Sarah Stewart Holland & Laura Tremaine slow read the books you've always wanted to tackle, at a pace you can handle. 🔹 Fall 2026: OUTLANDER by Diana Gabaldon
https://slowread.substack.com
In this first episode of our Slow Read of Diana Gabaldon’s OUTLANDER, Sarah & Laura discuss their first impressions of the novel, make guesses about where it’s going to go from here, and, of course, dissect the book chapter by chapter.
Reminder that you can watch the video version of our conversation on SubstackHERE
We’d love for you to join us in the comments on Substack or in the Slow Read chat. (Remember no spoilers beyond the sections we’re discussing!!)
Looking forward to spending the next few months with you through the stones!
Kickoff Conversation to Season 2 of Slow Read!
mardi 18 août 2026 • Durée 30:01
We hopped on live in the middle of a Tuesday to officially kick off Season Two and hundreds of you showed ready to talk summer reading and get excited about Outlander.
Laura and I had two very different reading summers. We talked about that and which books we both really loved or really didn’t. We talked about the books of the summer (looking at you Yesteryear!). We talked about the fall lineup of new releases which is insane.
Also, we talked about what you need to know to tackle Outlander with us. Outlander is broken into seven parts, and we’re doing eight episodes because we split one of them. Our first episode, covering Part One, drops Monday, August 31st. Part One is about seventy pages. If you want to stay with us, have it read by the 31st.
The Slow Read Outlander season is members only this time. Bookmark slowread.substack.com for the reading schedule, the meeting schedule, the Zoom links, and replays of anything you miss. The printable bookmark is here.
If you’re a slow reader who’s sitting Outlander out, we’re not going anywhere — we’ve got other episodes and goodies sprinkled through the fall. But if you want in on these episodes, come join us. We don’t know yet whether we’re going to love this book. We do know we’re going to have fun.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
Your official invitation to the next Slow Read
lundi 22 juin 2026 • Durée 31:40
We finished The Stand. Six months in Boulder, and we made it out alive — well, most of us did.
And now we get to tell you what we’ve been dying to announce: our next Slow Read is Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander.
Here’s the part you need to hear first, because it changes things. Unlike The Stand, which we gave away free to everyone, the entire Outlander read this fall lives behind the paywall. Every main episode breaking down the chapters, every book club meeting, every unhinged side quest — members only. If you want to take this journey with us, now’s the time to join.
The Stand episodes, we had to edit ourselves — pull whole sections, watch what we said, because the internet is the internet. Outlander has one of the most intense, passionate fandoms out there (they call Diana herself, like a deity — we’ll get into it). Behind the paywall, it’s just us and you. No torching on Twitter, no walking on eggshells. Our true feelings, full unhinged selves, the way a book club is supposed to be.
A few reasons we are genuinely thrilled about this one:
It’s Outlander. It’s been everywhere for a decade, the TV show just wrapped, and it sits right in the cultural water — but it’s also double-intimidating: a 50-million-copy series with nine books, novellas, graphic novels, a whole universe. Reading the first one together means you finally get to be conversant in this giant piece of pop culture, without committing to all 10,000 pages alone.
Diana herself is a delight. Marine biology and zoology degrees, a PhD, a side hustle writing Scrooge McDuck comics, and she wrote Outlander on a lark as practice — never thinking anyone would read it. “Science and art are two sides of the same coin,” she says. “What they both rest on is the ability to draw patterns out of chaos.” We fell a little in love.
And this time, both of us are going in blind. With , Laura knew the big picture and led the way. For , neither of us has read it — so we’re discovering it right alongside you. People say it’s intense. Possibly even slightly traumatizing. (Laura says that’s a selling point.)
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
SLOW READ: The Stand (The Circle Closes)
lundi 15 juin 2026 • Durée 45:52
Welcome to SLOW READ, where we tackle the books you’ve always wanted to read at a pace you can handle.
Join the SLOW READ community on Substack for bonus episodes, book club meetings, and Side Quests with Sarah & Laura
REMINDER:
Our final book club meeting discussing The Stand will be THURSDAY, JUNE 11 at 6pm PT / 8pm CT / 9pm ET and we’ll be announcing our next SLOW READ! You don’t want to miss it.
Mentioned in this episode:
* The Shining by Stephen King
* Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
* The Crocodile Hunter
* “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (”…if the fates allow”)
* Noah Kahan, “Maine”
* Steel Magnolias
The Stand, or The Walk?
Laura: How are you feeling?
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
SLOW READ: The Stand (Chapters 72 - 73)
lundi 1 juin 2026 • Durée 01:01:38
Welcome to SLOW READ, where we tackle the books you’ve always wanted to read at a pace you can handle.
Stephen King Summer is part of Laura’s Secret Stuff Substack and when you sign up for it, you’ll get the Stephen King Summer Book Club + all her other Secret Stuff content AND the full Stephen King Summer archives.
Laura: This is Slow Read, where we tackle the books you’ve always wanted to read at a pace you can handle. And we are in the final chapters of by Stephen King.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
SLOW READ: The Stand (Chapters 61 - 64)
lundi 11 mai 2026 • Durée 46:43
Welcome to SLOW READ, where we tackle the books you’ve always wanted to read at a pace you can handle.
Join the SLOW READ community on Substack for bonus episodes, book club meetings, and Side Quests with Sarah & Laura
If you prefer to read instead of listen, below is a cleaned up transcript of the episode as well as links to all the books and Substacks we mentioned in this episode…and several fun bonus links and videos!
Join the SLOW READ community on Substack for bonus episodes, book club meetings, and Side Quests with Sarah & Laura
______
Mentioned in this episode:
* Giants in the Earth by Ole Edvart Rølvaag
* The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
* How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
* Contagion (film, 2011)
Living Inside the Book
Laura: And after a few hundred pages of peaceful community building, some stuff really happens in this section finally.
Sarah: I’d say so. I found myself traveling recently to Vegas of all places. And I was driving and I looked up at the moon and it was like fully half. And I’m like, oh, we’re not to the full moon for Tom Cullen. As if I have to wait for the full moon in my life for him to come back. I’m like real in it. I noticed every mention of Boulder. I noticed every mention when I was walking around Vegas. It feels like almost at the pace it’s happening. I’m a little stressed and I’m just in it. The anticipation of what’s going to happen next, especially after this section, is very, very high.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
Next Up: Our first Outlander episode covering Part One drops Monday, August 31st. It’s about 70 pages — read it however slow reading works for you. The reading schedule and printable bookmark are both waiting for you at slowread.substack.com.
Here’s what to do: Join as a paid member now, and you get everything. Spend the rest of the summer catching up on our side quests from the first half of the year — the one we did on death is, no exaggeration, some of our best work. Plus, we’ll have a couple fun summer episodes for you. Then our whole Outlander adventure officially kicks off August 3rd, when we release the reading schedule. Book club meetings, watch-alongs, all the bonuses — it’s all included once you’re in.
We’re all going to need a good, healthy, entertaining distraction this fall. Let this be it.
Happy summer reading, y’all — see you in Scotland.
Laura: We are here today at the end of The Stand by Stephen King to close the circle.
Sarah: But I think it’s a lie. Why did he say the circle closes? That’s not what happens at the end of this book.
Laura: That’s true. That’s totally true. But it starts with “the circle opens.” That’s the opening. So he has to close it.
Sarah: Or is it just that the circle continues? That would have been a more accurate title for this epilogue. Just saying.
Laura: I do have to say that I purposely, when I made our reading schedule for The Stand — we knew we wanted to do it for six months, like January to June, which we did — I planned it to close our circle here the same week the book opens, which is the second week of June. Just because I liked that symmetry.
Sarah: I love it. I love a symmetry.
Laura: We have a few little pages to get through, but before we do that — we will be continuing the slow read. We have picked our next book.
Sarah: I picked it and I forced it on Laura. That’s the truth.
Laura: We’re going to tell you all about that next week, where you’ll hear the reveal. If you cannot wait another second to find out the book, our paid members learned last week during our book club meeting. So you can go watch the replay of that if you just can’t stand it another second. But today we’re going to tackle “dusk of a summer evening” and the circle closing — which is a lie, because it doesn’t actually close.
Sarah: It doesn’t actually close, but there are things to say about how King ended this whole thing. Because if you do any sort of Reddit search, any sort of Googling about The Stand, what people want to talk about is the end.
Laura: Pretty much. Whether it was a true stand, or a letdown for some people, or if it’s what people expected. There’s a lot of that.
The Split Epilogue: An Epilogue for the Good Guys
Sarah: We get this kind of split epilogue, right? So we get “dusk of a summer evening.” The people we get to see from the Free Zone contingent — the good side — are Stu and Franny and Peter.
Laura: I’m sorry, three people. Babies are people too. On their journey back to Maine, they stop at Mother Abigail’s house.
Sarah: I don’t know if that path makes sense, for the record. Geographically I’m always like, where are you guys going? What are we doing? But whatever, it’s fine.
Laura: Maybe there’s something about the way you’d have to travel by foot. I’ve always thought this is weird. I’m going through all this area of the country, including Nebraska, this summer on my RV road trip with my family. So maybe I can report back to us. But they do stop at Mother Abigail’s house. They’re on the porch, the baby’s playing, and they’re talking about what happened in the Free Zone and what they think is going to happen next. It’s a little epilogue for the good guys, really. Did it feel true to you?
Sarah: Yeah. I think it’s true that the Free Zone would not stay together as this tight, cohesive unit. As people came together — I love this line — “all these people make me nervous as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.” That’s something my grandpa would say. My grandpa always said, I want to live in the middle of 400 acres with a fence around it that says no trespassing. So to a certain contingent, living with other people is never going to be on the menu. From their perspective, the circle has closed, the threat is gone, so the need to stay close together for safety isn’t as intense. It makes sense that people would start to dissipate.
Laura: I do think it’s an interesting choice that he follows the people leaving instead of staying in the Free Zone to say what happens next. Although you’re getting reporting from them on what the next phase looked like before they left. So he’s trying to get the best of both worlds.
Sarah: I think he’s also addressing a natural question. If this really happened — but for the dreams about Mother Abigail drawing everyone to Boulder, or the contingent that went to Vegas — after a catastrophic pandemic like this, these little communities would be sprouting up all over. They wouldn’t all gather into one place. That’s the storytelling aspect, that it’s not very normal. So he’s addressing: okay, but in reality, people would dissipate. There’d be a lot of people like Franny who are homesick for their region, for their part of the country, who want to go back.
Sarah: At their last Free Zone meeting they’re ready to have a sheriff, ready to get guns — and the progression of “when we don’t have one enemy, we have many enemies” seems pretty psychologically right to me.
Do People Ever Learn Anything?
Laura: He’s making the point over and over again in this ending — even in the darker parts — that the more things change, the more they stay the same. People are gonna people. Do you think people ever learn anything? That’s the question he’s posing.
Sarah: I do. And look, there’s a way to look back over this book, and over the whole of human history, and say people are gonna people — they can be cruel, they can be violent. But the side of the coin I’m on is: yes, and the human species has made enormous, dramatic progress over the past 500 years. From the dark, peasant-and-serf-driven structure of society where how you’re born is how you die, the end — to an enormous ability to chart your own path and create peace and prosperity for the majority of people. The statistics on the children pulled out of poverty just in the last 30, 50 years are incredible. So I get what he’s saying, but I disagree to a certain extent that this is just an endless cycle, because we’ve made enormous progress. There’s no point in human history — unless you’re a crazy person who has this vision of the ‘50s that’s not accurate — where you’d want to go back in time. I don’t want to go back. First of all, I have a Type 1 diabetic child. The technology sucked just 10 years ago. I’m always going forward in time.
Laura: There’s no doubt there’s an evolution, which means we are learning as a species. We’re learning and adapting and changing. I kind of think a better question — instead of “do you think we ever learn anything” — a bigger question that feels more complicated to me is: do we think people are inherently good?
Are People Inherently Good?
Sarah: Well, we know what Stephen King thinks.
Laura: Do we?
Sarah: Well, actually, I don’t, because I think I probably sit with him. I don’t think you can categorize all people. I think there’s a small percentage that are cruel and evil and violent and dark — and some, yes, it’s a product of their circumstances and trauma, and some I think maybe there’s something else going on, and it’s just kind of baked. He dances around this nicely with the dark man. I don’t think there’s a “dark man baby,” you know what I mean? That’s the philosophical debate — would you go back and kill Hitler as a baby? Do people spring forth fully formed? I’m not naive. I understand there are cruel, violent, terrible people out there. And on the other end of the spectrum, there are people who are just naturally nice and good — and a lot of them teach preschool, you know what I mean? They’re organized a little differently. And then there’s this messy middle, where you’re deciding day to day, moment to moment, in these sliding-door moments. You’re Harold, you’re going to fall for Nadine, you’re going to lean in. Or are you Larry and you’re going to turn Nadine down? There are lots of moments where most of us — the average, the mean — could fall either way.
Laura: I think that’s one of the points of the book: most of us could fall either way. Our goodness might be circumstantial. And that’s a little bit of a hard pill to swallow, especially if you were raised to believe one of two things in a black-and-white way. If you were taught we’re all good, created in the image of God, no one can take that away — or we’re all depraved, all sinful. If you were raised with that binary, it’s hard sometimes, even if you’ve totally deconstructed, to read books like this or have conversations like this and not shake some of those old ideas. And I think he’s actually asking some of these questions in a really interesting way. Harold is a perfect and easy example, but so is Franny. If you’re raised in a certain type of home, or tax bracket, or with certain luxuries, maybe it’s easier to be good. If you’re given an opportunity for power you’ve never had, maybe it’s easier to be bad. And it’s not innate. It’s circumstantial.
Holding Both Things at Once
Sarah: Growing up, especially if you’re a teen inclined toward reductive thinking — if you’re an Enneagram One, forget being a teenager, if you’re just an Enneagram One — it’s taken me a long time to realize and be grateful for my upbringing and my faith that says: no, baby, the whole time both things were true. Every one of us is a child of God with a spark of the divine, deserving of inherent integrity and dignity. And we are also fallen, and can be harmful, and have to watch our pursuit of vice or distraction or selfishness or greed or you name it. I have this little piece of paper on my desk that my friend, who’s Jewish, gave me. On one side it says, “For you the world was created.” On the other side it says, “And to dust you shall return.” You have to hold both. Every moment is incredible and the fact that you’re here — I was talking about this with our 11-year-old — that Nicholas just happened to go to Transylvania University even though he grew up in Atlanta, and we fell in love, and that’s how Felix got here, all the things that had to align to get you here. And also that doesn’t erase that you can be a selfish jerk sometimes and you’ve got to watch it. Holding all of that is the work. The work of life, for sure.
Laura: But it feels like chaos to me to not be able to assign people into their roles. This is just my inner thoughts — it’s easier to be like, this is a good person and this is a bad person. I’m an intelligent person, I can get into the nuance and the layers. But it is scary and uncertain to feel like, oh, anybody could turn at any moment.
Sarah: But they could also turn the other way at any moment. They could do the right thing at any moment.
Laura: But I want to be able to categorize people or situations, because that makes me feel safer. To feel like I’m walking through a world where anything could happen at any time — which of course I know is true — is so scary. It’s easier for those of us who are designated Enneagram Ones, or black-and-white thinkers.
Sarah: Your devotion to Stephen King is really coming into focus for me right now.
Laura: I get why his approach to the world is appealing.
Sarah: Why? Because he’s connecting these thoughts?
Laura: Because the sorting is pretty easy. The clown is bad. The dark man is bad. The villains are easy to identify.
Sarah: They’re easy to identify, but they’re very existential. They’re not boogeymen who live under your bed. They’re not one-dimensional the way a Michael Myers, a knife-wielding kind of scary, is.
We All Hold Monstrousness
Sarah: I find it deeply comforting to live in a world where it’s all at play. Deeply, deeply comforting. I always trace it back — maybe I was just at a developmentally appropriate age — but I saw Sister Helen Prejean, the nun from Dead Man Walking. Remember Susan Sarandon? That’s her. She spoke at my college when I was a freshman about working with people on death row. And she said, vividly I remember this: when you meet someone, do you tell them the worst thing you’ve ever done in your life? No, of course you don’t. And I thought, right — we all hold monstrousness. The capacity for it. Seeing that is deeply empathizing. And especially growing up as the victim of a school shooting — the shooter at my high school was 14 years old and did something really monstrous — it’s very much informed my understanding that we all hold that capacity. That’s what we share. We share that spark of the divine, but we also share that capacity for awful, terrible things. What I react the strongest against is this idea that you can do something so bad that you lose your humanity. I really push against that. I don’t think it’s true — for me personally, ethically, morally, spiritually. There’s something about the safety of the idea that your mama, or Jesus, is going to love you no matter what. You still maintain your humanity even in the face of something truly, truly terrible. And that’s why I think King plays around with the dark man — is he human? Does he maintain his humanity? Is he even human to begin with? That’s a much more interesting way to think about terribleness: put that structure in place and say, don’t worry, they’re not living next door to you, because he’s something different.
Laura: I love that point. And I want to be clear that I don’t think our worst choices and actions define us, and I’m not walking around categorizing everybody — you’re bad, you’re good. I don’t think like that. I understand the layers and complexities of our humanity. But when I’m walking through the world, the best person I know — the thought that they could make a mistake, that these things would align and their child would die... there’s something about the idea that if you’re a good person it won’t happen to you. Bad things won’t happen to you.
Sarah: There’s something comforting to me to say: no, you could make a call, it could be the bad one, it could lead to XYZ dominoes — but you still loved your kid. You were still trying. It’s the Brené Brown, everybody’s doing the best they can. Some people’s best is dangerous and they belong in prison. But there’s something about releasing the idea that you can try hard enough and be good enough and terrible things won’t happen to you, or you won’t do terrible things. I think about this poor woman on Oprah who fell asleep at the wheel and her children died. Dr. Robin had to talk her down off the edge. That episode lives rent-free in my head. That’s what I appreciate about Stephen King. Dark things happen, man. It doesn’t matter how good you are or how hard you try. There’s a lot of dark stuff that can happen to you.
Laura: Totally. And that’s way different from what I’m talking about. An awful accident, an awful choice that led to an awful outcome, an awful diagnosis — anything that happens to you is not what I’m talking about. Not like living next to a serial killer. That’s different.
Sarah: And what you’re saying makes me think what feels so anxiety-producing to me is maybe not other people — because I definitely have the capacity to think about other people’s layers. It’s my own. I worry about my own capacity. In The Stand, what would I choose? My deepest fear is that if it came down to it, I would make the selfish choice.
Laura: We already talked about this — you’re not even leaving your house. You’re just staying there.
Sarah: That’s true. That’s totally true.
Which Side Would You Choose?
Laura: Well, we have to be self-aware as Enneagram Ones and say the appeal of order would be high.
Sarah: Totally. We just need to be honest about ourselves. But also, I like to sing the national anthem, so I’m still pretty sure I’d end up in Boulder. All the group singing and the clapping and supporting each other — I’ve got to believe my extrovertedness would win and I’d end up there. Also, I don’t like being bossed around. I’m not going to live with a dark man. I like to be in charge. I just like the woo-woo of the dreams. I know who’s going to get me in the dreams. I am devoted to Mother Abigail. I’d need one dream and I’d show up with 500 people I brought with me, because I’m an enthusiastic disciple.
Laura: Yeah, we differ there. I left the evangelical church, but you can take the girl out of the church, you can’t take the evangelical out of the girl, let me tell you. I still hold a grudge against Mother Abigail a tiny bit, but her beckoning through dreams appeals.
Sarah: You would be with her. You wouldn’t be like, I better go with the guy who’s freaking me out in my dreams.
Laura: No, we’re too old for that. We would go with Mother Abigail.
Sarah: No, we would, for sure. See, we’ve talked ourselves down. We’re good.
Laura: Boulder would be appealing, but Mother Abigail’s voice would be stronger. I am more tied to the divine. I am not drawn to darkness in real life. I love dark stories.
Sarah: Says the lady who holds Stephen King in summer.
Laura: I know. I love dark stories, and it’s a mental experiment. But in real life I am not drawn to darkness. I don’t like a haunted house. I barely own any black clothing — this is actually true. I do not like darkness. I feel a lightness in my real life. So it’s always been interesting to me that I’m drawn to dark literature, and dark literature only. I don’t like dark music. My husband’s obsessed with Metallica. No, sir. I don’t do anything that feels like that. Nothing. Except horror literature. It’s just where I channel it all.
Sarah: I read a book and I was like, this book was a delight, and you’re like, that doesn’t sound good to me. I’m like, who is opposed to delight?
Laura: You described a book to me before we pressed record using the words “precious” and “adorable.” And I was like, yeah, I’m out.
Sarah: I should have said scary and frightening.
Laura: Precious and adorable will not make it to my shelves.
The Actual Epilogue: Randall Flagg Wakes Up Again
Sarah: I was really here with our buddy for all this philosophical debate — everything I think he’s saying, I get it, I’m with him. I didn’t like these last four pages with the circle not closing at all, just opening in a new place. Tell the truth, Stephen. Tell the truth.
Laura: You mean when we turn to the actual epilogue with Randall Flagg?
Sarah: Yes. I didn’t like it. He just wakes up in a new place gathering new people. I didn’t like it.
Laura: I did like it.
Sarah: Ugh.
Laura: Because it felt, again, really true to me. Evil never dies.
Sarah: Okay, but we went through this many pages. Can’t we get a nice clean ending? Look how many pages. So many pages.
Laura: Okay, so if you put aside what might have felt itchy about Randall Flagg popping up in the Amazon among Indigenous people —
Sarah: Yeah, there’s a little bit of itchiness there.
Laura: So let’s name that and put it aside. I do think the fact that they fall to their knees and start worshiping who they think has come to save them — this is obviously so sarcastic and awful — but it felt true to me. There’s always going to be, throughout history, time, and region, someone claiming that they alone can save you.
Sarah: Yes. You’re right. Cult leaders, people who will lead you astray — all those points he’s making, I thought it was very well done. And he’s not particularly long-winded. He managed to do it in a few pages.
