own writing, so I find myself quite excited about revisiting them with my adult eyes, and also seeing how his writing style evolves over the many decades of his career. I’m also excited to visit several of his books for the first time.

I’m not setting a timeframe for this, and I’m not planning to exclusively read King novels, but let’s see how I go. 

Wish me luck.

The Books

In the interests of keeping up momentum, I have decided to skip: the short story collections (although I do love me a King short story); the Dark Tower books (which I expect I will want to go back and discover once this project is done); and the Bachman Books. I will probably still include the novella collections (mostly cos I can’t go past the chance of giving Rita Hayworth & The Shawshank Redemption or The Body another read).

• Carrie
• Salem’s Lot
• The Shining
• The Stand
• The Dead Zone
• Firestarter
• Cujo
• Different Seasons
• Christine
• Pet Sematary
• It
• The Eyes Of The Dragon
• Misery
• The Tommyknockers
• The Dark Half
• Four Past Midnight
• Needful Things
• Gerald’s Game
• Dolores Claiborne
• Insomnia
• Rose Madder
• The Regulators (tbc)
• The Green Mile
• Desperation
• Bag Of Bones
• The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
• Hearts In Atlantis
• Dreamcatcher
• Black House
• From A Buick 8
• The Colorado Kid
• Cell
• Lisey’s Story
• Blaze (tbc)
• Duma Key
• Tbc
• Under The Dome
• Full Dark, No Stars
• 11/22/63
• Joyland
• Doctor Sleep
• Mr. Mercedes
• Revival
• Finders Keepers
• End Of Watch
• Sleeping Beauties
• The Outsider
• Elevation
• The Institute