Laura: At least it wasn’t long.
Sarah: I do kind of have a beef. We run into this a lot in politics, where I feel like the conversation, or the policy goal, is “we’re going to get to a place where nobody’s violent or nobody has bad parents.” That’s probably not going to happen, guys. That’s utopia. It doesn’t exist. We’re always going to be humans — I guess until the robots take over — but we’re always going to have evil or selfishness or greed or violence. We’re not going to policy our way out of that. We can definitely improve the situation, and we have, we’ve done a really good job, but there’s no end road. There’s no finish line where we did it, we fixed it, and people will stop behaving badly in perpetuity.
Laura: And some of these figures, historically and culturally, are almost like reincarnations of each other. So Randall Flagg becomes Russell Faraday. He has to cycle through the different languages. He’s an agent of evil. He’s not even sure where he is exactly, but he’s going to figure it out. He’s not worried about it.
Sarah: This is giving one of my favorite books I read, I think two years ago. It’s called Blazing Eye Sees All. Have you read it?
Laura: I have not.
Sarah: It’s so good. I highly recommend it. The structure is around that lady who turned herself purple with colloidal silver and they held her dead body around for a while. You know who I’m talking about?
Laura: Oh, yeah. The Love Has Won lady.
Sarah: The author uses her story and then tells the story of all these other female cult leaders in America over the last hundred years. And there’s been a fair share. The similarities of how they appeal to people, what their downfalls are — it’s just a cycle. One of the really interesting parts I think about all the time, particularly when we talk about the dreams: there’s this moment where they talk about how women in particular, but all people, have spiritual experiences. That is a thing people have. There’s evil in the world, and there are also strong forces of spirituality and good and woo-woo, whatever you want to call it. And because we have such a materialism-focused, post-Enlightenment culture, your options are: everybody’s going to tell you you’re crazy, or you can go to the cult leader who tells you you’re not crazy and welcomes you with open arms.
Laura: [The person who] has subscribed to too many conspiracy theories — and then when it turns out they’re right, it’s really hard to give that person credit. It’s almost impossible, because we don’t want to believe the crazy people might have been on to something.
Sarah: Might have a direct line to something else.
Laura: We want people like that to just channel it into the literature. Just put it right on the page, friends. I liked the ending. I liked the epilogue, because it’s not “evil conquers all” and it’s not “good conquers all.”
So Did Good Actually Win?
Sarah: Good won.
Laura: Did they really win? Vegas got nuked by their own person.
Sarah: Yeah, a lot of people died. But by their own hand. They were destroyed in that moment, but we’ve already established well into the book that there are good and bad people in both Boulder and Vegas.
Laura: So it didn’t really accomplish much, and it didn’t even kill Randall Flagg. That’s what was frustrating to me. So there is no winner.
Sarah: I guess we don’t know when this happened. Okay, I’m going to add something. This — the circle closes — in fact happened 500 years in the future. See, look, I fixed it. So we got a happy ending for 500 years. That seems reasonable considering how many people died in the plague. Randall Flagg, the dark man, was out of commission for 500 years. Spread the word, Stephen King fans. I just added a little detail to The Stand that I think is helpful.
Laura: It still doesn’t close the circle, though, to your original point.
Sarah: No, it doesn’t. Why did he say that? It’s not closed. You said the circle closed — oh, by the way, he’s back. No, friend.
Laura: But is it the nature of a circle that it goes on and on? So it closes and then starts again?
Sarah: I guess so. Time is a flat circle.
Laura: You sound like Matthew McConaughey from True Detective. Speaking of dark content. I’m not going to say Stephen King originated any of these theories — many of them he did not — but he put them into pop culture in a way that has resonated with the masses. And there are a lot of derivatives of his stories. Now I hope slow readers start to notice that. Oh, this is a reference to The Stand, this is a reference to the dark man. Once you start reading Stephen King, you have no idea how many things are a nod to him.
Sarah: Well, you’ve made me a Stephen King fan.
Laura: So the real question is, have I made you a Slow Read fan?
Sarah: Yes.
Laura: Okay, good.
What Slow Reading Did
Laura: I’m very curious, because our next Slow Read — which we’re not saying on this episode — is not a book I’ve read before. So I’m curious to see if it feels different, if I feel a different urgency, if it’s harder to slow read a book I haven’t read before. I could slow read The Stand without urgency because I already knew how it was going to end.
Sarah: Fun fact, I’ve never slow read a book I’ve read before. I’ve only slow read new books.
Laura: Oh, so you had a completely different experience.
Sarah: What was really different for me this time is that I slow read a modern piece of fiction. All my other slow reads — I guess Wolf Hall is pretty modern, but War and Peace, Don Quixote, Brothers Karamazov — they’re all classic pieces of literature I’ve taken my time with. So it was different to read something with more plot propulsion. But I still really enjoyed slow reading it. First of all, it just makes a big book less intimidating. It doesn’t feel like, oh, I’ve got to get through this book. I like the feeling of, I’ve checked it off my list, I’ve read what I’m supposed to read, I don’t have this big heavy book hanging over my head that I should be reading all the time.
Laura: You just read your pages and then you’re done and you did it. That’s a really nice way to read, because people aren’t only intimidated by the book, they get weighed down by it. You’re like, should I be done by now? Should I be reading more? You “should” all over yourself when you pick up a big book without a slow read.
Sarah: Some of those books you named that you’ve already slow read — they’re harder books, weightier, they take more mental capacity. So when you do your 50 pages and put them down, you’re almost like, okay, I did my homework. The Stand isn’t necessarily that.
Laura: So I’m curious if you felt like drawing it out was to the benefit of sitting in the story, or if it was more like, this isn’t the type of book we need to slow read.
Sarah: No, no. I really felt like it was good, because you got to sit with so many things he was experimenting with, instead of rushing through to find out what happens. I can promise you this: if I’d read this on my own, as quickly as I wanted to, I wouldn’t be able to tell you much about The Stand in six months. But the way we did it, the story’s baked in. I know the details.
Laura: That’s what I find. When I read something slowly, I take it in a lot better and remember it a lot better, as opposed to reading for plot, wanting to find out what happens. I’ll go through my Goodreads and be like, I read that book — I don’t remember reading that book. I read it so quickly.
Sarah: And the talking-about-it aspect was really important to me, because it made me think about what I wanted to say about it to you, to our slow readers. This would also be true in a book club. I hope it’s true for slow readers listening to our conversation, that you think about a book differently, or appreciate it differently, when you do it in a book club conversation — because hearing people talk about it also tattoos it onto you in a way.
Reading Every Word Aloud
Laura: I think it’ll be interesting as time goes on which parts of the story I felt like I lived in the most. Particularly the beginning. The beginning of the pandemic in The Stand was really intense and felt very immediate, like I was experiencing it — more than once we get to Boulder and the characters come into play. I’ll be interested to see if I feel that way in six months or a year. And I’m interested to know from you, with the reread slow read, what parts stood out, or if they were the same parts you’ve always been into.
Sarah: I do want each of us to share our favorite parts. But a huge part of this slow read for me was that I read every single word aloud.
Laura: I still think you should have recorded at least one chapter for the people.
Sarah: Maybe I’ll do something else. Maybe you can do “the circle closes,” even though it doesn’t. A little bonus or something.
Laura: Maybe we’ll do that.
Sarah: It really changed it for me, reading every single word aloud. It started as a gimmicky thing for myself, because it was a reread — a way to keep me interested and really help me understand the text we were going to describe on the microphone. But what it made me do was: you can’t skim. Anything you’d kind of skim, especially on a reread — even the boring, sloggy parts of The Stand that I would have read fast — I couldn’t. I sat in my living room, my whole family knew I was doing it, I read aloud, and I did voices. I did everything. And that made me connect to some of the smaller characters a lot more — the Judge, Dana. When I’m reading their actual words aloud and giving them voice and character and spirit, it really brought things to life in a whole different way.
Our Favorite Scenes
Laura: Since you brought up Dana — that’s my favorite scene in the whole book, Dana’s showdown with the dark man.
Sarah: Really?
Laura: Yeah, she’s such a badass. I really, really love that chapter.
Sarah: Did you feel connected to Dana before then?
Laura: No. Well, that’s my favorite part. When you said that, I was like, yeah, that’s my favorite part. But then I’m like, is it the Mother Abigail chapter where we learn about her life story? Can I have a tie? Can I have two? So mine are the Mother Abigail life story and Dana’s showdown with the dark man.
Sarah: My favorite — I talked about this when we read it — this is such a dark scene, y’all. I just love when the Project Blue people are dead.
Laura: You and the Dinty Moore.
Sarah: Well, I thought you were going to say the kid.
Laura: That’d be worse. I’ll give you the Dinty Moore. That’s fine.
Sarah: When they’re describing the guy face-down in the soup, but then also the people who decide to have sex in their last few minutes of life, the guy who puts the sign around his neck and sits down in the hallway. That scene, the descriptions of that whole situation, are so gnarly and so terrifying. This is what is horror to me. We can even talk about whether you find this book to be horror, but that is horror to me, even though it’s not descriptive graphic violence. They’re dead, but it’s not graphic. It’s just so scary. When I think of The Stand, that’s what I think of.
Laura: I wonder if the section that will stay with me the longest — not necessarily my favorite, but I think about it a lot — is the second wave, where people die of accidents and the kid falls down. That one was rough. That was the most emotionally affecting for me, especially because there were children involved. It’s like, which one were you wrapped up in, but which one did you keep thinking about? It’s a big book, lots of pieces and parts and chapters and characters. It’ll be interesting to see what sticks with you over time.
Sarah: The other big image that stays with me is Harold riding on the barn roof. That little scene tells us so much, now that we’re done, about who Harold is or could be. He’s in love with Franny, Franny’s pregnant and having to travel with Harold, who she doesn’t even like. All those early dynamics stick with me so much. I’m more interested in Harold than I am in Stu, ultimately, as a character. Franny’s sort of our every-person, the stand-in, and Stu is too a little bit. They’re our stand-in for the everyday person. So I really like those early days with Franny and Harold.
Laura: It’s interesting that both of us are naming primarily first-half-of-the-book scenes.
Sarah: I think so. Where he’s putting the pieces together toward the end is interesting, but it’s not as affecting as the first half.
Laura: I can’t wait to hear from all our slow readers — which parts stuck with them, whether they liked the first half or the second half, and which characters they’ll be thinking about for a long time. I think this will be a fun conversation to have in the comments as we close the circle.
Closing the Circle
Sarah: He might not be closing the circle, because we’ve got another book to read.
Laura: We’re closing the circle. The circle is closed. It’s closed here on The Stand.
Sarah: Slow Read: The Stand — we’re going to change the name. Got to figure out when we’ll make the switch. The name is going to change, the graphic is going to change, the colors are going to change.
Laura: So good. I can’t wait for people to see it. Should we tell people the genre? But it’s genre-bending, so I guess we can’t even do that. Our next book is genre-bending in the same way The Stand is genre-bending. A little bit. I mean, I feel like The Stand is considered horror. But did you think this was scary?
Sarah: No, not really. Just the kid. That section, I would have been fine never reading. I would have been okay.
Laura: And that section was cut from the original version.
Sarah: You should have left it on the cutting room floor. It’s brutal. That is horror. Although — and I was going to say not in a way that helps — Trashcan Man’s ultimate fall apart, maybe you do need that interaction with the kid. Maybe that’s why they put it back in. It’s rough out there. But is that horror, or is that — I don’t know, thriller? There needs to be a word for when the horror is not supernatural, it’s just other human beings, and it’s not crime. It’s not really mystery. Maybe thriller. That’s why it’s genre-bending: it’s hard to figure out where to put this book, because it’s the pandemic, but then something else comes on the scene and you’re dealing with a lot of other threats and fears.
Laura: Including tunnels. God, I hope nobody reads this book who’s already afraid of tunnels.
Sarah: Oh yeah, that scene. The Lincoln Tunnel for sure. You’re bad off. But not just that — there’s more than one tunnel.
Laura: There is more than one tunnel. But the Lincoln Tunnel — I hope you don’t start this book with a few tunnels, or you’re in trouble. I also feel like we haven’t even said Larry’s name on this whole final episode.
Sarah: I did, I talked about Larry.
Laura: Oh, you did. At the beginning. Sweet Larry. Sweet, sweet Larry. Figuring out, making the choices — because remember, he turns to a good man now. That’s right. And Glen Bateman, also one of my favorite characters in the whole book.
Sarah: They’ll live in our hearts forever, even as the circle closes and we move on.
Laura: And again, if you cannot wait until next week to find out, you can go ahead and become a paid member of our Substack — because we should probably tell you now, the next book is going to be for paid members only.
Sarah: So if you want to hear — we might be really unfiltered.
Laura: You’re going to hear why in next week’s episode, when we talk about why we picked this book. And listen, you should subscribe and get the Side Quests and listen to those over the next few months, because they’re really good. They’re some of the best conversations we had — about everything from death to how we met.
Sarah:The Stand will stay in your feed if you want to start over, or tell someone else who’s been meaning to slow read The Stand, or read it at all. They can read as fast as they want, because now all the episodes are out there.
Laura: And just thanks, everybody. This has been really fun.
Sarah: Thanks, Laura, for saying yes to my invitation to slow read The Stand. It was so fun. It was so gratifying. I’ve never done anything like this in all my podcasting years, and it really enhanced my reading in the first half of 2026. I hope that’s true for everybody, because I’m passionate about reading and doing it in different ways and making it fun and interesting and adding to our life in such a chaotic world. It really matters to me. It’s one of my missions. Doing it with you was amazing.
Laura: It’s been a blast. As we read about pandemics and violent killers.
Sarah: And a nuke explosion at the end.
Laura: It’s been a blast, you guys. Pun intended.
Sarah: You really stuck the landing. Excellent work, my friend.
Laura: We’ll see you next week, where you can learn about our next stand — our next choice for Slow Read.
Sarah: Thanks, guys.
Laura: See you on the other side.
Next Up: Next week we reveal our next Slow Read — a genre-bending book Sarah picked (and forced on Laura). It will be for paid Substack members only. Paid members can get a head start now by watching the replay of last week’s book club meeting, where we announced the pick.
Slow Read: The Stand is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Sarah: Well, it’s giving Sopranos. You know how in The Sopranos it was the penultimate episode that usually contained the most action? I feel like that show set up that structure — although apparently not, because The Stand has been around a lot longer. The main action, especially a majority of the violence, the falling out between Randall Flagg and members of the Free Zone, the nuclear bomb — all of that happened in our last section. So now we’re getting that real finale. We’re caring for the characters we really loved. We’re seeing where they ended up. We’re tying up some loose ends.
Laura: I felt like these last chapters post-nuclear-bomb were so arduous. I felt like King is personally trying to remind us that this whole thing is about the journey and not the destination, which is such an annoying message. I was just like, we are still walking. It should have been called The Walk, not The Stand. Honestly, the whole book is just about journeying.
Sarah: Well, I will say this. It’s not standing still, that’s for sure. But there’s a moment near the end where Stu says they’ll have to stand a watch for him. So it really felt like this conclusion of the book was more a philosophy: it’s not that you have to walk forever, but that you do have to stand watch. Maybe the stand wasn’t some sort of high-noon final battle between good and evil, which is what I expected when I started the book. It’s more like standing watch — standing watch for our worst instincts, standing watch for the ways in which humans can perpetuate great cruelty and harm on each other. We’re standing sentry, keeping an eye out. And even though I’m an Enneagram One and I love a black-and-white conclusion, I thought this was truer, wiser. I really liked it.
Laura: It also seems to be saying that nothing is ever really over. It might be over for you individually, if you come to the end of your story, but life just keeps on keeping on. I have always quibbled a teeny tiny bit with how we spend these last chapters with just Stu and Tom — and even primarily Stu. We’re in Stu’s mind mostly. It’s no longer an ensemble cast. We started all the way back in Arnette, Texas, at the gas station — Stu is our first point man — and then we also end with so much Stu. I love Stu as a character. It’s just, oh, he wasn’t the one I was the most attached to. How did you feel about Stu being the final stand?
Sarah: I loved it. I thought it wasn’t just Stu — it was the combination of Stu, Tom, and Kojak, who I believe is the real hero of this novel. I really liked the way King put the strengths and weaknesses of these three creatures together. It didn’t feel arduous to me. I was excited to see the ways in which they were stripped away and rebuilt. I liked that Nick kept appearing. I liked that we were worried about Franny. And I liked the changing threat — that we went from the heat of the desert and the nuclear fallout to this incredible winter hellscape. And Tom is such a great addition to every scene he’s in. The way they were facing very openly “we might not make it” felt like real learning, as opposed to how people were orienting themselves when Captain Trips first started wreaking havoc.
Kojak, the Real Hero
Laura: Let’s do a chapter breakdown, because if you’re a regular Stephen King reader, you recognize in this section in particular that he brings out his favorites — which is to say dogs, cars. He loves a car explanation.
Sarah: I did feel like there was a little too much detail about what type of car you need to get started, the manual and the automatic. I was like, buddy.
Laura: No, this is one of his things. Dogs, cars, ghosts in dreams, recurring themes, and of course abandoned hotels, even if they’re just the Holiday Inn. These pop up in so many of Stephen King’s stories. It’s such a King universe that we’re in. There’s no mistaking what we’re reading.
Sarah: How do you feel about Kojak just being such a convenient hero? Kojak can do everything. He can hunt, he can bring the blankets up from the washout, he can go find Tom in the snow. Kojak is a dog of all trades.
Laura: Here’s my question, because you’re the Stephen King expert. Does he often use dogs the same way he uses children or people of different abilities — to say, well, they have different skills because they are different?
Sarah: Yes. And so that’s what that felt like to me. This is not a run-of-the-mill dog. It’s a special dog.
Laura: In the same way that he uses children, there’s an innocence to animals, dogs in particular, that feels like they’re tapped into a god, a universe, a different plane. If you’re a dog lover, you don’t even necessarily deny that. That’s why it’s a convenient tool to use a dog.
Sarah: I just want to say, though, that it’s a special dog — because if it was my dog, I would have to eat her by the fire. She would be of absolutely no use. She’s currently snoring underneath my chair. She would not be able to bring me a rabbit or firewood or much else.
Laura: Same.
Sarah: I’ve never owned that type of dog, but I’ve known dogs like that — super capable, very smart, communicative. I read recently that domesticated dogs have existed longer than agriculture. So I think it could happen.
Laura: Definitely could happen. If you’ve ever watched a working dog — a herding dog, certain hunting dogs — they are very capable. I like Kojak. More Kojak. I’m here for it. It didn’t bother me, but also I’m a dog lover. I wonder, if you’re not an animal person, if you’re like, come on with the dog. We’ll have to hear from our community about that.
Chapter 74: Tom Shows Up
Laura: In Chapter 74, Stu is still broken-legged, starving, and starting to get sick. He heave-hoes himself up out of the washout when he hears the boom and needs to see with his own eyes what’s going on. To me, this is the arduous part — not the plot points. Do we need two pages of him crawling up?
Sarah: I didn’t think we needed that part. I get it, he needed to get up there. I was just so happy that once he got up there, Tom showed up.
Sarah: Okay, but here’s the immediate thing I thought. You have read this book before. You knew this was going to happen. And still you had all those complaints about them sending Tom.
Laura: My complaints about why they sent Tom are separate from Tom ending up being the savior. They sent Tom because Stephen King needed him to save Stu. I still think they took advantage of someone. And here’s the plot weakness: why does he approach Stu when he was very clearly instructed during the hypnosis to stay away from people?
Laura: I think King’s implication is that they have to go the same way because they have to take tunnels — unless they’re going to crawl up and down the Rockies. So everybody’s taking the same path because they have to cross through these tunnels.
Laura: I don’t mind a plot point of convenience. I get it, they need to be all on the same road. It just needs to make sense. And I like this ending because I love Tom — he’s one of my favorite characters. I just don’t want Tom to be taken advantage of in the first place.
Sarah: I feel like this is Stephen King saying he’s not taken advantage of. Look how incredibly capable he is. He is a hero. I love it when Stu says, “You saved my life,” and “You don’t owe me a Christmas present? I wouldn’t be here anymore for you.”
Sarah: I felt like Stu waited a month to say that. You’re just saying that now? Anyway, Tom shows back up and Stu is happy to see him, but in the same way as, is this the best helper I’m going to get? Everyone is hesitant on Tom until he shows his capabilities — like Nick with the tornado.
Laura: I’ll tell you what drove me nuts about this whole section. Why isn’t Stu asking Tom more questions? He doesn’t ask him a single thing about Vegas.
Sarah: Because he’s about to die, Laura. He’s on death’s door.
Laura: I don’t mean in his delirium. We’re talking about a man who’s going to throw an impromptu Christmas. He is well enough at points to be like, so Tom, what was happening in Vegas? Did you get us any intel? Literally nothing. Maybe it’s just such a man thing — the man asked no questions. My husband wouldn’t ask Tom a dadgum thing.
Sarah: I thought perhaps he was waiting to gather the whole story when there would be more people around, in the Free Zone, so it could be a community interrogation — so Tom doesn’t have to go through it more than once, and so there are other witnesses. I’m projecting a lot, but that was my assumption. I do think Tom is helpful in the same way Kojak is helpful — now suddenly there’s an able-bodied person who can forage in the cars to get medicine, find sleeping bags. That was a huge relief.
Sarah: The hand of God. Tom was the hand of God, just like the hand of God touched the bomb. I really felt like Tom was this essential component that you can’t argue showed up out of anything but almost grand design.
Laura: Did you have to google the word travois?
Sarah: I did. A visual really helped, because even though Tom is brawny, he’s going to drag this man for eight miles up the hill. There are absolutely arduous components of this — climbing out of the washout, the dragging of Stu.
The Hand of God and That New Sears Battery
Sarah: Definitely getting the car and getting the car started. Here’s my question: was the car left for them? Are we supposed to know who left it? I couldn’t tell. I’m like, should I recognize this person on the key chain?
Laura: No. I think Stu is sort of understanding — not an “everything happens for a reason” kind of thing, deeper and more spiritual than that — like, somebody drove this car. Why would you have pulled over and abandoned it in the middle of nowhere? He’s ruminating on what the hand of God really means, because the other cars they came upon were either not stick shifts, or didn’t have gas or oil, or had flat tires. And then they finally come upon the one that’s not perfect — it’s old and dirty — but it’s perfect enough. Got that new Sears battery in it. That’s all that matters.
Laura: I did like the reminder. The first car they come upon, the skeletal woman in the flowered muumuu kind of falls out of it comically. But we do need the occasional reminder that there are dead people everywhere.
Sarah: Everywhere.
Laura: They’re a little bit immune to how weird and gross that is, but we as the reader need to be reminded.
Sarah: Especially later, when he’s digging in the snow and realizes they’re on top of the traffic jam — a river of dead people below them.
Chapter 75: Fever Dreams and Vitamin C
Sarah: What I really liked, moving into Chapter 75 where he’s really sick and delirious and having all these dreams: after the whole book where the dream was real — you were dreaming about Mother Abigail, she was talking to you, telling you what to do, Nick was telling Tom what to do — it became more amorphous. They weren’t full-on predictions anymore. With Randall Flagg gone, even if not dead, there’s almost space in the dream world for unpredictability again.
Laura: I see what you’re saying. I also liked that Stu was waffling between, is this an anxiety dream, or is it my intuition pushing me forward? Because if he hadn’t been having those dreams, they might have just hunkered down for the winter — which probably would have had a better chance of survival.
Sarah: But the dreams were driving him forward, which is what we’ve talked about the entire book. Those people headed to Nebraska early on for no reason they understood. To end on that same note — I liked the symmetry. He says at one point, “Not all dreams come true, but too many of them had come true during the last half year.” They’re returning to a baseline, but it’s a new baseline, because everything is different, including your relationship to your own dreams.
Laura: And listen, I would have stayed at the hotel. It was really cozy. I did love the little side quest about why movies are important and TV isn’t good enough, VCRs aren’t good enough. He keeps it a projector — it’s more cinematic that way. I read recently that Chinese carmakers are putting projectors in the headlights so you can have a drive-in movie wherever you go. How about that, Stephen King?
Sarah: We have a drive-in theater where I live and it is fantastic. So I thought this vignette was silly, but I get it. He’s right. It is better that way.
Laura: I felt like the scene where Nick appears in the dream to Tom — where Tom seems to be sleepwalking, almost in the hypnosis of Nick appearing, and wakes up at the pharmacy with the bottles. Who set the bottles out? Was Nick using him in his sleep? That felt so reminiscent of The Shining, where it’s ambiguous whether ghost-dream Nick put the bottles there or whether Tom collected them in his sleep.
Sarah: It doesn’t necessarily matter — it’s all supernatural. Nick is using his own story of having the infected leg back in Arkansas to teach Tom, so Tom can understand how serious this is and help Stu get better. I am glad that Stephen King is on board with my preferred treatment, which is vitamin C tablets. Get that boy some vitamin C ASAP. Also antibiotics, but I’m a vitamin C acolyte. I believe in it.
Laura: But also, why you gotta have Stu have a penicillin allergy all of a sudden?
Sarah: He just wants you to understand, Laura, on a fundamental level: you are never safe. Nobody picks up a Stephen King book to relax. You might get a reprieve, but you do not get to relax.
A Sprinkle of Cozy
Laura: So he gets better enough for them to trudge on. I liked this part where they’re in a town and can go looking in people’s homes for what they need — big heavy coats. There’s an interesting subtext that the population has been wiped out, and yet there’s just so much stuff.
Sarah: I always think about those scenes in Station Eleven where they’d forage through houses, and it didn’t take long before there was less of use, especially food-wise. I would think books would be of incredibly high value, but maybe you don’t have a lot of time to sit around and read.
Laura: I liked the little detail that this town had more stuff because it just had weed — people came for the summer to get high — while another town had actual helpful snowmobiles. He gets a really good one, but then misses an embankment and crashes it. My question is: is snow burned down your throat real? They fell off the snowmobile, their mouths filled with snow, and their throats were burning. Does that happen?
Sarah: I don’t know about the burning part, but you can drown in snow. So I think it’s a way of drowning, sort of. You could easily die like that.
Laura: I am the least qualified in the room to talk about snow. If you live in cold climates, please tell us if this is a real thing.
Sarah: Now, the scene where they have a little Christmas. First of all, I love a Christmas. I love a Christmas moment at any and all times of year. And you got some grief — that Stu is missing everyone terribly, wishing they were there.
Laura: I made a note that finally we are having some grief, because I have not understood the lack of grief in this entire book.
Sarah: There’s no better time to look back and realize everything that’s changed. Let us not forget “if the fates allow,” the best Christmas lyric, that we all had to clean up because it made us too uncomfortable. He should have sung that, not “The First Noel.”
Laura: Listen, I sang it out loud. I’m reading the whole thing — I’ve read every single word of this book out loud now. When I got to that part, I sang it. And depending on your mood, the little Christmas scene with Stu and Tom could read as cheesy, but I literally got a lump in my throat singing it out loud.
Sarah: I didn’t have to sing it and I got a little verklempt. I appreciated that we finally acknowledged some grief when he thinks about his friends in Texas — because he has said he doesn’t miss Texas. He pulls out his old keys; he’s kept his key ring through all of this, his key to his Dodge back in Texas, and that makes him finally feel a little something. And then later, after they get back to Boulder, he’s reminiscing about how they would have called him Silent Stu in his Texas days — a quiet observer — but now all he wants to do is talk and share this story. There are multiple moments in this section where we are finally getting the grief and nostalgia I’ve craved.
In Defense of Wolves
Laura: Don’t worry, everybody, because if the grief, nostalgia, and Christmas spirit was a little much for you, he immediately pivots back to wolves, Randall Flagg still being alive, scary tunnels. He just can’t help himself. Don’t get too cozy.
Sarah: I will give you a sprinkle of cozy, a mere sprinkle, and then we’re going to talk about how the wolves are still his — which I feel is unfair to wolves. They do not need further discrimination, further tainting by this idea that they’re evil animals. I feel very strongly about coyotes and wolves and the way they’ve been mistreated in our fiction. In the same way I don’t feel sorry for snakes being stand-ins for Satan — I hate snakes — but it’s not their fault. They didn’t write that. Until I started watching The Crocodile Hunter in my twenties, I thought all snakes were venomous, and they are not. That’s how badly we portray these poor species that do not care about our narrative arcs.
Laura: Speaking of animals, why was Tom dreaming about an elephant?
Sarah: Oh, because that’s his hypnosis signal. One of his hypnosis signals.
Laura: We get a little hypnotized Tom. He says Flagg never dies — he’s in the wolves’ laws, the crows, the rattlesnakes, the shadow of the owl at midnight, the scorpion at high noon. “He roosts upside down with the bat. He’s blind like them. Will he be back?” Tom didn’t answer. What do you think that scene was about?
Sarah: I think it’s to remind us it’s still there — that they’re close, but they’re not there. It’s finished, but not all the way. It’s never over.
Laura: It’s also a way for the characters to know that. Stu might have been well within his rights to think that when the nuclear bomb went off, it’s all over. Tom being the messenger for “no, no, he’s still here” is the way they can know that.
Just a Bomb?
Laura: From a storytelling point of view, this is why I found it arduous. Once the big thing has happened — Vegas has blown up, that’s the final stand — then I just want the book to wrap up. And I’m like, well, I’ve got a hundred more pages.
Sarah: What are you talking about? That final scene is so short. This is my husband’s beef — he read along with us and then zoomed ahead. He said: thousands of pages, and all we get is the hand of God touching a nuclear bomb and then it’s over. He wanted a war, a battle.
Laura: I’m a little bit with your husband. It’s just a bomb. That’s always been a huge criticism of this story — if you go look at The Stand on Reddit, that’s a lot of people’s feelings.
Sarah: First of all, no, we didn’t want a war. I did not want hundreds of pages of three steps forward, two steps back — I’ve read enough Civil War history. But I think it’s because of the cover, the most famous one, with two people duking it out. The way we sum up this book — “it’s about the battle of good and evil” — leads you to expect not a stand but a standoff. When the bomb goes off, who’s left at the end? Larry and Ralph, standing there chained up with Randall Flagg. It’s not a battle; they’ve been taken hostage. But I like “stand watch” better than “standoff,” because it’s more reflective of life, and I think that’s what King always intended. Throughout, stands have been taken. There has been a stand the whole time. We just thought the battle of good and evil was going to be an actual literal battle.
Everything Hinges on a Baby
Laura: Even into Chapter 76, where they finally get back to Boulder. He’s running to Franny at the hospital. He learns pretty immediately that she’s had a C-section and the baby has Captain Trips.
Sarah: I thought the way he described everyone standing watch over baby Peter — they were all invested, all waiting to see if he could fight it — it’s almost like that was the final battle: this little baby against a virus. And again with the biblical nods, everything hinges on a baby.
Laura: We get the short Chapter 77 where Stu comes in and they reunite, and the doctors tell them what they think is happening with the baby. The virus was changing — every time your body put up a new defense, it would evolve. And it says, “in a way, it was more similar to the AIDS virus than to the common flu.” What did he use as a metaphor in the original version? Definitely not AIDS.
Sarah: That’s immediately what I thought. Now we’re back in the ‘90s, because you wouldn’t have been using that metaphor in 1976.
Laura: I didn’t care one lick about the medical piece. Reading this aloud, when I got to the part where Franny says “just tell me the end, just tell me what happens” — that as a reader is also what was happening with me. Just tell me the end. And the doctor says he has to be careful with how he presents it. I was like, we’re all Franny and King is the doctor. He’s telling us he’s going to be careful how he presents the end of this story.
Sarah: Even though I knew that baby was going to live — I never thought for one hot second that baby was going to die, even before we knew he had Captain Trips. He did not set us up with a pregnant lady for 1,200 pages to have that baby die.
Laura: Especially because other babies have died along the way. So you need Franny’s baby to be the exception, for whatever medical mumbo jumbo he’s going to give us. But that’s not based in any real biology as far as I can tell.
Sarah: I don’t think your viral immunity has anything to do with your dad. I think it’s all about your uterine environment and what you’re exposed to through your mom. You’re not going to get viral immunity through sperm. Maybe I’m wrong, and our commenters will roll up and correct me. But I never thought that baby was a danger. Everybody else did — he belonged to the whole community, everybody was watching out for him — but I was like, Peter’s going to be fine.
Life Goes On
Sarah: So we go forward in time. They put the winter behind them, they’re in the spring, and this May Day celebration scene reminded me so strongly of the end of Steel Magnolias. It was almost distracting. Steel Magnolias begins in the spring and ends in the spring at Shelby’s funeral, with children running around just like they were at the beginning. Life goes on. The children are here, they’re playing, they’re hunting Tom. We’ve been through a nuclear weapon, a pandemic, all these things, and life goes on. Especially sitting in spring, I thought it was profound.
Laura: I thought he made an interesting point that could have come over heavy-handed, but didn’t. The guy who wants to be the sheriff now wants to arm everybody up — a certain personality type. “In the same way, the American struggle between the law and the freedom of the individual had begun again.” I underlined that so hard. King’s going to make a commentary on America, always. And in some ways there’s a relief to the “life goes on, people are gonna people” of it. Though I felt there was a little bit of anti-city vibes, and I was like, excuse me, there’s a lot of value to a city.
Sarah: So they’re at this May Day celebration, Lucy’s pregnant and due in June, and then Franny breaks out into a rousing rendition of Noah Kahan — “I wanna go to Maine.” I started singing it immediately. Me too. I wanna go to Maine too.
Laura: I thought this was dumb.
Sarah: You don’t feel connection to place at all?
Laura: Yes, I feel deep connection to place.
Sarah: But why wouldn’t you want to be back? What’s the most absolute different locale? It would be Maine. If you were in Maine, wouldn’t you be like, God, I’ve got to get out of here?
Laura: Maybe eventually. A lot of what I write about is Oklahoma and California.
Sarah: But if you stuck me somewhere with no four seasons and heat all the time, I would go out of my mind. If I ended up in Phoenix, it would be a mental health crisis for me.
Laura: She gets pregnant again and she’s like, we’ll figure it out, there are books about birthing babies. After she had a C-section? And if we run out of medicine, we’ll learn how to make it ourselves. This was just too hippy-dippy for me. It’s not even that she’s pregnant again — it’s that she has a little kid who could have some weaknesses due to his struggle with a very strong virus at birth. Kids have accidents. Kids get sick. Back in the day, they all died of infectious disease. I might not leave the penicillin that far behind, babe. You don’t know who’s in Maine. Last time you left it, you and Harold were the only people in your whole town. You know what’s helpful? Other people.
Sarah: But it’s such a good song. I wanna go to Maine. My other question was — if Mother Abigail is dead and Randall Flagg has left the scene, why are all these people still rolling into Boulder? Why aren’t people setting up settlements other places?
Laura: I think people are gathering together — the people who want to gather, like me. I’m a gather-together person. I live in a city on purpose. I do not want to grow my own food; I’m going to partner up with someone who does. We all have our own strengths. And then he also hints at the other people who are like, we’ve got to get out of here. In the same way there is now — there’s city people and rural people, and everyone’s going to take their chances and live their lives the way they want.
Sarah: I think he just likes Maine best and wants everybody else to like Maine best too. He lived in Colorado and then had to get back to Maine — it was one of his darkest parts. So literally the story is, Colorado sucks, we’ve got to get back to Maine.
Laura: Colorado’s beautiful, too. I think King is putting in his own experience: I’ve got to get back to Maine no matter what. I think he just sped up that timeline. Of all the slowed-down timeline of these 1,200 pages, that part is sped up. Maybe after five years of surviving, I would make my way back to California. But I would not do it ten months in.
Sarah: Yeah, with a baby and pregnant. That does seem bold.
Laura: Okay, now we’re going to save these last six pages — “the dusk of a summer evening and the circle closes” — for the final episode, correct? Which I did cheat and read. I wanted to disclose that.
Sarah: I cheated and read it too. But we still have a lot I want to talk about — not only those last six pages, but in a big-picture way, the cultural relevance of The Stand, the adaptations. I had a fellow slow reader tell me she’d been toting the physical copy around while she traveled, and people kept approaching her wanting to talk about it. So there are things, as we wrap up this journey together, about what it meant to us and what it has meant to the literary community.
Next Up: The final six pages — “the circle closes” — plus a big-picture conversation about the cultural relevance and adaptations of The Stand, in our final episode of Slow Read: The Stand. See you on the other side.
Sarah: We have been reading Stephen King’s epic The Stand, and I think we’ve come to the part where we stood. Did we stand?
Laura: I think we’re still standing.
Sarah: Are we standing?
Laura: I think we stood. I think we did it. We are wobbling in our woo!
Sarah: We would love for you to join us for our final book club meetings for The Stand. There’s obviously going to be a lot to say as we wrap up this epic novel. All of those are coming up in June. You need to check our Substack for details of our book club meetings, our final episodes, and maybe some announcements for what we’re doing next. All of that is going to be on Substack. You can join us there at slowreadbookclub.com and we’re going to have side quest conversations for you. Tomorrow our side quest will be on summer reading and summer plans. We can’t wait to talk about that with you.
Laura: Yep. If you join us at the Slow Read Substack, you will get all of our side quests that we’ve been covering through this time. And they have been wide ranging, friends.
Sarah: They really have. Sometimes they go along with the book. Sometimes they don’t.
Laura: They don’t. But they are excellent conversations with Sarah and I, only for our Substack members. Over on Slow Read, go to slowreadbookclub.com for all of that and more.
Sarah: And more.
“Is That It?” — First Reactions to the Ending
Sarah: We’re going to talk about chapter 72 and 73, and I deserve an award for not texting you the second I finished the section. It was hard. If I had finished this section before we saw each other in person for the first time in 12 years, I wouldn’t have been able to resist. I didn’t really plan to not read it until after, but I’m glad it worked out that way or I would not have been able to keep my mouth shut.
Laura: Because you would have wanted to talk about it.
Sarah: It’s so talkable. We stood. Of course I want to talk about it. I’m curious what you think reading it for the first time. Did you feel like dun dun dun? Did you feel the music swell in your head?
Laura: Yeah, I definitely did. I wanted to just bare minimum text the wide-eyed emoji, but I didn’t — again, because I deserve an award. And my husband, who had been doing a good job kind of keeping pace with us, sped ahead and finished the book, so he’s been saying some cryptic stuff. It got me all keyed up. But yeah, it kind of snuck up on me, but not really. By the time you get to chapter 73, by the time you’re in Larry’s head, you’re like, okay, we’re here, we’re gonna stand. But then it’s over kind of quickly, and so you’re just like, what just happened?
Sarah: I know. That’s what I kind of wanted to ask slow readers — if you’re like, “is that it?” Nicholas was definitely that reaction. Those were the cryptic comments he was making. It was very much, “Is that it, Vang?”
Laura: Is that how you felt when you read it the first time?
Sarah: Definitely. I was kind of just reading, bopping along, and didn’t realize that was it. I mean, there’s still a little bit more to go, but I feel like it’s a lesson in — it’s in the journey, not the destination.
Laura: Yes, but I like the destination. Okay, now we’re getting too close to chapter 73. Let’s back up. Let’s do chapter 72.
Chapter 72: The Walk and the Question of Fate
Laura: So, chapter 72, we pick back up with our traveling party — Stu, Larry, Glenn, Ralph, and Kojak, the true star of the traveling party — as they continue their grueling walk across the United States. They’re averaging like… I really appreciated the mileage chart. I thought that was very helpful, as a person who travels a lot and plans itineraries.
Sarah: I was with them in their analysis around the campfire of like, why are we doing it this way? They know why they’re doing it. Mother Abigail told them: walk with just the clothes on your back. You can’t take food. You can’t take packs. You have to survive this hundreds — 400-mile walk, or whatever it is, 500-mile walk. But I sort of was with them when they’re like, we know why we’re doing this, but why are we doing this? And like, can we cheat a little bit?
Laura: I really liked this conversation they’re having about why are we doing this at the beginning of chapter 72, and we get to your theory that you’ve brought up over and over again. They’re having a conversation mainly about the wear and tear on their bodies at first, and then Glenn says: “And 50 years of confirmed agnosticism, it seems to be my fate to follow an old black woman’s God into the jaws of death. If that’s my fate, then that’s my fate. End of story. But I’d rather walk than ride, and when you get right down to it, walking takes longer — consequently I live longer by a few days anyway.” So I thought, here we are, here’s your theme. Is it just fate? Is this story just one long journey of fate?
Sarah: Well, I have been talking about this for six months. But I don’t know that that is a direct correlation to them having to do it bare, you know? No food, nothing. Now, I mean, they really talk about how fasting clears the mind. I liked all that. And there’s been a walking theme as much as there’s been a fate theme through this book. Remember? Stu walked out — he walked off his fear of the hospital. Trashcan Man walked himself into delirium. Nadine’s walking. Everybody’s walking all the time. Walk, walk, walk, walk, walk. So it does feel like a sort of preparation for the mind, body, and spirit, if you will, for what’s to come. But it also feels like an unnecessary burden to have to figure out your survival. Like they’re eating chips out of people’s cars with dead people.
Laura: I’m into it.
Sarah: I’m into it.
Laura: Because there is a grounding that happens when you are viscerally aware of your own body and its survival. These men would not have had the bravery necessary in chapter 73 if they’d just taken a car.
Sarah: No doubt in my mind.
Laura: Because they had to know what they’re made of.
Sarah: You’ve got to know what you’re made of. You’ve got to know how far you can push your body, how far you can push your mind. And really, I think this physical experience strips away that dichotomy. You know, the closest analogy I can find in my own life is labor. I had three nine-pound babies with not a drop of drugs. I gave birth to two at home — and sort of knowing that I had to get myself through it, like me and my body and a midwife. I’m not a free birther, please don’t message me. But it’s exactly what they describe. It’s so clarifying in a way that’s not intellectual, that’s not, “I’m walking through these steps.” You do something like that, and that dichotomy of my mind, my body — it just goes away. It’s like people when they talk about running marathons, or extreme marathoners, like pushing your body but really yourself, all of you, to the brink. In this way, I think it prepares you to do some really hard shit.
Laura: And these guys, they all know it. They’re on the way to do some really hard shit.
Sarah: Yeah. And there’s lots of metaphors or references. I like your birth metaphor, but then there’s biblical stuff throughout, even more so in chapter 73. So there’s walking in the wilderness, there’s people taking pilgrimages. I mean, it feels like a human experience, kind of like what you’re describing — we put ourselves through this.
Laura: At the end of the day, they had to put the steps in front of them. They had to make the miles. They had to get over aches and pains and hunger. They were instructed, but then they chose. You know what I’m saying?
Glenn Is 57 (And the Dialogue Gets a Little Stilted)
Sarah: Before we get too far into this chapter, can we talk about this long conversation about how old Glenn is, and then it’s revealed that he’s 57? What the hell, guys?
Laura: I know. My husband’s older than that. Jeff is older than that. Oh my God, they’re just talking — the way they’re talking about his arthritis, I’m like, poor Glenn must be like late 60s, early 70s. 57. Steven, my dog, that’s not that old.
Sarah: It might have been a little bit older in the 70s, though, in fairness. I will also say, because I’m reading the whole thing aloud, that this was the first time in the whole book where their conversations — mostly in chapter 72 — I struggled with reading aloud. It was the most stilted. It felt the least flowy. It felt the most sort of like…
Laura: Preachy.
Sarah: Yeah. And like bookish, as opposed to — there was not a natural cadence to these characters we’ve been with. Because I’ve read all of these characters, I’ve read them aloud for a thousand pages now. And in these exchanges — and I don’t know if that’s purposeful or not — I just was like, the dialogue here is a little weird. It felt a little more like clunky book writing, as opposed to in the past. Especially Glenn, who I love so much, one of my favorite characters in the whole thing. He’s been very flowy throughout, and this was a weird one to read aloud. I wondered how that came across in either the audio or if you were reading it in print, if anyone else noticed that.
Laura: I mean, a little bit. I’ve had a stronger reaction to other sections where the dialogue feels like just Stephen King has some things he wants to get off his chest. Which, you know what? It’s your book, buddy. Go for it. But I know what you mean. I kind of went back and forth, being like, I love how this is working out. I love that they’re encountering the Wolfman — whose name I can’t remember in real life — the kid.
Sarah: The kid.
Laura: Where you’re like, oh, well, we know what happened to him now. And I think the way that affected them, and kind of freaked them out, was really smart. Like, he’s trying to pick up some pieces here as he’s getting them closer and closer to Vegas. And some of the conversations — the conversations about the casting away of things being symbolic, like “when you cast away things, you’re casting away the self-related others that are symbolically related to those things” —
Sarah: Yeah, nobody talks like that. That’s what I mean, it was weird. Now, I do appreciate, like you’re saying, him tying up some threads. They come across the kid, they come across Harold Lauder. They don’t seem particularly shocked, although by this point they know that Harold and Nadine are who blew up the committee meeting. But then they also find his journal, and they read his final note. Remember Harold wrote that final note that we talked about, that was really kind of well done in terms of the finality of Harold’s character in life? So now knowing that these guys have read it… you know, because sometimes you’re like, well, will anyone ever know? Who do you write this letter for? Now they know. So yeah, there were some storytelling ends that Stephen King is bringing together, and I think he’s doing a good job in a pretty tight chapter — picking up those pieces and also showing how those moments, where they’re seeing Harold, encountering the kid’s body, feeling Randall Flagg’s presence… I bought the way that he allowed them to both be afraid — really afraid, there’s still a lot to be afraid of — but also let them see that he’s not God. It’s a complex strategy he’s got going on here, but it’s not failsafe. There are weak points. And I thought the way he kind of put that all together for them, while also building them up — he’s doing a lot in this chapter, and I think for the most part he sticks the landing. He’s showing you that they’re getting stronger, that they’re getting clear. He’s showing you that they are picking up puzzle pieces about Randall Flagg. He’s showing you that they’re still afraid. Of course they’re still afraid. And how close they’ve gotten to each other, and learned from each other. I just think he did a lot here, and he did it pretty tightly.
Male Friendship, Shared Purpose, and Tribe
Laura: I agree. This is also a commentary on male friendship, which actually a lot of Stephen King’s work goes back to friendship. And in this case it’s just guys, but they show a lot of affection for one another, a lot of respect for one another. And I think about that when you think of the average Stephen King fan — and I’m making a gross generalization here — but I think the average Stephen King fan is male and maybe on the younger side. And I like the affectionate friendship threads, the leaning on each other. It’s like the opposite of toxic masculinity that he’s showing here, a long time ago, almost 50 years ago when it first came out. I like that, because horror doesn’t always do that.
Sarah: Yeah. I think it’s really lovely, and I think it gets to something with male friendships too, because they’re walking side by side and they have a mission. I think that’s important for all human beings. I think about Sebastian Junger’s book Tribe all the time, talking about how after the Blitz in London people would be like, “I kind of miss it,” because they had a mission, they had a purpose, they were fighting something together — men and women. But I think particularly for men, I see this with my boys. When there’s something for them to do and achieve and face together — you hear people talk about this even with people with PTSD, horrific experiences inside the military, they still talk about with a great deal of appreciation this sense of shared purpose they had with their fellow soldiers. And that’s what these guys are. They’re soldiers on the way to a mission.
Laura: Yeah, I feel like it gives men an expression of that when they’re on a mission, versus just in day-to-day life. They don’t have maybe that same camaraderie, that shared purpose. I don’t want to say trauma bonding is a good thing, because no one wants the trauma part. They just want the bonding.
Sarah: Yeah, but it gives people something. I don’t even know if it’s trauma bonding. I think there’s just something evolutionarily inside all of us, because we spent millions of years in pursuit of survival together. What kind of leisure time did we have? We were feeding ourselves. We were moving. We were outrunning the weather. We were outrunning predators. That is the majority of the experience of the human brain and the human psyche — it’s a tribal experience. I mean, that book starts with the people who would get kidnapped by the Indians, and they’d go to rescue them and they’d be like, “No, thank you. We would like to stay. Thank you so much.” And I think King kind of gets at this over the course of the novel, when everything upends and you have to be really focused on your survival. He personifies it post-pandemic and really heightens that experience by bringing Randall Flagg into it. We’re not just trying to figure out what we’re going to do post-pandemic — now we have a threat, and there’s not that many of us there to meet it, in a way that can put everybody in a place where they are not only willing to work together but make sacrifices.
Laura: The ultimate sacrifices.
Stu’s Fall and “Go On Without Me”
Sarah: The ultimate sacrifice. We have an accident. They are navigating a steep, treacherous dry riverbed to a washout — which I just did on my spring break trip in New Mexico. And it is scary and hard. I would just like to say, and this was just for funsies in a national park. So I was reading this part like, oh, be careful, guys, be careful, guys.
Laura: But Stu slips and falls. It’s really bad. He’s falling and he hears his leg snap in two places. And Stephen King has spent a thousand pages telling us: if you’re injured, you’re out of luck.
Sarah: So not great. It’s not great, Bob. And it’s gonna happen to Stu — our sort of beloved, I guess I wouldn’t say main character, but kind of. I mean, he’s definitely the foundation upon which everybody sort of rests a lot of the time.
Laura: Nick was like the brain, Stu was like the steady strength, and Larry’s like the heart. They’re like — hey, that’s it — Nick is the Tin Man, Stu is the Lion. Do I have these? No. Stu would be the Scarecrow, Larry would be the Lion.
Sarah: I like this, I think I did a good thing there. It’s a nice wink that Stephen King does — they’ve all been so worried about Glenn getting up the hill, like all the things, nobody’s worried about Stu. Old 57-year-old Glenn, he makes it up. But the strength, like you said, is the one that falls. Which happens throughout the book. Mother Abigail, supposed to be the ultimate good, God-given strength character — she kicks a bucket.
Laura: And then Nick. Nick too.
Sarah: So what do you think he’s trying to say with all these “you’re depending on this person a little too much”?
Laura: Maybe. Or just like, the ones of us that we think are the strongest are as vulnerable as everyone else.
Sarah: Well, I think that’s it. And I think he’s saying, you don’t need a savior. It comes from the numbers. It comes from the community. It comes from everybody willing to step up — not just depending on one person. Depending on one person, to me, is what he is warning dramatically against with Randall Flagg, right? You people have sacrificed everything, including your own ethics, on the idea that he’s gonna save you and he’s gonna protect you because he’s scary. It’s almost — is he making an anti-fascist, anti-populist argument here? I don’t know, maybe.
Laura: Well, he’s definitely making — back to your point about a tribal argument — for sure. There’s real differences. I think it’s interesting how he weaves the differences and the sameness between the Free Zone and the Vegas people. He’ll make the point, like, we’re all the same, we’re all just people, people make choices, nobody is all good or all evil. He’ll sort of make that point, and then he’ll make a point like — yeah, no, there are some differences, actually. JK, some of us suck. Some of us are bad.
Larry’s Redemption: “I’m a Nice Guy Now”
Laura: But this whole section is so relevant. Yeah, they cut bait quick.
Sarah: They do.
Laura: Larry’s like, no, we’ll get a car. And they’re like, nope, that’s not the instructions. We’ve got to leave him. And Stu’s like, you’ve got to leave me, and you’ve got to leave me right now. And Larry doesn’t like it. He fights it pretty hard. Because I thought this was really great where he was like, no, I’ve spent this whole journey trying to stop becoming a person who ditches, and now you’re asking me to ditch.
Sarah: And I think that’s so smart of Stephen King to say, it’s not about just reversing yourself. It’s about becoming wiser, and that’s not an easy rule to follow. It doesn’t mean you’re a better person because you never ditch. It’s that you’ll be a better person because you have your priorities straight and you know what you’re working towards — not about you, or how you want to seem, or what kind of person you want everybody to perceive you to be. It’s about real wisdom, which often requires deep sacrifice, especially in a crisis.
Laura: It’s always the moment where you have to do the thing you thought the character had spent the whole book trying not to do.
Sarah: I know. And I do feel like he gets there — not just in the fact that he has to leave Stu, but he gets there even spiritually and in alignment, when he has the dream and he’s sort of able to say to his mom, his dead mom, but kind of spiritually, “I am a nice guy. I figured it out. I got there.” You really see that of the four of them in these two chapters — you see it the most with Larry. We get sort of the redemption that you always want from a character, even though it’s only happening within him, because everyone he would want to prove it to is dead. But he knows within himself, like, okay, I got here. I’m a nice guy now. He’s not a taker anymore. He’s a giver.
Laura: Except I also really related to his anxiety dreams about the microphones being too high on the stage. Have you had that dream?
Sarah: Not that one, but I’ve had my share of anxiety dreams. And he’s like, every rock star, every performer has these dreams where they can’t make the mic work.
Laura: Oh, like you’re back in school. In this class, you’ve got to take the test you haven’t been to.
Sarah: That’s mine. I’m in a class that I have to take the final and I have not been attending the class.
Laura: Oh, I have that one too. But from a performer standpoint, not being able to get the mic to work is so symbolic of, like, you’ve lost your voice, you’ve lost the audience, you’ve lost your only power. And you can’t make it work and you’re just on the stage without a mic. I was like, oh, that’s so relatable.
Sarah: Yeah, I do feel like Larry got there. It’s a really, really difficult thing they have to do. I know Glenn and Ralph are kind of head down, “we’ve got to do it.” But I can’t imagine — they just did it with the women, and now they’re having to do it with poor Stu.
Laura: I know. But you know what — he doesn’t say this, Stephen King doesn’t say this — but if you just look at who they are before, before the pandemic: Ralph is an Oklahoma guy, I think they made a reference to him being a farmer or a rural guy, who I’m sure had to do the hard decision of shooting the horse or whatever. That’s who Ralph is. Glenn has always had a big-picture understanding of sociology, of community, of what this whole thing is. He’s always sort of understood it. Larry — liberal rock star Larry — is the bleeding heart. He ain’t no nice guy.
Sarah: Yeah. It’s like everything tracks. Even Stu, who he is, has to say “go on without me,” like, no questions asked, go, you can’t even stay the night here because you’ll rethink it, you need to go right now. They’re all very clear except for Larry. And I think that also goes back to who they were before.
Laura: Yeah, but I also think they’ve had enormous growth, especially Larry. And especially Stu, because remember when we were talking about Stu in the beginning, he was sort of detached. He couldn’t leave the town. There was all that line about how he wanted to leave but he just couldn’t quite do it, he wasn’t really bought in, because his wife had died. And even — we just watched the first scene of the 1994 miniseries, and Stu starts in the doorway with his back to all the guys in the gas station, kind of looking out, very detached. He’s kind of participating in the conversation, but his back’s to it.
Sarah: I think all of them, even Glenn and Ralph, were looking for something in the before times that wasn’t quite there. And maybe Larry thought it was fame and success, and it wasn’t, because he got enough of a taste to realize, oh, maybe this just causes more problems. So their journey from the before time is realizing what they thought — especially Larry — what they thought they wanted wasn’t whatever was going to make them happy. And just this sense of, with the whole point of the scene being sacrifice, putting yourself on the line for something bigger than yourself, is really, really powerful. And you can see them all reckon with that in a real way.
What Mattered “Before” Doesn’t Matter Now
Laura: You know, Larry never tells anybody who he was before. And I think that is fascinating, as someone who lives around a lot of famous people, where that fame — whether they’re attached to it or not, and most of them are on some level — it’s sort of part of their identity. Now, he only got a couple of weeks of fame before the pandemic hit, but it’s so interesting that he hasn’t tried to establish who he is by referencing who he was, like, “I was somebody.”
Sarah: Yeah, it would be really hard for me to not want to be like, “I was somebody, this is what makes me a leader here, that’s what gives me some credibility here.” It’s just a shorthand for your resume or accomplishments or title. It’s just a shorthand when you’re meeting new people to establish who you are, what your talents are, what your gifts are. And he has never done that, which is fascinating to me.
Laura: Yeah. Beyond Glenn, his sociologist, I don’t feel like a lot of people do that. If you’re a doctor, that’s super important and relevant. But like we said, I’m not even really sure what Ralph did. I certainly don’t know what Stu did.
Sarah: No, he worked in the factory. He worked in the factory.
Laura: Oh, he worked at a factory. That’s right. So yeah, I definitely think he’s making an argument. And there does seem to be this sort of mass decision that it doesn’t matter what was going on beforehand, unless you’re a doctor.
Sarah: But does it not matter? I’m curious — we haven’t really run into anyone who was like a CEO, somebody who was a natural leader who will be like, “look, I know how to run things” — not because they’re trying to be cool or superior, but just like, here’s what my talents are.
Laura: I would say that Stephen King has some thoughts on that, if he made a factory worker the default — a factory worker, and a mute wanderer hitchhiker, and a little old lady, the leaders. So I think we know where he stands on that.
Sarah: I know. I think it’s interesting. Do you honestly think, if this happened, what would you say? Would you be like, “I’m a podcaster” in this world?
Laura: I mean, I’m just an extrovert and a people person, so I don’t know if I would lean on my experiences. I would just — I am who I am, you know? I think I would show up as who I am post-apocalypse just as much as I do in my everyday life. That’s what Bess says about me, is that it doesn’t matter where I am, I just show up fully as myself. So I’ve got to believe that would still be true. But some people don’t like that about me. Some people, that might not have been the type of leadership people like. I’m an acquired taste, man. So I don’t know.
Sarah: I just wonder if our listeners could think of this as an exercise — in a post-pandemic world, in this type of pandemic, if Jeff and I both survived and we wandered into the Free Zone and we were like, “we’re a director and a podcaster.” Okay, well, we are useless. We are literally useless. Not because those were our titles, but because the skill set you were developing in the pre-world is not helping us here at all.
Laura: Yeah, I think that’s why the judge with legal experience, doctors with medical experience — you have the whole conversation with Dayna where she’s like, all the stuff we studied is worthless now. I think that’s kind of the conversation people start having: what’s actually relevant and helpful?
Sarah: Yeah. It’s interesting to think about.
Could You Sacrifice Yourself?
Laura: Okay, but let’s talk about this as we wrap up chapter 72. Would you be able to sacrifice yourself? Would you say, like, “go on without me, guys, I’ll just stay here and die in the desert”?
Sarah: I mean, I think it is the only choice, but I don’t know that I would be able to do it so beautifully as Stu does.
Laura: Yeah. I would be crying. I’d be weeping. I’d be sad. It’d be hard. It’d be so scary to know. I think I’d take those pills right away.
Sarah: Even with some morphine pills at your disposal, I don’t know, that’s still hard for everybody involved.
Chapter 73: Kojak, and Maybe Stu’s Not Done For
Laura: But wait, don’t give up on poor Stu yet. Chapter 73, we start with Kojak. The traveling party’s like, hey, where’d Kojak go? And we find out that he went back to Stu — he brings him a rabbit, he brings him firewood, and we’re all like, oh wait, maybe we shouldn’t count Stu out quite yet.
Sarah: Because the last sentence — under which I wrote DAMN in all caps — of chapter 72 is, “and they never saw Stu Redman again.”
Laura: Right. But we know we’re going to see Kojak. We know Kojak lives for another 15 years. So it’s got to be a good sign for Stu that Kojak’s with him.
Sarah: It is a cliché male thing to me to be like, “we haven’t seen Kojak for hours.” The women would have clocked, like, we’re missing one of our party, even if it’s the dog.
Laura: Especially Glenn. Glenn loves that dog.
Sarah: Yeah. So we know that Kojak is back with Stu. I feel pretty good about Stu’s future. And maybe because I flipped through the pages just a little bit to see if his name showed back up. Just saying.
Laura: Oh, don’t. You’re a cheater.
Sarah: I have not done that at all. And I didn’t text you, so you can’t get on to me. But when you read that, you know that we know — throw me a literal bone, since we’re talking about dogs.
Laura: Were you putting together the clues all at once? Like, oh, then that means… Yeah, a little bit.
Barry Dorgan and the Limits of Law and Order
Laura: So we’re back with the traveling party. About 20 days after leaving Boulder, they finally get to some of Randall Flagg’s interceptors, led by Barry Dorgan, who’s like the captain of law enforcement in Vegas. And Glenn and Dorgan end up having this back and forth where Glenn picks up pretty quickly that Dorgan is not a monster — that he does seem to believe in law and order, in some sort of standard process, rule of law, and that this ain’t that. What’s about to happen to them is not that. So I found, from the second they were picked up, the way they all clocked what was going on — particularly Glenn — and were able and willing to articulate and call out, at every opportunity, what was happening.
Sarah: I thought that was really astute on King’s part, especially if you’re coming out of the 60s and 70s when this is being written, when there’s gonna be some complicated feelings around — they mention it later in the chapter — police brutality or whatever. And you realize that he’s just a good guy who’s trying to do his job, who has complicated feelings about it. Maybe “good guy” is too strong of a word, but he’s a normal guy with complicated feelings, who feels an obligation to do his job and to do it well, to carry out these orders. It feels very understandable to me.
Laura: Yeah. And he’s frustrated by being called out on it, kind of. And Glenn’s calling everybody out.
Sarah: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No man is marked safe from Glenn, okay? He’s just… he’s the best. He’s calling out the hypocrisy.
Peak Glenn: Laughing in the Face of Evil
Laura: And then we get peak Glenn. I feel like Glenn is the GOAT in this entire chapter. So they get stopped, they get cuffed — and I really don’t think “arrested” is the right word here. This is not a real law enforcement agency with any sort of procedure. It’s just taken. Taken is probably more accurate. They get put in prison, and Larry is acknowledging, like, oh, I’m back on the West Coast, what a long strange trip it’s been, and starts reciting “I will fear no evil, I will fear no evil.” But Glenn’s approach is different. He’s gonna laugh in the face of evil. That’s what old Glenn’s gonna do.
Sarah: What a badass. This is so relevant to right now, I feel like — that when people in this particular type of power, on this power trip, get laughed at, that is their worst possible nightmare. They only want to be feared or respected, but to be laughed at, to be ridiculed, is like a hair trigger. I love this: “Glenn laughed heartily. He threw back his head and laughed long and hard, and as he laughed, the pain in his joints began to abate. He felt better, stronger, in control again. ‘Oh, you’re a card,’ he said. ‘I tell you what you do. Why don’t you find a nice big sand pile, get yourself a hammer, and pound all that sand right up your ass.’”
Laura: Glenn! I underlined that too. Glenn!
Sarah: And then he talks about “Flagg’s face grew dark and the smile slipped away. His eyes, previously as dark as the jet stone Lloyd wore, now seemed to gleam yellow.” There’s a few things there. I did like that laughing made his pain fade a little.
Laura: Yeah. Like his physical pain. Because Flagg’s presence makes it way worse at first.
Sarah: Yeah, there is a spiritual component to laughing, I deeply believe that. But I also was like, is he really laughing or is he fake laughing?
Laura: I feel like he really was laughing. His ability to control his own pain and present what he wanted to present to Flagg had to be based in something real. Nobody’s that good of an actor.
Sarah: And I think — again, because of the process they’ve taken on the journey, being stripped away and understanding what you’re capable of and understanding what you’re facing, which is most likely death — it’s the same way with Dayna, right? And even Nadine. Okay, if all fear of Randall Flagg is based on fear of death, when you accept “yes, I will die and I will die soon,” then what can he hold over you? And I think Glenn was really like, you have nothing. You’ve controlled everybody through this fear of what you’ll do to them. Well, I accept whatever you’ll do to me. You have no control over me. You are powerless. You are a joke.
Laura: Also in Glenn’s mind, who has studied this kind of thing for his entire career — how satisfying or sad or full circle, to realize this thing that they’ve been in such fear of. He’s just a man. And I know we understand he’s a little bit more than a man, but he’s not all-powerful. He has a lot of weaknesses. And so for Glenn to realize, oh, this guy in the boots and this getup…
Why Doesn’t Flagg Kill Anyone Himself?
Sarah: But why do you think — Glenn says, like, okay fine, shoot me, and Flagg won’t do it. He makes Lloyd do it. Why do you think that is?
Laura: Well, does he directly kill anybody in the story? He’s a little bit of a Charles Manson.
Sarah: Yeah, I mean, except for when we get to the crowd in just a minute with poor Whitney.
Laura: But he doesn’t shoot him.
Sarah: No, that’s still spiritual. You’re right — there’s never any, even with the guy Lloyd is so freaked out about, “he just kind of looked at me, went crazy” — there is never a moment where he takes a human means to kill someone.
Laura: He does know body-to-body violence. Combat. He beats up poor Dayna after she’s already dead, but who cares about that.
Sarah: That’s interesting. I wonder why we think that is. I want to hear everybody’s thoughts over on Substack, because I know that y’all will have them. I can’t plug that into a theme I see within the book of why he wouldn’t — only in the same way Mother Abigail doesn’t save them in any real human way. Maybe he’s not going to kill them in any real human way. You know what I mean?
Laura: Yeah, I feel like to me that goes to a little bit of what is horror about this book. And as we get to the end, I really want us to have a good conversation about genre, and first-time readers, if this was what they expected in a book that’s so classically labeled horror — and is so different than what you might have expected. Because all of his violence is of the supernatural variety, instead of just the shootout with Poke and Lloyd. There’s a lot of human-to-human violence in this book, but if there was only that, that would change the genre of what we’re reading. That becomes a thriller, or — versus the horror part. He’s just a serial killer, that’s kind of different.
Sarah: It’s different. He’s like a devil figure, a Lucifer figure, and him just shooting somebody would be a little out of character.
Laura: Well, sadly he does get Lloyd to shoot Glenn.
Sarah: Yeah. Glenn dies laughing, but he does get shot by Lloyd. He kind of tries with Lloyd — he’s like, dude, you know he doesn’t have what you think he has. But Lloyd is ultimately just loyal, and he’s like, “well, he told me more of the truth than anybody else has in my whole lousy life.” And I was like, man, I hate this payoff for Lloyd. It’s not like I wanted good things for Lloyd, but I feel like King was showing us —
Laura: And maybe that’s the only reason Lloyd was around, was to show us, like, people are figuring it out.
Sarah: Yeah, because he hesitates. He hesitates.
Laura: He does hesitate. I wanted Lloyd to figure it all the way out, but that wouldn’t work. I mean, he couldn’t just shoot Randall Flagg. That’s not going to work.
Sarah: Because we tried that with Harold, and Flagg pushes Harold. So I don’t think Lloyd would have even been able to shoot him. But I don’t even know why I’m out here wishing good things for Lloyd. I’m not. I guess I’m just ultimately into redemption in all forms.
Laura: Also, Lloyd does hesitate. You can see Lloyd is having second thoughts, like Lloyd is really starting to understand that Randall Flagg is not all-powerful. But Lloyd has no attachment to Glenn. His hesitation is only within himself, like, God, is this guy speaking the truth? But his hesitation is not, “should I let this Free Zone guy live?”
Sarah: Yeah, he doesn’t care about Glenn.
Laura: Well, Glenn does. RIP Glenn.
Sarah: RIP Glenn. In a blaze of bullets.
Laura: In a blaze of bullets and laughter, like a badass.
Sarah: Pour you a creek-cooled beer out for one Glenn Bateman. That’s all I’ve got to say.
The MGM Grand Lawn and the Uneasy Crowd
Laura: Okay, then Larry and Ralph are taken to the lawn of the MGM Grand Hotel. They know it’s about to get real bad. And what has been built quickly is basically cages, where they’re going to pull them apart limb by limb. They’re going to draw and quarter them.
Sarah: They’re going to draw and quarter them with vehicles.
Laura: Yeah. God, it’s so gnarly.
Sarah: It’s pretty gnarly. It’s not great.
Laura: I love this visual. So they get there, but you see, oh, well, the reason this is important is because everybody else is there. It’s a spectacle. We’ve gotten everybody in place at one time. That’s why we needed these two dudes. They are the honey trap. They are the way that we’ve got to get everybody in the same place.
Sarah: But the crowd is uneasy. They’re not loving it. They’re already, I think, doubting him. This isn’t a mob thirsty for blood — it’s clear, sort of from the beginning. And Flagg comes out and says, “It’s them. They’ve been spying. They’re the ones who shot down all those airplanes. They did it all.” And Whitney, to his eternal credit, comes out and is like, “the hell it was. It was not them. You know it.”
Laura: We already know that Whitney’s one of the ones who planned a ditch. He was already defecting.
Sarah: Yeah, he was gonna defect. But good on him for standing up and being like, no, that’s not what happened.
“Don’t Believe Your Own Eyes” — Flagg’s Lie and the Crowd Turns
Laura: But someone else realizes — so this says: “Larry’s eyes touched those of a man standing on the front rim of the crowd. Although Larry did not know it, this was Stan Bailey, operations chief at Indian Springs. He saw a haze of bewilderment and surprise cover the man’s face, and saw him mouthing something ridiculous that looked like ‘Can Man.’” So he’s just a character we don’t really know, but he’s a sort of stand-in for, like, hold on.
Sarah: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s a lot of people at this point who knew that was Trashcan Man.
Laura: Yeah, we all know it was Trashcan Man. And you’re lying straight to our face.
Sarah: Yep. Again, I want to point out what is an exact parallel to what is happening in America, when people are realizing without a shadow of a doubt that this person they’ve been following is outright lying to them. It’s every meme that everybody has been posting on both sides for years, from 1984 — “do not believe your own eyes.” And now it is just so blatant. What is happening in America is what is happening in this crowd.
Laura: Truly. People who came to the dawn of realization.
Sarah: Well, God, Laura, I hope not, considering what happens next.
Laura: I hope the metaphor is there.
Sarah: I’m like, well, don’t take it too far.
Flagg’s Ball of Fire and the Return of Trashcan Man
Laura: Okay. So Whitney comes forward, and to scare everybody shitless and put himself back in charge, Flagg summons this ball of blue fire that incinerates Whitney. It kind of goes up over his head. They talk about the smell of his burning hair. It’s pretty brutal.
Sarah: This was so visual. When he sears his mouth shut across his face. This was very visual. Reading this out loud, I feel like I saw this more than I did the first few times I’ve read it. You’re sort of skimming over like, oh God, you know, skimming to get to what’s going to happen. But to read every word of this out loud, I was like, oh, this is rough.
Laura: Should this be the chapter you read out loud for people, that they can have if they’re paid subscribers?
Sarah: I don’t know. Maybe it should be. So we’re like, oh, shit, well, he’s going to shut it all down, he’s going to shut this dissent off, and nobody’s gonna do anything — which seems to be what happens. Everybody’s like, well, I don’t want the ball of fire to sear my mouth shut, so I’ll just shut up and let this happen. And Larry and Ralph are like, “I will fear no evil, I will fear no evil.” And then who shows back up but old Trashy, in his cart, with his skin falling off from radiation poisoning.
Laura: And I thought that he was getting this bomb for himself. But really, it seems like he was getting the nuclear bomb to take it to Randall Flagg — like a sacrifice, an apology, a tribute. Take me back here, I got you the biggest bomb humanly possible. Is that how you read it?
Sarah: I feel like it’s a little unclear, and maybe even purposefully, because when we last saw Trashcan Man, when he had discovered these bombs — he knew where these bombs were, like underground, and he’s trying to get to them, avoiding all warnings about getting near them.
Laura: It feels like when Trashcan Man’s mind is as clear as it’s going to get. It’s never fully clear. But in that scene, when we last saw him, he did seem more vengeful. He’s mad. He’s blown up the airplanes — or the helicopters, whatever they were — because he got his feelings hurt. He’s vengeful, and we can’t totally tell why he’s trying to get the nukes out of the ground. But in this scene, you don’t know if he’s changed his mind, or if that was always his intention, to bring it back to Flagg or not. But it doesn’t matter, because he’s obviously completely lost his ever-loving mind.
Sarah: And in some lights, this scene of him parting the crowd, coming in with a tractor pulling this thing — it’s either horrifying, or there’s almost a — I hate to say it — almost a comic relief to it. Like him coming in just melting, being like, hey everybody, I’m back, did you miss me? It’s almost like the infamous prom scene in Carrie, where there are some moments in the way Stephen King writes that scene — we’re so used to the movie version and how horrifying it is — but you’re almost like, is this… there’s something about this that is funny? “Funny” isn’t quite the right word, but it is horror mixed with this borderline funny visual. It’s like a mix.
Laura: A classic Stephen King mix of imagery that is just so iconic.
“The Hand of God” and the End of Randall Flagg
Sarah: Well, and people start to run.
Laura: Well, yeah, because they see what that is. Even if you don’t know exactly what it is, you know what it is.
Sarah: And so Randall Flagg is like, “stop.” That doesn’t work. Then he tells my favorite, Lloyd, “tell him to get rid of it.” Oh, friend. And he’s fully deflated of his power, until literally poof — his clothes just drop down empty. Because the little shape he sent out, the little fire he used to torture and kill poor Whitney, transforms basically into the hand of God, touches the nuclear bomb, and that’s all she wrote. And what’s the last line in this chapter? “And the righteous and unrighteous alike were consumed in that holy fire.” Wow.
Laura: Under the end of this chapter I wrote WHOA in all caps. Do you feel like, when it describes that he disappears and his clothes are left standing there for a second and then they drop — is he being incinerated along with everyone else, but a smidge early? Or is he escaping? What’s happening there exactly, because he bounces throughout time, you know?
Sarah: Yeah, I think the dark energy that animated the person that was Randall Flagg — because he says, you know, “I used to remember who I was before,” like he could, and then he stops being able to. So it’s like that energy was so tied up with the real person, that at the moment that energy can’t exist anymore — because what was feeding it was the people’s belief in him — it dissipates. And I’m sure it goes to another time and place. We don’t get rid of evil. But it was so tied up with the person of Randall Flagg at that point, and their ability to levitate and create white balls of fire and all this stuff — it couldn’t exist. The real Randall Flagg, whatever the real Randall Flagg was, could not exist without it. So the second it moved on to another timeline, universe, multiverse — that was all she wrote. So I don’t see any more threat to this.
Did the Free Zone Actually Bring Flagg Down?
Laura: It was the sense of, like, this right here, this is over. But how do you feel about — that wasn’t our Free Zone committee, that wasn’t our men on a mission, they did not bring this about. Nobody — everybody would have been standing there. It doesn’t matter. If they’d all been safe in their homes, when Trash King comes back with his tractor pulling the bomb…
Sarah: But listen, if we’re getting biblical — which Stephen King clearly is — there’s something about the presence. The chosen presence, the energy of everybody being there to see these two men, these particular two men, die. The white-hot flame of his hand had to come about. That’s what touches the bomb, right? If everybody had been in their home, if they weren’t sacrificing these two men, why would Whitney have come out and said, “this ain’t right”? And if he didn’t touch Whitney with the fire, there’s not a bit of that that happens without Larry and Ralph being there. It doesn’t happen otherwise. There’s too many pieces.
Laura: Well, there is interesting how many Jesus figures are in the book. It is not one character that is Jesus-y. You’re having them now be Jesus, or the thieves, or however you want to assign it to Ralph and Larry. But you’ve had moments where Randall Flagg himself has some sort of Jesus moments, obviously Mother Abigail — there’s a lot of, I don’t know what the point Stephen King would be making is, of like, we all are children of God, we all are vulnerable to sacrifice, we all have spiritual powers. But it’s interesting that it’s not like he has one Jesus figure. We have Jesus imagery, biblical imagery, the whole book.
Sarah: I think what he’s saying is that there is a plane of existence — he deals so often in ESP and stuff — that gets dampened, lessened, turned down from our everyday perception because of our modern lives and the status quo in our everyday existences. And so in this book, he’s creating a scenario in which those are gone. Because also, when we meet Randall Flagg, they say he shows up when there’s chaos — maybe it’s a protest, maybe it’s a terrorist organization. So I think he’s saying, okay, but what happens to this plane of existence he clearly thinks exists — and I think you could make a strong argument is present in the Bible and biblical stories — like, this is where it surfaces to the top at this particular moment in history. So what if something happened that surfaced it again? What happens in a moment where everybody can access parts of themselves they usually can’t, be it evil or good?
Self-Destruction, or the Way Good Works on People?
Sarah: I also think he’s really strongly saying that you bring about your own downfall. It does not come from outside sources. Like Trashcan Man, Randall Flagg himself — I understand what you’re saying about them all needing to be gathered for this sort of thing to be quite so epic. But his downfall was coming even outside of that. People were starting to figure it out. He’d alienated the most dangerous person of his community, Trashcan Man, who was gonna come back and wreak havoc upon all of them.
Laura: But that’s interesting, though. Did he alienate him? I don’t know if he alienated him. I think he empowered him. He alienated Lloyd by not telling Lloyd everything.
Sarah: Right. I guess he empowered Trashy.
Laura: But then he was going to get rid of Trashy. It’s just that he escaped after blowing up the aircraft.
Sarah: Well, that’s it, right? He uses everybody.
Laura: Talk about relevant to now. He treats everybody transactionally. What can you get me?
Sarah: That’s what I mean.
Laura: I do not feel like the Free Zone committee had anything to do with the downfall of Flagg and Vegas.
Sarah: Well, I don’t know. I think that he had weaknesses, but that allowed the opening — again, all those pieces, of Trashcan Man and them showing up. And I think they all had to be there. First of all, he had to have some antagonists — he was gonna bomb them to oblivion. There had to be some sort of pushback, because I think he would have even bombed the Free Zone. It might have been sloppy, and maybe he didn’t wipe them out completely, but they had electricity, and he had Rat Man and all these people working for him. He could have really done some damage. If they hadn’t come and made the sacrifice of walking across the country and sacrificing their own lives, I think he would have killed more people. I don’t think he was on the precipice of downfall anytime soon.
Laura: No, maybe not.
Sarah: But he’s not all-powerful.
Laura: I think he wouldn’t have gone on forever. Something would have happened, but he might have taken down a lot more people in the process. I still think that it’s his own failings in every way — either betraying his own people, not taking care of people, plotting them against each other. It’s all his own failings. I feel like the Free Zone guys were a sacrifice and sort of brought this all to a head, but I still don’t think it was really them. I think it was him. He messed it all up.
Sarah: I don’t know. I think they played a role. I think they had to be there. I think you have to do something, and you have to be the antagonist. The whole thing to me is really giving Paradise Lost — this sort of “I have power, why can’t I use it?” There’s some sort of paranormal power. It’s not a jump to say if I have this excessive power, it was given to me by a greater power, why can’t I do with it what I want? But also, like, no real strategy. It’s just power for power’s sake. What did he want? What did Randall Flagg want? To just secure this power, take out his enemies, and keep it for this kid he was gonna impregnate Nadine with? It’s never really clear — whereas with the Free Zone, maybe it was clear that the Free Zone wanted something different, and that’s why he felt he had to eliminate them. I think good is always an antagonist for evil, and you can’t just trust that evil is going to self-destruct.
Laura: No, I don’t think you can trust it or count on it. But it seems to be, a lot of times — not always, but a lot of times — sort of what happens is they self-destruct, as opposed to an outside power taking them down. Because that would have been a really different story. We’re not totally sure what he wants, other than dominance, world dominance — which is what a lot of powerful people want, just some sort of world dominance for dominance’s sake, I suppose. That’s not really what they’re after. And it does feel like a self-destruction, which I also think sometimes happens.
Sarah: Well, and is it self-destruction, or is it just the way good works on people like that?
Laura: Mmm, I like that thought.
Sarah: You know what I mean? Ultimately, they live in the world, and there’s good in the world, and there’s laughter, and there’s people that aren’t scared of you, and there’s people willing to make enormous sacrifice. Because part of that self-destruction was the presence of — I still think it really was Larry and Ralph, but let’s say you don’t buy that — Dayna sure as hell played a role in fundamentally undermining his perception of himself and others’ perception of him. And the judge. So the Free Zoners did play a role in not just accelerating — maybe it would have happened inevitably — but really exposing his weaknesses, for sure.
Laura: Well, I like that thought, that just their presence, and his lack of control of them — so Dayna killing herself, the judge also sacrificing, just being out from under his power — their very presence sort of changed his decision-making or his trajectory in a way that became self-destructive, but wouldn’t have been without their presence. I hear what you’re saying. Yeah. I like it. I like it.
The Book’s Not Over Yet
Sarah: But the book’s not over.
Laura: The book’s not over. Do not think the book is over. It’s not. We’ve got a couple more sections left.
Sarah: I’ve got about a little under 100 pages left in the book. God, there’s so much to talk about as this book ends, that I want to talk about with our fellow slow readers — about the experience. And so I want people to come to our final meeting that they can share with us.
Laura: In summary: come to our final book club meeting. Or put a comment on Substack.
Sarah: I just really want to hear from — this is my first ever slow read. I know a lot of people, it’s also their first slow read, or their first Stephen King, or their first horror. I really want to hear, as we wind it down — yes, we’re going to talk about how the book winds down, but also just like, if this has shifted your reading life, if it’s changed the way that you have read books, if you did this on pace with us, or you skipped ahead, or you binged and caught up. I really want to hear, not only about The Stand, but how spending this much time with one work affects you.
Laura: Yeah. So join us over on Substack so we can talk about that.
Sarah: We will be back next week with chapters 74 through 78, and tomorrow we will have a side quest where we’re going to talk about summer plans. We’re going to lighten it up after the nuclear bomb.
Laura: Summer plans, already. So join us there and check that out as well. We will see you on the other side.
Sarah: If you have been reading along with us since January, lordy, things are finally happening. And if you are binging and catching up with us, well, welcome.
Laura: There is a lot to discuss, including whether or not Randall Flagg is a bride’s dream come true.
Sarah: He is not.
Laura: Spoiler for the whole episode. He is not.
Sarah: Now, we would love for you to join us for our last couple of book club meetings for The Stand. Our May meeting is next week. And then we’ll have a big final meeting in June to process the end of The Stand and our whole slow reading experience together. You will want to be there for these meetings because they’re going to be very satisfying to discuss this novel after being with these characters for six months — and each other for that matter. And we’ll be revealing what our next Slow Read is going to be. It’s a big one. It’s a big announcement.
Laura: These book club meetings are for our Substack paying members only. And when you join us over there at the Slow Read Substack, you will get not only our book club Zooms with me and Sarah, but you’ll also get a host of other goodies, like all of our Side Quests where we share our personal stories about our dreams, death, parenthood, love triangles. Don’t you want to hear us talk about those things that are tangentially related to The Stand that we have been discussing for the last five, six months? Join us over on slowreadbookclub.com. That’s on Substack.
The Balance of Good and Evil (Before We Even Get to Chapter 65)
Laura: Okay, Sarah. Chapters 65 through 71. Wow.
Sarah: It’s weird because Stephen King has spent the whole book setting up how powerful Randall Flagg is. And then the closer they get, he’s starting to poke holes in that power — which felt like a lot of what this section was. But it hasn’t really lessened my trepidation for our boys as they get closer to Vegas. You know what I mean?
Laura: A lot of things I think are happening. He is poking holes in how all-powerful he is, but it feels like sort of the yin and yang to what he also did with Mother Abagail.
Sarah: Yeah.
Laura: So there’s a real balancing happening in this part of the book, which for me was a little jarring — to go from all of these hundreds of pages spending in the Free Zone with these characters that we love and how they’re setting up their community and all this, and then now to spend the last couple sections in Vegas. I’m like, this is a decidedly different vibe. And I agree with you. It doesn’t make him any less scary.
Sarah: But that’s because we know from life experience — not to mention our own literary tastes — that just because he’s not all-powerful doesn’t make him any less terrifying. It’s almost he’s almost more terrifying now that he’s feeling a little desperate.
Laura: Right, because he’s backed into a corner. People backed into a corner are dangerous, for sure.
Sarah: There’s a lot that happened in this section that sort of brought up so many questions that we have been teetering on the edge of in terms of: what is good and evil? What is all-powerfulness? Who is Mother Abagail and Randall Flagg, like — are they, if they’re not exactly God and the devil, are they angels, demons? And there’s just a lot of questions about those characters, but then also about our community characters in terms of like, nobody is all bad or all good.
Laura: He feels all bad to me, but the bad is complicated. Well, he does. He might be all bad — but I guess I meant the community people as they’re starting to have doubts.
Sarah: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s what opens up the most interesting moments, especially with Lloyd and Nadine and everyone not operating out of a place of pure fear. Because the holes that King pokes in Randall Flagg’s power break the spell just enough that people in Vegas can start to assess their own decision-making. In the same way that Mother Abagail disappearing freed people up to take leadership roles and make some decisions in the Free Zone — it’s a very similar situation, I think.
Laura: Yeah, that’s what I was feeling in the balance of it all. When Mother Abagail goes on her walk to the woods, it’s kind of disappointing, but you still have this human nature thing of like, all right, we’ll buck up, we got to come together and do it in her absence. But when we start to see the failings or the humanness of Randall Flagg — “disappointing” is not a word that covers it. It feels like terrifying. Like, oh no. Because we know men like this who start to lose their grip on power — if it slips even a little bit, they get very erratic and dangerous.
Sarah: Well, and the reasoning of the people around him — they’re like, oh no. I did so many things, I made so many decisions, based on the premise that he is protecting us. These people have made some moral and ethical sacrifices on the premise that he was gonna keep them safe. And he couldn’t even keep them safe from Trashcan Man. But I’m skipping ahead — let’s start with chapter 65.
Chapter 65: Randall Flagg in the Desert
Laura: Chapter 65 opens with Randall Flagg out in the desert. He’s just cooking a rabbit and thinking. This is, I think, not the first time we’re in Randall Flagg’s head, but it’s the first time this whole section where we’re getting a bit more of a fuller picture of how he thinks. And it is substantially more human than we’ve experienced him.
Sarah: He’s frustrated with himself and his powers. It’s almost like he has also taken his powers for granted. He cannot see who the third spy is. He cannot figure that out. He’s baffled that Harold Lauder attempted to betray him in the end by shooting at Nadine. He’s having trouble levitating, which is this —
Laura: Oh, my God.
Sarah: Well, considering what happens to poor Nadine, I don’t think so.
Laura: He comes through in the end, as the case may be.
Sarah: Oh, my God. I was so freaked out at the beginning of this chapter — how he would look at the wolves and they would fight. We’re going through a lot of the diminishment of his powers, but King is still like, don’t forget this dude is scary. He would just look at the wolves around him and they would start to bite each other and fight each other, and I thought, oh, that’s just such creepy dark imagery. That he is just like violence personified and a mere glance can bring it out in these creatures. I was very freaked out by that.
Laura: Yeah, he’s so creepy in this part. But to me it was giving more demon than devil.
Sarah: Yeah, and I thought it was so interesting how he talked about how he couldn’t remember his life or experiences before the super flu. He was no longer strictly a man if he had ever been one. He was like an onion slowly peeling away one layer at a time — only it was the trappings of humanity that seemed to be peeling away. Organized reflection, memory, possibly even free will, if there ever had been such a thing. He can only remember the events since the super flu. He was losing himself is how it’s described. So to me that’s so interesting. That feels like something that would happen as his power grew — but maybe there was something in his power and connection and ability to control other humans that was really linked to his own human experiences.
Laura: Well, and he also says — this is skipping ahead, but it’s relevant — he says later in this section that there might be other versions of him. What if there was one in China, what if there was one in Russia? He’s kind of assuming there are other versions of him, but that’s something to deal with in ten years is how he thinks about it. But as this whole story has been set up with Mother Abagail representing the good and Randall Flagg representing the bad — now that Mother Abagail has died, it’s interesting that it’s not then just like evil reigns. Because the evil is faltering. The evil is faltering in the face of her death. Characters throughout this entire section are starting to mention: this all changed when she died. When that power — it’s like they keep each other in check. There is a natural order of things, and when there is one to balance the other, that’s what keeps it in check. Now that one has died, instead of evil becoming total dominance, it’s become chaos and confusion.
Sarah: She must have known that. She must have had a sense that that was going to happen. I think there is a theme here, beginning with Nadine and continuing, that this isn’t going to end the way everybody expected it to. Nadine thought she knew what was going to happen when she got to him, that she was going to have this ecstasy. Instead, it was horrific.
Nadine and the Desert
Laura: I underlined the whole thing — because I think it’s one long sentence. He battered into her invader destroyer and the cold blood gushed down her thighs and then he was in her all the way up to her womb and the moon was in her eyes cold and silver — and it just goes. It’s like a paragraph. The sentence just keeps going and going and going describing that. It’s wild.
Sarah: So after he cooks the rabbit and has his philosophical thoughts or whatever, cut to Nadine on her Vespa with her white hair — very visual, very kind of cool image in a way — driving to the desert. The Vespa ends up dying. She’s totally dehydrated and delusional, sort of. And she turns around and he’s sitting there on his car. And she knew he was going to be there. To me, the image of her turning around and him sitting there was like, you know, the hot guy, the cool guy who sits on the hood of the car looking — I don’t know if that’s a 50s image, like from Grease, but it really sort of comes all the way through into present time — the hot cool guy sitting on the hood of their car. And you almost expect her to be grateful to see him. She’s been waiting for him since her own college days.
Laura: She’s walking in the desert. She’s delirious. She’s dehydrated. I also made a note here about the walking. He is known throughout King canon as the Walkin’ Dude. He is the Walkin’ Dude. And yet in this book, people just walk. They have to walk. They walk in ways that annoy me — instead of using easier means of transportation. Remember Trashcan Man walked until he was delirious and dehydrated into Vegas? The four men coming over from the Free Zone, they’re walking, even though there are other ways to do it. There is something about walking in this story. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be an equal playing field, like we all have to walk. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be a reference to pilgrimages or journeys — the Camino de Santiago, things like that. I just am like, we return to walking always. And that is obviously a thing that we’re supposed to pick up on.
Sarah: Well, I was just listening to Michael Pollan on the Ezra Klein Show about his new book about consciousness. He talked about all the brain science around walking and how it makes you more creative. It’s such an embodied experience that it really connects all the different pieces of your consciousness together. That’s definitely my experience walking — it’s where I feel clearest. But I think it’s interesting that in this book there’s not a consistent conclusion about walking. Sometimes people walk and it helps them, and some people walk and it pushes them to the brink and they make a bad alliance — like Trashcan Man, and Nadine here. She walked straight into insanity with this encounter she’s been waiting for for decades.
Sarah: Yeah, I don’t know what it is. But maybe that’s the point. When all else fails, in a post-pandemic world, when all else falls away — it’s walking. We revert to walking. That’s our most primal thing. Before agriculture, we were wandering tribesmen. That is fundamental to who we are for sure. Anyway — she turns around, sees him at the car, and it should be this grand — reunion isn’t the right word — grand meeting. And it just isn’t. It’s gross. She’s repulsed. She calls him an ageless pimple.
Sarah: So gross. An ageless pimple finally brought to a head and about to spew for some noisome — How do you say that word?
Lauren: You know what, I was reading this out loud and I got to that word and I was like, what is that word?
Sarah: We can leave this in the edit. Nobody knows how to say it. Noisome fluid. Some sweetness long since curdled.That’s disgusting.
Laura: When I was making some notes about this scene, the first thing I wrote was that he rapes her. And then I was rethinking — this is just me thinking out loud, nobody come for me — I was like, this was always the plan. This has been her plan since pre-pandemic. They were going to come together and have a union in this way. She has saved herself for this person. So at first I was like, is that rape? And then I reread the scene and I was like, oh no, this is rape. She is screaming. She’s trying to get away.
Sarah: It doesn’t matter. It is weird though — she had so many points to turn around. At so many points she understood consciously that he was dangerous, that this was a place from which she could never return. Nadine — of all the characters — Lloyd makes a certain amount of sense to me, Trashcan Man makes a certain amount of sense to me, even Harold. But Nadine, I’m like, I don’t get it. You didn’t want anybody to die. And then you turn all the way. You had Joe/Leo. Except for that moment with Larry when she’s like, please, please, please help me — there are just so many moments where I’m like, you knew how bad this was going to get. Your subconscious bubbled up into your conscious thought many times, like: no, abort, this is a bad idea.
Laura: I don’t know if she’s meant to be like a sacrificial lamb, or if she’s meant to be, as he calls it, an incubator.
Sarah: The implication to me is like his child could not be conceived willingly. She had to be taken this way and sort of put into the land of insanity for his child to be born or whatever. That to me was the subtle implication of the whole thing.
Laura: Well, she is one of the most complicated characters in that there are glimpses of her being good throughout the whole novel. So why is she saving herself for this sort of ultimate evil? And then she doubts herself right up until she meets him. We also have these unusual ideas about what she was doing with Harold — not completely consummating, but doing everything but. And I got the impression she didn’t hate that. Maybe she was just doing that to manipulate Harold, but you kind of get the implication that she likes it. There’s that whole scene where she sort of wants them to go all the way and she has to stop herself. So she’s enjoying these sexual acts with Harold, but then when it comes to this act she’s been waiting for all this time, it’s just so horrible and violent and so —Rosemary’s Baby.
Laura: Yes! Which by the way came out in 1968. That had to have been in his mind.
Sarah: Well, what also happens in the midst of this is that Randall Flagg feels somebody pass by. He also understands that the men from the Free Zone are coming for him. So he hasn’t lost the eye completely — he gets these senses that somebody’s passing by. It’s a full moon, so we’re all putting together the pieces of who that somebody might be. That’ll be confirmed in the next chapter — chapter 66. But he’s still, the holes are showing. I loved when he got back to Vegas with Nadine — he saw the questioning in everybody’s eyes. So he knows everybody knows things aren’t working out the way he planned. But there’s still a lot of power here.
Laura: And I think he’s trying to hide the slippage. Like, he’s trying to act like he’s still all-knowing. He definitely does not want people to know that he is, quote-unquote, losing himself.
Sarah: But that’s what’s so interesting about this chapter — you’re in his head, so you know what he knows, including that somebody passed by. It’s complicated.
Laura: Also — how relevant is this to our current world? Just desperate to cover up lapses in brain functioning?
Sarah: Whatever could you be referencing, Laura?
Sarah: Well, also, people backed in a corner are dangerous. That’s hyper relevant on many, many, many stages.
Laura: Look, I feel like I could say this about our past two presidents — our current president and our past president — that there is a misstep and then a desperation to show that there was not an age-related mishap. When there’s a slip and then they double down. Yeah.
Chapter 66: Lloyd Shows Up
Sarah: And I think in chapter 66, we start spending a lot of time with Lloyd. That’s where I thought Lloyd was one of the most interesting characters in this whole chapter — the way he was kind of processing Randall Flagg’s slips and processing his own choices to begin with. I thought that was one of the most interesting themes through this section. Lloyd really showed up. He showed up and he showed out in this section, and I kind of dug it.
Laura: Listen, I have much to say about Lloyd. Except to say — how far has Lloyd come from his shootout with Polk?
Sarah: He even says that. That’s one of my favorite parts of the chapter: he got better. It’s like, it’s giving Larry. It’s giving Stu. There were people on both sides of this battle who, being chosen and stepping up and finding some leadership, really changed them. And I think Lloyd’s one of those people. So we get to chapter 66. Lloyd’s back in Vegas and he’s gotten word that Trashcan Man — apparently not always the easiest of allies or tools to keep in your control. Go figure. Who would have guessed?
Laura: I mean, Lloyd isn’t just that he’s been chosen — he’s become a leader. Are we all on our own path? I’ve said this throughout the whole book, because I think a huge theme of this book is your path is your path. I think that’s what we’re exploring a little bit with Nadine also. Even though she doesn’t want to fulfill this thing she’s been on a path to fulfill the whole time, I don’t know how much choice she has in the matter by the time she meets Flagg in the desert. But we’re all on our own dedicated path. We have our roles, like it or not.
Sarah: That’s why I don’t think “your path is your path” fits this quite so well — because I think there are so many people in this book who the path changed. Lloyd is different now. He was in a place of desperation and he threw in with Flagg, but that has changed him. And I think he could be a very different kind of henchman than Stephen King portrays. If you’re a Sopranos fan — it’s the difference between like Paulie and Silvio. There’s a kind of blind adherence, like you just follow the boss. And then there’s a more conciliatory approach. He even says, like, who would have become a diplomat — who would use that word to describe old Lloyd when he was hanging out with Poke? So it’s kind of changed him. His assessment — so first he learns that Trashcan Man has booby-trapped a truck. Spoiler alert: it gets worse from there. Then Julie Lowry comes and tells him about Nick Andros and Tom Cullen. And so he’s starting to put some pieces together. And watching him put these pieces together and decide what it means for him, what it means for the community, what it means for Randall Flagg — it’s not a level of complex decision-making or analysis that I would have predicted Lloyd able to do.
Laura: Well, no. That’s why I’m sort of asking what exactly is going on here, because at the end of this chapter, Tom Cullen realizes it’s the full moon. It’s time for him to hit the road. And he is also thinking more clearly. His time in Vegas has changed his brain. And so this is what I’m trying to ask about both Lloyd and anyone in Vegas — what King’s commentary is here. It’s not just that they have been entrusted with a leadership role, or that they’re in a place of belonging, or any of those philosophical things. It seems that there is something in this orbit, in this community, that is making them think more clearly. It’s literally making them — I don’t want to say smarter, that’s a weird word — but Tom Cullen has actual disabilities and he is without a doubt thinking more clearly as he sets off to go back to the Free Zone than he was in any previous iteration of his life. And so I was thinking, what is King saying here? Because you would think the narrative would be: if you’ve chosen evil, you’re cloudy, you’re muddy, you’re brainwashed or something. But he seems to be saying that these people are having more clarity than even the Free Zone people.
Sarah: I don’t think Tom Cullen is thinking more clearly because of his time in Vegas. I think he is thinking within the framework of the hypnosis. To my mind, the hypnosis is like an on-off switch and it’s still on. It fundamentally changes his brain. The hypnosis puts him in a future-oriented place that he doesn’t usually exist in — he’s very present-oriented. And so with the hypnosis and the mission in front of him, it changes the way he’s processing events because he has a goal. I love how he says that the people in Vegas were nice folks, not much different from Boulder folks as far as he could tell — but they had that smell about them. It was as if these people were wearing happy folk faces, but their real faces, their underneath faces, were monster faces.
Sarah:Their underneath faces — so good. And I think that’s what King is getting at. He’s not making the argument that people are fundamentally good or bad individually. He seems to be saying: people make all kinds of choices, and he’s walking us through how people get to these places where they’re facing this battle between good and evil. It’s not like Stu, or in particular Larry, woke up and were like, I’m a good guy and now I’m going to make all the good right choices. I thought it was really interesting in chapter 66 when Lloyd is talking to Julie Lowry and she says, nice fucking guy — which is such a throwback to Larry. Because I don’t know how you read this section and don’t see that Lloyd is trying to make good choices that, if not protect the people of Vegas, at least live up to his responsibility towards them. And even — I know this sounds crazy — even when he kind of says, like, I’ve made this choice, this is who I have pledged my loyalty to and I’m gonna stick to it — I wouldn’t call it honorable, but I would at least call it consistent. And I think he’s really pushing this idea that people can change. The circumstances change you. And there’s no neat and tidy way to unpack how you get to even a very black-and-white battle between good and evil.
Individual vs. Collective
Laura: The more we’re talking through it, the more I think this might be a little bit of a commentary on individuality versus collective. The people in Vegas are very individualized in their decision-making — even with Trashcan Man, Lloyd — my allegiance is to Flagg, or I am making this choice. And maybe that brings some kind of clarity, or just a sole, s-o-l-e, soul mission — or s-o-u-l, a soul mission — that is a lot more defined. Whereas when you are trying to make decisions for the collective, or for a greater good, as they’re doing in the Free Zone with their community meetings and all of these things, that brings sometimes more of a muddiness when you’re trying to choose for others. I’m not saying one is good or bad. Obviously I’m all for the collective good. But I am just wondering if the people in Vegas, although they are doing things that ultimately benefit the community, are making decisions on an individual level.
Sarah: Yeah, but that’s in real contrast to like Lloyd in chapter 67, where he figures out — when he’s trying to trace down the Nick Andros/Tom Cullen connection — he calls the guy who tracks people. I thought that was also one of the creepiest parts of this book. The sort of secret police that Randall Flagg had. Talk about current applicability. A version of real surveillance and tracking of people. It was like he had a Facebook algorithm file on people before there were social media algorithm files. So Lloyd learns that there’s this red list of people that Flagg has been keeping from him. And that really disrupts his understanding of Flagg — because ultimately that was a mistake. If Lloyd had known from the beginning about this connection, maybe he could have acted and caught Tom Cullen before he left town. And here’s the thing: Randall Flagg can’t even articulate why he kept the red list from Lloyd. So this other information comes in and it disrupts Lloyd’s understanding of not only his relationship with Flagg, but what Flagg is doing for the collective — and therefore what Lloyd is doing on behalf of Flagg for the collective.
Laura: But it still reads as individuality to me. They’re doing it for their own benefit, even if they don’t understand it. They’re not doing it to protect others or for a greater good. Those that are starting to defect never had any real loyalty to Flagg in the same way that those who might have had a loyalty to Mother Abagail. It’s a version of loyalty — but it’s an individual loyalty. It’s a loyalty to Flagg. It’s not a loyalty to the people of Vegas.
Sarah: Well, I think everyone’s loyalty — even if it was individual decision-making — was based on this assumption that Flagg was all-powerful and would protect them. And the more and more that gets disrupted, the more they’re questioning. That’s why people start to leave. There was a sense of like, I’m not saying to keep myself safe — I’m saying because he’s so powerful that if I step one millimeter out of line he’ll kill me. But the more people that he cannot control — well, then people start thinking, maybe he can’t control me either, and maybe I’ll bounce.
Laura: But again, their assumption that he can protect them is individual. They’re not worried about who he can protect for others. There is no us here. This is a political idea.
Sarah: Well, it’s so interesting though, because even the people who defect from Vegas — they have relationships with each other and they leave together. It might not be everybody in Vegas, but King does poke a lot of holes in the every-man-for-himself reading. There are relationships in Vegas. There are people who have aligned together.
Chapter 67 and the Red List
Laura: The first major hole we see — with the red list thing and everybody understanding that maybe Randall Flagg is not Satan himself — is Lloyd gets on to him. He tells him about the Tom situation and basically says, if you had told me about the red list, I could have stopped this. This is your fault. I couldn’t believe it. And he says this with Nadine in the background, catatonic.
Sarah: So weird. And she really — she turns it on a dime. So they get into this fight, Flagg screwed up, Lloyd sees that — sees an opening to say this is your fault, not mine — which is a huge shift in people’s understanding. And then all of a sudden Nadine is not catatonic and really is back to the old Nadine. I found that turn kind of hard.
Laura: Well, listen — you can’t skim this section, because you will miss a really pivotal part of the book. I actually kind of feel like King didn’t totally give this its due for what is about to happen. We have read a thousand pages leading up to Flagg’s consummation and impregnation of Nadine, for her to just flip a switch in two paragraphs or whatever. I was like, wait — I mean, I knew this was coming, of course, but I did not remember as I was reading it aloud how quickly this turns.
Sarah: Well, I wonder if it makes more sense when you put together this slow drip of the holes in his power — Harold, Dana, Tom Cullen escaping, then the first Trashcan Man blowing up the trucks, then the pilots — the dominoes are falling pretty fast at this point. And so you kind of wonder, like, was Nadine there the whole time? Was her ultimate purpose to get there and get impregnated as she thought? Or did she, as these dominoes start to fall, did something awaken in her to realize: no, my ultimate purpose is to tell him that the four from the Free Zone are coming, that he’s screwing everything up, and to basically bait him into throwing her over the parapet at the MGM Grand to her death? When I think about it, it feels sudden — but then I’m like, no. Maybe back to the path. This was ultimately Nadine’s path. Maybe that’s why we needed someone who felt like they were questioning the whole time. So that when her moment came — maybe what I’m arguing is that Nadine was the ultimate Free Zone spy.
Laura: Oh, that’s interesting. But she also gained some knowledge that I’m not sure where it came from. When she and Harold leave the Free Zone, as far as they know, they’ve blown up the whole committee. Until she gets to the MGM, pregnant, traumatized. I guess she’s starting to realize she’s given her whole life over to someone she thought was going to be a god. And then when she gets there, he’s a devil. She either overhears all the ways in which he’s failing, or maybe that catatonic state was some sort of — like the hypnosis — maybe when she’s in that catatonic state. But suddenly she knows that the guys are coming from the Free Zone to get him.
Sarah: She has that knowledge. Maybe she sees it in her catatonic state.
Laura: Then where does that knowledge come from? Is it bestowed? Does it come in dreams — because dreams are such a big thing?
Sarah: Stephen King has been making the argument that moments of trauma and disruption open up levels of consciousness not usually available to us. That has been pretty consistent. So you can see why the moment in the desert could have perhaps unlocked some things for Nadine — because it’s pretty freaking traumatic. My favorite thing she says to him, though, when she baits him into throwing her over the edge: Everything you made here is falling apart. And why not? The effective half-life of evil is always relatively short.
Sarah: I love that line. I thought that was so good.
Laura: With Nadine, you also can’t overlook the mother instinct. She doesn’t want to be pregnant with his baby. She doesn’t want this to continue on. She doesn’t want to carry this demon to term. She wants to rid herself of all of this. And she’s obviously wildly manipulated Harold, attempted to manipulate Larry. It’s not that the ultimate manipulation — making him so mad he throws her over the edge — was out of character. It just felt like a lot of buildup, and we kind of think maybe we’re going to get to see the next gen of this. It really severs an enormous storyline of Flagg’s.
Sarah: Yeah, but people are dropping like flies around here right now. You know what I mean? The closer we get to the end, it doesn’t matter how long you’ve spent with this person — everybody’s on the chopping block.
Chapter 66 Continued: Tom Cullen and Love
Sarah: What I think is so interesting about this chapter too is that he doesn’t end it with Flagg’s failure to levitate. A quarter of an inch; they would go no higher. We end it with Tom, and Tom saying that the biggest difference in Vegas was simply love: There were nice enough people and all, but there wasn’t much love in them because they were too busy being afraid. Love didn’t grow well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn’t grow very well in a place where it was always dark.
Laura: I underlined that section too.
Sarah: And he’s talking to Nick in his dreams. Nick is keeping him safe. But it’s really sad because he talks about waiting to see Nick again, but for some reason he could never understand — Nick had turned away. He doesn’t know yet.
Laura: It’s also interesting that in dreams, Nick can talk and hear — and in Nick’s own dreams he could hear.
Sarah: Well, he had to do something — because what’s he going to do, write a note Tom can’t read in his dreams?
Laura: I’m telling you — the fact that Randall Flagg can’t get up is an obvious wink that he can’t get it up. I mean, he can, but he can’t. It’s an impotent kind of —
Sarah: Okay, but look — isn’t that back to our theory? It’s easy and almost intuitive to think if somebody is all-powerful, they’re all-powerful forever. And Stephen King is like, no. Our choices, their impacts, the consequences, the energetic exchange are all connected and nothing’s written in stone. Something can change at any moment, including with the Walkin’ Dude and his ability to levitate.
Laura: Well, I think there are so many doubts. When everything was going his way and everything was falling into place exactly how it was supposed to — he carries himself with the confidence of a man that everything’s going their way. And then when everything starts to fall apart — because the pilots blowing up are his fault — when Flagg finds out that Tom Cullen is the spy and is now on the move, he’s told that by Lloyd. He was not able to know that himself. And when Lloyd tells him, he sends the pilots after Tom for no reason. He even thinks in his mind — how bad would it be if Tom Cullen got back to the Free Zone? It wouldn’t be that big a deal. What’s he going to tell them? We’ve got the electricity going over here. He doesn’t have much to report back. I could just let him go. But no — his ego makes him send the pilots after Tom. And because Trashcan Man had rigged those helicopters, which might have sat there for weeks — instead, Flagg sends all the pilots after Tom Cullen, blowing them all up. So again, that’s all his fault. It’s all his misstep. Everyone in the room, Lloyd and Nadine, is seeing: oh, this guy — there’s no plan. He is losing his power. It’s getting sloppy.
Sarah: Listen, what’d you expect bringing on somebody like Trashcan Man?
Chapter 68: Trashcan Man’s Story, Told Twice
Sarah: So we get a whisper of this, but we get in chapter 68, from Trashcan Man’s perspective — some of the pilots cracked a joke at his expense and he lost it and blew everything up. Then he kind of realizes — I love this line at the beginning: he was walking proof that a man finally takes on the look of what he is, because his skin had burned, peeled, burned, peeled again, and finally had not tanned but blackened. So creepy.
Sarah: And you would think — okay, he’s blown everybody up. All is lost. The Trashcan Man is the burning man. We’re done here. Except now his ass is out here looking for a nuclear bomb.
Laura: Well, I think this is all about trauma. They made a joke about fire starters or bedwetters or whatever silly thing they said. It brought up all of his trauma of being bullied, and he just goes to a place of destruction. What I thought was interesting from a storytelling point of view is that we hear this story twice. We hear it when the guy comes and tells it to Lloyd — this is what happened, the guy made a joke, here’s the exact joke he made, Trashcan Man loses it. And then we get to hear that exact same story with the exact same line, but from Trashcan Man’s point of view. And Stephen King — my buddy Steve — doesn’t do this over and over again throughout. This is one of the times that is interestingly repetitive. He does it purposely. It’s a storytelling choice to hear this story twice from two different angles. And you even hear that Trashcan Man almost realizes, like, oops, I might have overreacted.
Sarah: But that’s back to the theme I’m pushing — that these pivotal moments, instead of just being this march down fate’s predetermined journey, there are these pivotal moments that might not mean anything to you. The pilots weren’t trying to be mean. It was a throwaway line. Randall Flagg’s decision to keep the red list to himself — he couldn’t even explain it to you. Doesn’t even know why he did it. But to Trashcan Man, this moment was wildly impactful. Because everybody is their own sort of bomb waiting to go off, right? Everybody has this one particular combination that could unlock good or bad, creativity or disaster, whatever. With somebody like Trashcan Man — it just feels like we could have all seen this coming. It’s another sort of Flagg hubris. You thought you were going to be able to control somebody who could find weapons and can’t even explain to you why or how.
Laura: It just feels like a nod to history too. If you look throughout so many wars — if this hadn’t happened, this might have happened. In this case, if Trashcan Man hadn’t blown up the pilots — it’s a sliding doors moment. If he hadn’t been triggered by some offhand remark, if he hadn’t blown up the pilots and the helicopters, would the Vegas contingent have completely annihilated the Free Zone? Maybe.
Sarah: Trashcan Man was a liability always. Even if they’d taken out the Free Zone, Trashcan Man was gonna stay a liability.
Laura: But without Trashcan Man, they wouldn’t have had their weaponry. So you have those people that are both a liability and an asset depending on the day.
Sarah: And you realize — everything Flagg is putting together is so fragile. Yeah, he has a Trashcan Man, but he has so few pilots. That’s it. There are no other pilots. And yes, he can draw Nadine to him — but when you draw someone that way and make them so fragile, they might throw themselves off a roof. I just think Randall Flagg’s fundamental weakness is that he sees everybody as pawns. And what Stephen King is sort of saying, particularly in this section, is: these are not pawns. These are people. And people are inherently messy, complicating.
Chapters 70-71: Defection and the Final Balance
Sarah: So we get Chief Whitney and Horgan coming and saying, we’re out, we’re leaving — which is not something you would have predicted hundreds of pages ago when they were crucifying this dude in front of everybody.
Laura: I was mad that the chef came and told Lloyd he was going to bounce. Why would you do that? You know Lloyd is loyal to Flagg. Why would he keep your secret? I guess he’s giving him an opportunity to come with them, or giving him the respect of not just leaving in the night — but I just was like, why would you ever trust Lloyd?
Laura: I liked it because I thought it was showing that they have built real relationships here. There is trust between the members in Vegas. And I think it was also meant to show us how far the understanding that Flagg has weakened has gone — not just that they’re willing to bounce, but that they’re willing to tell Lloyd about it. One of these lieutenants is like, he ain’t the same. He’s slipping.
Laura: What did you think — and I’m asking you this because a lot of our Slow Read community has discussed this in the comments on Substack, y’all — you’ve got to get into the comments on Substack. We have the best Slow Read community. People say the smartest, most interesting things. They pick up stuff Sarah and I miss. You could be one of them. Go participate on Substack. But what did you think about Dana and Nadine dying in such similar ways, out the windows of the MGM?
Sarah: Is this lazy storytelling? Is this purposefully a parallel? Is it a Shakespeare allusion? I meant to look that up and I forgot.
Sarah: Usually the safe bet is yes. Bible or Shakespeare, you’re probably pretty safe if you cover both those bases. I think it is a metaphor for his power. He’s at the top floor. He’s in this penthouse. He is at the pinnacle of his reach and vision — you can see from far up there. It’s supposed to represent that he’s at the top. And then that is ultimately twisted and used against him. It’s a metaphor for the inherent vulnerability of that much power.
Laura: But both of the women who are betraying him dying in this way — it was a smidge unsatisfying for me.
Sarah: Oh, I don’t know how else they could have gotten away from him. They’re not going to fire a gun. She tried to pull her knife, he turned into a banana. What else are they going to do? These are their options. I think it was a really smart way for them to use the bare minimum of what they had at their disposal to get out of there.
Laura: And in this chapter — the women angle has been discussed so much on Substack — in general, this is a very male-dominated section. It is all men. Yeah, we have Trashcan Man out there looking for the bomb, we have Randall Flagg, they’re looking for the Free Zone guys coming this way, and we spend a lot of time with Tom Cullen.
Sarah: There’s just a lot of journeying. Tom is journeying. The Free Zone guys are coming. Randall Flagg starts out in the desert. There’s just a lot of traveling going on.
Laura: Yeah. Chapters 70 and 71 are both short little looks at what’s happening, including — Trashcan Man is in the desert. And he has, by his own ways of divination, found a bunker that has what we can only assume is a nuclear warhead.
Sarah: This is wildly unbelievable to me. You don’t think it just feeds into all the conspiracy theories of this is where America hides our bombs, in the desert outside of Vegas? Yeah, but they hide them really good.
Laura: Do they though?
Sarah: I feel like there have to be so many security protocols — if it loses power, if something like this happens — I’m not saying you couldn’t get to them, but you couldn’t get to them as like one random guy, and you sure as hell aren’t bringing out one on a cart. That’s not how nuclear weapons work.
Laura: Listen, when I first read this, as a teenager and in subsequent readings, I’ve always been kind of confused by this section. Not by the logistics — he’s obviously found a bomb and trying to bring it above ground — but it’s like, suddenly in this section things got weirdly technical. I’m just going to skim this part because I don’t understand all these things.
Laura: Yeah, I don’t love where this story is going, logistically speaking.
Sarah: I do buy that Randall Flagg still has this vision. And I certainly buy that Kojak understands that he’s there and looking at them. I want to say that for sure.
Laura: Also — we have been given a nugget hundreds and hundreds of pages back that Kojak is going to live for like eighteen more years. I hold on to that like the hope that it is.
Sarah: Because it is. I was disquieted by this moment at the very end of chapter 71. When Randall Flagg is spying on them — peeking at them through his eye — and Kojak can see him: What he had forgotten was so staggeringly simple that it was humbling. They were having their problems too. They were frightened too. And as a result, they were making a colossal mistake. I thought that was such a powerful turn. He’s not all-powerful — but look, neither are they.
Laura: Yeah. And they’re without their — I don’t know, spiritual leader. I’m not sure what you would even call Mother Abagail at this point, but as far as we know, they’re working in human realm only.
Sarah: They’ve lost their leader. In Vegas, it’s the opposite — he’s lost his people.
Laura: Oh, so smart.
Laura: It’s true. And it feels like — obviously with all the things we’ve parsed through that are storytelling or silly or supernatural — what you just said is the part that feels the most human about this story. Leadership and warring factions making mistakes, making assumptions, but also having some similar parallel problems.
Getting Close to the End
Sarah: Laura, we’re getting so close to the end.
Laura: I know.
Laura: What do you think? Are you excited for the end? We only have 100 pages left — less, maybe.
Sarah: I don’t even know. I’ve just been hanging out with these people for so long. I’m stressed about who’s going to die because I know some people are. I’m feeling a lot of stress about that. And I feel like I’m gonna get to the end and be like, okay, but so now let’s go back to the Free Zone — you tell me what happens for the next hundred years in the Free Zone. Which I know I’m not gonna get. But I mean — I’m excited. I’m ready for them. Let’s have it out. Let’s do this. I’m not scared. It’s go time, Laura. It’s go time.
LauraThe Stand is coming. And hopefully we’ll see all of you on the other side.
Sarah: But I don’t think we’re going to see all these characters on the other side.
Laura: I hope you come and tell us at our book club meeting — our May book club meeting next week — what y’all think as we enter these last hundred pages. I also just want us to think about — because this is my first Slow Read and we’ll dissect all of this when we get to the end — the difference that it makes in your reading life to have spent six months with these characters. It’s really changed me. Both the Slow Read aspect of it with a book I’ve read multiple times before, and the reading aloud — which I know I’m the only one doing it that way. There’s going to be a lot to say as a Slow Read community that I want us to talk about in terms of just the experience. It’s a little bit separate from the book itself. Because you know — it’s never too late for an old dog to learn new tricks in terms of shaking up your reading life a little bit. This has been really, really good.
Sarah: I bet Kojak’s going to learn some new tricks over the next eighteen years.
Laura: Come on now. Yeah, I bet he is.
Sarah: All right. Well, we look forward to seeing all of you at our book club meeting next week. We will be back covering chapters 72 through 73. And until then — see you on the other side.
Sarah: Laura, after a very long time in the free zone, we are back with Randall Flagg and his crew, which have been varying levels of infiltrated by the committee spies. How did you feel about this section?
Laura: I thought these particular chapters were some of the best written of the whole entire book. I have two standout sections that I consider the best in terms of incredible sentences and just the craft of it — this is one of them. Not a ton of wild imagination necessarily, but the sentences in this section, I was like, oh, that’s so well written. How he looped back several different things, and then the section many hundreds of pages ago with Glenn Bateman — that one felt really well written too, really poetic. But this section feels different. Like he was in a flow state, Mr. King, when he did this part.
Sarah: I totally agree. I thought it was really engaging. And I also want to say — in this section as a whole, King makes a ton of literary references. He references Edgar Allan Poe, he references Lord of the Rings. I looked up the law book that Judge Ferris is reading, the one King mentions multiple times, and that’s a real book — it’s literally about racial social justice. I looked at it and was like, okay, he is doing some things. King is doing some things. This is pre-Black Lives Matter as a movement, but obviously these conversations were being had. We’re coming out of the 60s, back in the 70s when this was first written — it makes sense.
Laura: And back to the writing style changing — I feel like that’s also part of the fact that we’re now in Vegas, and we haven’t been there for hundreds and hundreds of pages, and the writing is just different. It almost feels like these little sections — Judge Ferris, Dana, and then Harold — could almost be novellas with just a little more structure put in. They’re so well done. But it’s a really different tone from the time we’ve been spending in the free zone, which is a little folksy, a little quote-unquote normal novel stuff. This is really different, and that feels intentional. The Vegas parts have a different flavor. And I also like that he’s making the connection that not everyone in Vegas is evil. People are people. It’s not black and white.
Chapter 61: Poor Judge Ferris
Sarah: Well, let’s start with chapter 61, because poor Judge Ferris doesn’t actually make it to Vegas.
Laura: God bless him. Bless his heart.
Sarah: There’s a lot going on in this chapter — the plot happens, but also King is pulling together a lot of things. So we find Judge Ferris making his cross-country trip, and we know that Randall Flagg has sent patrols to stop him, to kill him — but please, please, please protect his head, because I’m going to send it back to the free zone and freak them all the way out. Some very specific instructions.
At first I’m like, why are we taking this beloved character and sending him directly to his death? But there are two moments where I start to see the pieces coming together.
The first is Judge Ferris is in a hotel room and a crow taps on his window. And Judge Ferris realizes this crow is Randall Flagg. He pulls a gun — and what I thought the most affecting part was, the crow slash Randall Flagg kind of panics. Oh no, if he shoots me, that’s it. Luckily for the crow slash Randall Flagg, the safety’s on. But Stephen King is giving us this insight to realize he is not immortal. He’s very powerful, but he can take on these other forms, and that means he’s vulnerable the way those forms are vulnerable. Which I thought was really interesting.
Laura: Well, I also thought it was interesting because we haven’t encountered much supernaturalness for many hundreds of pages. It’s been kind of practical for a while.
Sarah: What are you talking about? Are you forgetting the drive-in scene where he took over the speakers and was speaking to Nadine?
Laura: Yes, but it’s all Randall Flagg–based. The percentage of supernaturalness in this story is on the lower side than I think most people might expect from Stephen King. This has been more of a practical, post-apocalyptic novel.
Sarah: We’ve just spent a lot of time in committee meetings and town meetings. Even when Mother Abigail’s healing Franny, it is a moment among a lot of secretarial work.
Laura: Yeah. I was like, bring it, Crow. I was ready for something like this to happen.
Sarah: But there’s also — not just that the crow gives us insight into Flagg’s vulnerabilities — the whole time I was thinking, why are you so worried about him? Why are you so paranoid about Judge Ferris making it all the way to Vegas? You know he’s a spy, you hunt him out immediately. There is sort of a “thou dost protest too much” situation. Why are you sending parties all over the United States to stop this one guy?
Laura: Don’t you think this is the first real glimpse we have that Randall Flagg is scared?
Sarah: Yes. Exactly. I think that’s what this whole section is about — he is paranoid, he is not all-powerful. For one thing, he has to depend on animals to be in a lot of places at once, which is a vulnerability we’re learning. And then he has to depend on these dum-dums like Bobby Terry — what a name — to institute his orders, and they’re ding-dongs who can’t do it. The one instruction was: don’t shoot him in the head. And Bobby Terry kills Judge Ferris so dramatically and terribly that he’s unidentifiable. So even if they sent the head back to the free zone, they’d be like, who dis, we don’t know.
Laura: I feel like there are parallels here — not just to our current moment of a wannabe all-powerful dictator, but to past moments too. There’s a lot of bravado in that type of person, but there’s an underlying fear. And also, the people surrounding them doing their bidding are statistically often dum-dums.
Sarah: Well, that’s definitely Dana’s observation in the next chapter — that there are more ding-dongs in Vegas than there are in the Free Zone.
Laura: Yeah, but they work harder.
Sarah: They work harder. Then Bobby Terry screws up, and Randall Flagg transforms into some — I couldn’t quite put it together. Beast, man, crow?
Laura: All I know is there are teeth involved. That part I picked up on. There were teeth, and he died in a very gruesome manner. I wasn’t sure — maybe weasel-y, animal-y?
Sarah: Did you have to get a map out and be like, wait, the sentries are in Oregon? How do we get from the Rockies to Vegas?
Laura: I was so confused.
Sarah: He’s going up and around, obviously. Listen, I’m a big national parks person, so my baseline geography of the mountain ranges and the middle west to far west is probably a little better than most.
Laura: It must be, because I literally was like, Oregon, where are we? What’s going on? I just think everybody — including Randall Flagg, because apparently he materializes like a ghost — is moving around awful quick in this story without airplanes or helicopters, and sometimes just on bicycles.
Sarah: Okay, I didn’t want to nitpick this because I complained earlier in the book about why they were all using bikes. But now that we are into cars, like Judge Ferris doing all the driving, I do have a nitpick of — can you just stop at the empty gas stations and get gas?
Laura: I mean, yes, I guess. Maybe. But it must be a big deal, because poor old Larry is still out there remembering the fact that he could have lost his fingers getting gas and that Harold had such a better way of doing it.
Sarah: And also, I am living in 2026, but they did address it — he got a key from the empty front desk and just let himself into a room.
Laura: I’m assuming it’s a physical key, because now everything would be digital. This is the 70s, where they had physical keys. You’d need electricity to program the key cards.
Sarah: I did think that would be a different thing if this type of super flu took out everybody in 2026. The digital dependency we have now would add a layer of complication.
Laura: Alright, Judge Ferris. You’re the best. R.I.P. Next chapter.
Chapter 62: Dana Juergens, Absolute Badass
Sarah: Dana Juergens. What a badass.
Laura: What a badass. What a badass. Why has he been keeping Dana Juergens from us this whole time? I’m kind of angry.
Sarah: Did your book have an illustration of her?
Laura: Yeah, but she looks — it’s a weird illustration. It’s not how I picture Dana. She looks like a man. And I just don’t think that would be Lloyd’s type, because that’s who she’s sleeping with. I was picturing her as curvy and—
Sarah: I love where he writes that she always thought women looked best on their backs. Like, are you saying that, Stephen King, or is she saying that?
Laura: I feel like you’re just sharing your thoughts, dear sir.
Sarah: I did like the Vegas of it all — she’s in a round bed with a round mirror. That tracks. So she’s sleeping with Lloyd, gathering all kinds of information, like the fact that they’re putting together weapon systems out there. I thought the part about Trashcan Man was so creepy — Lloyd is like, he’s so smart, he’s as strange as the big guy himself, and how he just disappears and sniffs out weapons all across the country.
Laura: Isn’t it funny that Lloyd, who was a common criminal in pre-pandemic life, is interpreting Trashcan Man’s abilities as genius? I’m not disputing that it is a level of genius, but we have experienced Trashcan Man differently as the reader. I think it puts some things together though — that chaotic, vulnerable internal dialogue we’ve seen from him, paired with the prioritization Randall Flagg clearly places on having him there. And Trashcan Man is working under a totally different set of rules — he can come and go. Whereas the rest of Vegas has these really defined work assignments. Dana’s been there ten days and she’s assigned to a crew, they work nine to five. It’s very serious and structured.
Sarah: Kind of like it or not, what Dana is doing — manipulating Lloyd through their relationship — is part of the women’s stereotype that some people critique King for. But she is doing so much more. She’s gathering intel way beyond just that relationship. She’s building relationships, she’s working, she’s putting pieces together. And the way she’s so thoughtful and smart even to the very end — when Flagg tells Lloyd to wait, she was like, I knew immediately that wasn’t what was going to happen because he would have jumped the second you said go. Like, she’s so sharp about the motivations of everybody around her.
And what she gives us is all this color and texture around the fact that not everybody there is a monster. She talks about one guy and says something like, the odd thing is, he sounds really genuinely sorry — too bad he’s also so genuinely scared. She’s adding so much nuance. It’s not just a bunch of Trashcan Mans out there. There are regular people who are just terrified of Randall Flagg.
Laura: It’s like giving Voldemort the whole chapter. They won’t talk about him, they won’t say his name. He was “the great there, not there.” His presence is lurking even when he’s not in the room.
Sarah: Weren’t you fascinated by her friendship with Jenny?
Laura: I was. And I also thought that was actually, if we’re going to talk about the way he writes women — if she’s manipulating Lloyd, she’s also trying to find a bestie. She’s really friend-crushing on Jenny. She likes her and doesn’t understand why Jenny would have been drawn to Vegas in the first place, but she knows she can’t really ask her without showing her cards.
Sarah: Well, that’s because Dana is a badass and is not motivated by fear at all. That little pep talk she gives herself — “my name is Dana Roberta Juergens and I’m afraid, but I’ve been afraid before. All he can take from me is what I would have to give up someday, anyhow — my life. I will not let him break me down. I will not let him make me less than I am. If I can possibly help, but I want to die well, and I’m going to have what I want.” That is not the motivation of people terrified out of their minds. That is a completely different orientation to the world. Dana’s a stoic, I think.
Laura: That speech is so good. But I do think King is also trying to show us why people end up on the quote-unquote bad side. It’s not because they’re evil or want to torture people. It can be because they’re scared. It can be because, as he’s alluded to in the past, they’re techie — so they’re excited to work on the airplanes and get the power grid going. And some of the good people in Vegas are out there loving on little Denny, right? He’s trying to show that they love this child. They want what’s best for this child. It’s complicated.
Sarah: I really hooked on how Dana described Flagg as “glamorous” at one point — especially when we find out Julie Lawry is in Vegas in the next chapter. Some people are drawn to that. Jenny kind of articulates it: I know what I’m getting. I know he’s in control. I might not like it and I’m scared of it, but I know somebody knows what’s going on and is figuring it out. And there was some of that in the free zone with the worship of Mother Abigail too.
Laura: When you get these little short lines, these small tangents and backstories to characters who are inconsequential to the main plot, you are understanding the layers of why people do what they do — or why they’re numb to their own actions and end up in these situations. That’s what makes this book so epic to me. Even to the guys who killed Judge Ferris — we get a few nuggets of backstory to understand how scared they are, how bored they are out there. It gives the story so much richness.
Sarah: And we’re getting complex portrayals not just of everyone in Vegas, but of Flagg himself — who gets bested by Dana. She figures out immediately that he’s playing her, that he’s smiling. The theme of this book, by the way, is that smiling is creepy. Does Stephen King smile?
Laura: I think maybe not, based on what I’m picking up from this novel.
Sarah: So Randall Flagg is smiling at her, being like, listen, babe, we’ve got no reason to — we can both live beside each other. Why are y’all sending spies? I don’t want to hurt anybody. It’s so creepy.
Laura: But she says it was goddamn persuasive. And hypnotizing. There is an element — even without the supernatural part, it can be persuasive. We know people like this who really make us falter. But he is also employing his voodoo, his hypnosis, and she has to keep fighting it.
Sarah: Who the other spy is — I saw Tom Cullen at the top of the cherry picker while she was changing streetlights, and I was afraid Tom was just going to be like, “Hey, it’s my friend Dana!” and blow her cover. That’s why they show up — as the transcript says — at four in the morning, “the hour of the secret police.” Loved that line. And then she realizes pretty quickly, because she’s a badass, what information Flagg is actually trying to get from her. Her mind keeps going back to Tom, and she’s worried he can read her mind, so she’s trying not to let him get inside her head.
Laura: Sarah sent an article last month that was actually about consciousness — I think Stephen King would really like this article. We’ll put it in the show notes. But one of the things it also discusses is the historical precedent of religious figures levitating. I did not know enough about big-C church history to realize, when we first see Randall Flagg levitating, that this is a reference to saints who reportedly levitated — who would fast themselves from a religious point of view and that would give them powers, like levitation. There’s historical documentation of this. I didn’t fully understand that reference when it first appeared.
Sarah: I just think he is doing such a complex dance. Flagg is powerful — everybody’s terrified of him, he made one guy go crazy just by looking at him, he can become a predator anywhere in the world. But he’s not all-powerful. He’s not immortal. I loved it at the end when Lloyd says, “I think he’s around somewhere. I think he’s around waiting for something to happen. I don’t know what.” Even his acolytes in Vegas are seeing the chinks in the armor, just as we the reader are picking up on it.
Laura: And I think there has become a bit of an equality — which we didn’t get in the beginning — between Randall Flagg and Mother Abigail. My initial impression was that Mother Abigail, as the one with a direct connection to God, would be in the stronger position. But we see all the ways in which she is vulnerable. And then the same with Randall Flagg. Both of them are emissaries. They are not God or not-God themselves.
Chapter 63: Julie Lawry, You Suck
Sarah: Next up in chapter 63 — ugh. If Julie Lawry ends up getting Tom Cullen killed, I’ma be so mad.
Laura: You know what’s funny? I saw a comment from our slow readers — if y’all aren’t in the comments over on Substack, please go see. People say the most interesting, thoughtful things. We’re having great conversations over there. But someone said a few chapters back, “I’m so glad to be done with Julie.” And I was like... we’re not done with Julie.
Sarah: Denny, this little boy who apparently has a rotating cast of mothers, is at the park with his newest mother Angelina, and she’s sitting next to this woman who’s going on and on about her obnoxious life and sex — and we should have known from the second she mentioned sex four or five times that it was Julie Lawry. Because Tom Cullen comes through the park too, the child loves Tom Cullen, Julie Lawry realizes it’s Tom, and is Cheshire Cat grinning at the thought of blowing his cover.
It’s a very short chapter, that’s all we know, but this is such a big reveal. Remember — right before this chapter, someone notes the moon’s almost full. So I’m like, oh, maybe it’ll just be in time — Tom, get out of here before Julie gets with somebody and puts this all together. Fingers crossed.
Laura: Although I feel like when Angelina tells Julie that Tom Cullen got booted out of the free zone — that’s actually a kind of decent cover story. And we know why they believed it: because Flagg can’t read Tom Cullen’s mind. He can’t give them the same intel he gave Harold and Nadine. But also — this is amazing storytelling. She was always going to show back up. That’s definitely where she was going to end up.
Sarah: She sucks. She just does.
Chapter 64: Harold Comes to Rest
Sarah: Chapter 64. Oh, Harold. How do you feel?
Laura: I felt bad for him. That’s rough. That’s a rough way to die. I was picturing that Ali Wong TV show where they end up in the desert and injured in the exact situation Harold is in — it looks brutal. You are thirsty, you are hallucinating. It’s not fun.
Sarah: So Harold and Nadine are fleeing to Vegas, and Harold wipes out on an oil slick — which he now thinks, after many hours suffering alone in the desert, was probably Randall Flagg. Because where did the oil come from? It’s been months. He suffers multiple leg breaks, he’s lying there, he tries to crawl back up to Nadine, and she refuses to help him and leaves him to die. He tries to shoot her, but he feels like Randall Flagg also interferes and pushes him out of the way.
And I think that’s what else King is telling us: the more you let Flagg in, the more he can mess with you. Dana didn’t let him in — so Dana had the capacity to take back a little bit of her life and take some action he didn’t control. But Harold had let him in so far that he could put an oil slick down. He could shove you away from shooting Nadine. You let him in, dude. You knew you shouldn’t have.
Laura: Oh, Harold. So he sits there, suffering. He got his punishment for killing Nick and the other members of the committee. But over the course of his suffering, he does seem to regain some of his humanity as he continues writing in the ledger.
Sarah: This is the chapter I was referencing — the most well-written in the whole book. I underlined so many things. As Harold is coming to his conclusions, writing longhand — he’s been writing his whole life, he got really good at it, he feels this connection between writing longhand and how important that is. “That was the whole world after all. Nothing but thoughts and plots.” And then he talks about the great works written longhand — Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Paradise Lost. Again, King pulling from so much literature in this section.
But then when he’s like, I could have been something in Boulder — and when he signs off as Hawk, his name from the Free Zone — he has so many moments of self-clarity and self-realization. He says he had fallen victim to his own protracted adolescence. Well, I believe it. I’ve seen it. And then: “when the end comes, when it is as horrible as Goodman always knew it would be, there is only one thing to say to all those good men — approach the throne of judgment: I was misled.” Like he tries to kind of foist off responsibility — and then ultimately is like, no. It wasn’t. It wasn’t anybody’s fault but my own. Like, I did have my own free will.
Laura: I thought the last moment — where he’s talking about other people jumping off the quarry but how he could never do it, which was part of what led him to his demise — and ultimately he jumps and shoots himself in the head, and that’s what kind of saves him, gives him back a little bit of control over his own life. It was just so sad.
Sarah: Because he realizes, as I’m sure many people have in the last moments of their life, like — I just ended up like everybody else. Quote-unquote misled. I just ended up like everybody else.
I could have been something in Boulder. I love that. It reminds me of the Dixie Chicks song “Top of the World,” about the man sitting in his living room letting his family live their life in the other room. The song is like, I could have loved Jesus the way my wife did. I could have been different. It’s giving Harold in this moment. I just let it happen to me instead of taking the moments that I knew I had.
Laura: And he’s still — even here, you still get glimmers of the insightful Harold we knew. It’s not like he offered nothing. Like, I thought it was so smart when he pushes back on Nadine saying Randall Flagg feels someone who would betray one side would probably betray the other. Harold’s like, really? You think you passed that? He’s arguing with her, sharp to the very end.
And when he takes Hawk as the way to sign off — “on my school papers, I always signed my name Harold Emery Lauder” — it’s like he’s saying, I lived as Harold, I made all these choices as Harold. But I’m going to die as Hawk.
Sarah: And it’s such a bummer. I know he has been sort of the villain and we’ve been as annoyed with him as Franny has been. But this is heartbreaking. A hawk is not a crow. Not a crow. I love a hawk. I hate a crow — it is the only bird I hate.
Laura: Did you see the parallels to Harold shooting at Nadine, and the surprise on her face, her not even moving — to the Judge shooting at the crow who suddenly panics and is like, oh my God, these people are actually going to fight back? They’re going to fight to the very end.
Sarah: Yes. Just like Dana — they’re going to do what they can do, and you won’t be able to control it always. I think that is definitely the takeaway of this section.
Is This the Book You Expected?
Sarah: We didn’t talk about it, but this section we just read was the beginning of Book Three, and there are opening epigraph quotes, including lyrics from “Stand By Me” — the song. I love that he quotes those lyrics, because obviously this book is called The Stand, but then his probably most beloved adaptation is a short story originally called The Body— the movie version is called Stand By Me. And I was just like, God, he loves an intertwining sitch.
Laura: He does.
Sarah: And I’m starting to feel, at the end of this section, all those branches coming together. I’m feeling more comfortable in where he’s taking us. I think it’s going to be rough, but I get where we’re going now. Okay — I want to ask you this, because I haven’t in a few episodes, but as we’re now sliding into home: is this book what you expected?
Laura: No. I’m not really sure what I expected, but this wasn’t it. This has been such a different journey. The only other Stephen King book I’ve read was Carrie, which is so short and so contained — so the expansiveness of this has been really surprising. There are some elements I was prepared for because I’ve watched enough Stephen King movies. But it’s been much bigger and more complex and interesting, and definitely went places I didn’t expect. I didn’t expect we’d be talking about sociology and the best form of government. That’s for dang sure. So no — it’s been a very pleasant surprise.
Sarah: In a slow read context, do you look forward to picking it up and doing your pages?
Laura: Yeah. And I think the closer we get to the end, the harder it’s going to be to stick to the schedule.
Sarah: For sure. Well, I’m scared about what happens next.
Next Up: Chapters 65 through 71 — and if you can’t wait, become a subscriber on Substack and check out our side quest, which is going to be all about Viva Las Vegas. Also, two book club meetings left for our Slow Read members — two crucial ones. You are going to want to talk with your fellow slow readers about these last sections of The Stand. If you can’t make it live, you can always watch the video or listen to the audio replay. Until next week — see you on the other side.
Laura: I am having a similar experience by doing this so slowly. I’m reading it so differently than I would read any other novel, which changes your relationship to the character. Of course it’s a reread for me. Where if you’re mildly irritated by a character, you’re just reading so fast that you don’t really sit with those emotions. You’re like, well, that’s sort of annoying, and you just keep it moving because you’re propelled by the plot or by finishing or whatever. By doing it slowly, it really changes the way I think about the characters because, like you said, we’re kind of in it real time, like they’re friends.
In the past, when I didn’t have much sympathy for Larry Underwood because he just seemed very narcissistic, on this read, doing it slowly, I’m sort of seeing the fullness of his character differently—and having a lot of sympathy for him until we get to this section and he wore me slick.
Sarah: This is always my experience with slow reads. I read War and Peace last year and I just felt like I lived about 20 percent of my life in Russia all year long. When you do a slow read, you also live a little bit in the book. You’re not hopping in and out. You’re not speeding through. You’re just existing there and soaking up all the slow changes and the atmosphere and the annoying people and the people you like and everybody’s choices. That’s why I like it so much.
Laura: Because when you read quickly, you get the high level of what an author is doing with a character. You understand if they’re meant to be manipulative or the hero. But when you go slowly, you just feel like you know them. You can sort of think about this book when you’re driving around town doing your errands, like you would think about people you know in real life. It’s just really a different experience, but I’m loving that part.
Sarah: Yeah, it’s the best. I love hanging with characters like that. Even when they’re all dying. Even when they’re all dying.
Laura: Which brings us to the bummer of this section.
Chapter 56: Babies, Bombs, and Bad News
Laura: Chapter 56, we start out — are the babies dying? This is rough. I feel like this theme is going to hit the mothers among us. The beginning of this chapter, Ralph stops Stu and tells him that a new group is coming in to join the Free Zone. There’s about 40 of them. Wonderful news. There’s a doctor among them. But not so great news is that one of them, Mrs. Wentworth, was pregnant with twins. She delivered on the road as they were walking. And both of her twins die under mysterious circumstances. Everyone’s mind immediately goes to: did the babies breathe air and immediately get the super flu?
Sarah: That doesn’t make sense virology-wise, because I’m an amateur virologist now. It would not hang out that long with no host for months and months in the hot summer sun.
Laura: But you don’t think the immune people might carry it, but they’re immune to it?
Sarah: I mean, I guess, but it has to have something to live off of. There are real virologists listening right now being like, hey, this is why you’re an amateur.
Laura: But I wonder if — was there something to what they were trying to say about because the babies were conceived before the flu hit? Is there something then, or if their biological dad had it, does that make a difference?
Sarah: Yeah, that seems to be their theory. The smaller story of Mrs. Wentworth is so much like a story in a book I read for Well-Read Mom called Giants in the Earth, which is about Swedish pioneers in like Minnesota, 1800s. This woman along the way loses a child and she kind of loses her mind a little bit, doesn’t want anybody to have the bodies. It really, really reminded me of that story. The idea that if you were traveling to what you perceived as safety with your children or while pregnant and then to lose one of them — I think it’s just a really unique psychological trauma.
And with this, the whole conversation got me thinking about with the “no more babies” — this is what I always say about Handmaid’s Tale. Like, people are like, it would never get that bad. I’m like, I don’t think you understand how quickly people would go crazy if there were no babies. I 100% believe people would lose their ever-loving minds and would be able to look past or accept any manner of horror and abuses if they thought it would get them babies.
Laura: Well, and it makes King’s choice to have Franny be pregnant such a stroke of genius to this particular story. It really came together in this section because it raises the stakes. Not just Franny’s pregnancy, but like all of humanity’s pregnancy. And it just makes it all more emotional. I’m a little worried — she hasn’t felt the baby move but one time. I keep thinking that too, but she’s not due till January and it’s August. And you don’t feel them as early with your first baby.
Sarah: I lost a pregnancy at 20 weeks and then got pregnant way too soon afterwards with Felix. And just that obsession — like all-consuming obsession with feeling the baby move and making sure everything is okay. I remember my doctor being like, come in anytime, anytime. And Felix — he was such a jerk. Anytime they would do an ultrasound, he’d be asleep. I’d be like, move, you jerk. Don’t you understand my stress level? And the doctor’s like, no, he doesn’t. And he doesn’t care.
Laura: With your first one, you really don’t know. Eventually it becomes unmistakable that the baby is moving. But there are so many twinges and little flutters, and you want it so badly to feel it that you sometimes will it to happen.
Franny being pregnant is really becoming an important part of this story. And story-wise, it also really matters that Stu is not the biological dad. There’s a lot happening here.
Sarah: That feels... Mary and Joseph.
Laura: Biblical, yes. This whole book has so many biblical things. Well, and we find out later in this section that Nadine’s going to get impregnated by the dark man, which sounds unpleasant to me, personally.
Sarah: Cold. Ew.
Nadine, Leo, and the Question of Loyalty
Laura: So at the beginning of Chapter 56, Nadine is back in her original house, packing up. And she doesn’t even realize that in the corner, Leo — formerly known as Joe — her little savage companion, is sitting in the corner in his underpants. Are we supposed to love him or what? Because I’m creeped out by him.
Sarah: I mean, Stephen King plays around a lot with powerful, psychic kids. And I don’t think they’re supposed to be deeply comforting. Because there is something about when it’s coming from someone who fundamentally doesn’t understand the world yet and isn’t mature enough to have a prefrontal cortex, it just hits different. It reminds me of Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind — he talks about what happened in the ‘60s and why people got so freaked out by psychedelics. In traditional cultures, when you’re expanding your consciousness, it’s like your guide is old. But in the ‘60s it was teenagers, and everyone was like, whoa, everything’s upside down, this is no good. That’s what Leo reminds me of. I’m interested in what he has to say, but it’s in a container that feels like it’s not capable of containing it.
Laura: Well, and also it’s interesting that Nadine has a real moment of self-awareness here where she realized she preferred him as Joe, when he was nonverbal and violent and she was the one keeping him in check. Once he meets Mother Abigail and becomes Leo, remembers his name, starts speaking — he chooses to be in a more traditional situation with Larry and Lucy more often and didn’t have as much attachment to Nadine. She discards him, which she realizes about herself. And it’s just telling you a lot about Nadine. She keeps trying to distract herself from what her mission is. She is being called to the dark man and she keeps trying to find reasons not to go. She’s trying to self-sabotage, but she stays on the path ultimately.
Sarah: What confuses me is that Leo has this advanced perception of what’s going on. He has some sort of psychic connection. He understood that Mother Abigail was going to make it across the river. So why is he drawn to Nadine? He won’t enter the house with Harold, but he’s so sad Nadine is gone. I’m like, dude, either you understand who’s on the light or the dark or you don’t.
Laura: I know. You can’t even argue that it’s because she’s wishy-washy about it all, because so is Harold. Back and forth they kind of go. And I don’t know why Leo has this relationship with Nadine.
Sarah: You’re right. It doesn’t really make any sense. I do like that Harold gets so mean to her in this chapter. Like he’s just over her. I think that is good and accurate and interesting — if a relationship is built only on everything but.
Laura: A lot of things are happening there. They’re both realizing that they’re about to have to leave the Free Zone and they both have complicated feelings about it. Which is what makes this book better than just everybody in Vegas is bad, everybody in the Free Zone is good. A lot of humanity is going to fall somewhere in the middle. Nadine and Harold are doing some exceptionally odd things, but they’re still having some sadness and regret. They’re sort of attached to the Free Zone despite their own mission. They’re not just one-dimensional evil people.
Sarah: Yeah, I mean, I think Harold still loves Franny. Shows you the knife’s edge of love and hate that he’s planning to kill her. But I think he still kind of feels connected to her in some way. It’s also revealed in Chapter 56 that Harold is building a bomb.
Spies, Consent, and Tom Cullen’s Mission
Laura: We find out Dana is a lesbian.
Sarah: Could you blame her after the time in the harem? That might put you off men.
Laura: I know, but before that — Sue gives a little backstory to Dana. She had a real brute of a husband back in the day and then just realized, you know what, maybe I like girls. But it’s funny — not like funny haha, because I’m not insulting anyone here — but why in the world would Stu be just shocked that Dana is a lesbian? He’s really bothered by this.
Sarah: I bought it even in the ‘90s. I think people were still — and also he was living in teeny tiny Arnett, Texas. How many lesbians do you think there are in Arnett, Texas?
Laura: Not that many.
Laura: But then they all go to set Tom off on his mission. And listen, I’m sorry. I find this cruel. I do.
Sarah: I’m just too interested in what’s going to happen to be wrapped up in the ethics of it. Is there some ableist assumptions in seeing it as cruel? You’re assuming that he’s not up for it. What Nick is arguing, and what I buy to a certain extent, is that he is uniquely suited for this. Not ill-equipped — uniquely suited.
Sarah: So it’s not necessarily... Now, is there some consent issues? I feel like he feels coerced.Absolutely. But I mean, I think you could also argue that hypnosis is not mind control, right? It’s a little bit in a gray area.
Laura: Except you’re potentially sending him to his own death. It’s not like they’re coercing him to be the local PE teacher.
Sarah: Tom has — he loves his house. He loves his whole situation. He is not in the mood for this. But you have to think about what Stephen King is telling you in the scenes way back in the beginning with the tornado. When push comes to shove, he has instincts and capacity that others do not, and can save lives. I can see the case they’re making. I’m not saying I would do it. I’m just saying I don’t think they’re evil and completely cruel to do it. I understand how they got there.
Laura: I can see objectively how they got there, but it does feel like they’re taking advantage of someone who is pretty incapable of saying no to them. That said — he also can’t understand his own capacity, and they can.
Chapter 57: Destiny, Free Will, and the Drive-In
Sarah: We both underlined “this is a job for a weasel, not a lion.” I underlined that so much. It’s an interesting quote because you would usually think the opposite — except who are the good guys and who are the bad guys here? The weasels are supposed to be Flagg and his people. We’ve had literal weasel scenes where it’s Flagg. Now suddenly the good guys are the weasels. Because it’s a David and Goliath situation. They’re not going to battle him strength to strength, obviously.
Laura: David and Goliath. The ones who do consent well — the judge, Dana — they both seemed like they are fulfilling their destiny, which is the whole book to me. The whole book is asking these questions of destiny, fate, our path, our soul’s mission. Every single character is walking through that in all their different ways.
Sarah: Don’t you feel like that happens in real life all the time? Those hard moments where something intercedes and really changes the direction?
Laura: I think life is more of a soft merge than a hard right. Almost always.
Sarah: Well, I think things happen daily that are nudging us. Like last night I dreamed about a person I hadn’t thought of in years. And I was like, oh, should I reach out to them? I used the term “the Holy Spirit at work” all the time — because something happens or I bring up something and someone’s reading the same book. To me, that is the connective energetic exchange that leads us in directions. But in this book it’s dialed up to like 15. This is not a small child reading your thoughts and telling you to talk to somebody.
Laura: If that happened to me, I’d be freaked all the way out.
Sarah: Definitely. And may I remind you — in a couple of chapters — literal pushes. Literal “get out of the house” pushes.
Laura: That’s what I think the book is doing for us, though. Like, that’s why I read fiction. It’s not because I anticipate a little Mowgli character telling me to go have a certain conversation. It’s because I feel like, oh gosh, this happens in life. You can’t even deny your own path, even if you want to, even if you try.
Sarah: I like to think I’m more in control of my path than that. The choice to move home was my choice. Nobody was pushing me to do that. My husband didn’t want to do that. It was me taking the reins and saying, no, I want to go this direction.
Laura: Because that was your path.
Sarah: Yeah, I mean, maybe. I didn’t think it was at the time. I wanted a certain life, and so I chose a path that would get me to the life I wanted. It’s like a balance. And I think that’s kind of what he’s playing with — we’re dealing with psychic children, and also, can everybody go turn all the appliances off, please? So the place doesn’t burn to the ground. I just like that real balance of pragmatic and psychic going on through all these chapters.
Laura: Then we get my favorite scene. Nadine is tasked by Harold with leaving the bomb in the closet at Ralph’s house — that’s where they’re going to have the committee meeting. She breaks into the house, leaves it in the closet. She keeps thinking, should I go in and take that out? Should I dismantle this bomb? But then I love this scene where she is sort of transported by — the dark man enters her. Like possesses her.
Sarah: And he was cold. Which is scary because until then he’s been sort of warm and loving to her. She’s drawn to him. He’s attractive. But now suddenly he’s cold. He sort of possesses her, drives her Vespa as her, to the drive-in movie theater.
Laura: You like this scene because you clearly don’t go to drive-in movie theaters, because now I’m going to freak out next time I go to our drive-in movie theater.
Sarah: I’ve never been to a drive-in movie theater.
Laura: What? It’s so fun. It’s the best.
Sarah: Well, this scene is so Stephen King. It is so cinematic. It’s obviously an empty drive-in movie theater. And all of the speakers — all of the speakers in the parking spots — fall down onto the ground and start emitting a message. Randall Flagg’s voice. And there’s no power yet when this happens. So it’s just so cinematic. This is my favorite kind of horror. And I got chills. The speaker is the dark man being like, Nadine, Nadine. Talking to her.
He communicates with Nadine so differently than anyone else. It’s very dramatic. Even before all this, when she was in college. He is communicating with her in a totally different way. I don’t know if that’s because she won’t hear him otherwise, or because she’s meant for such an important mission that he has to get through to her. But he’s also scaring her.
Laura: Wild. Especially the singing at the end. A creepy song really is the cherry on the sundae for me. I thought when he starts singing “I’ll Be Seeing You” — the weirdest. And she is fighting it, but she really can’t, because he’s like half-occupied her body. And then her hair goes totally white.
Sarah: Totally white. Wild. So when she goes back and tells Harold — he is so cruel to her. He’s like done with Nadine. D-O-N-E.
Laura: Not quite yet. When he sees her white hair, he’s a little freaked out and gets a little hesitant. Like, I don’t know that we should be doing this. And she’s like, it’s too late. Emotions at war on Harold’s face. Anger, horror, shame. Little by little, they drained away. And then like some terrible corpse coming up from deep water, a frozen grin resurfaced on Harold’s face.
Sarah: They are back and forth playing with who is hesitating. Maybe we shouldn’t do this. And then the other one is like, it’s too late. That’s something they both said several times. And you kind of want to be like, no, ding-dongs, it’s never too late to do the right thing.
The Twins Motif and Twin Flames
Laura: Another thing I want to mention — it keeps coming up in this section — from the beginning with Mrs. Wentworth, but then multiple times things are mentioned about twins. Not just her twins, but I circled a few different references to twins. Which made me think immediately — hashtag Taylor Swift — it made me think of twin flames.
Sarah: Well, the drive-in is called Welcome to the Holiday Twin.
Laura: That’s one of the things I circled. Twins in all kinds of traditions, mythology, even current traditions — twins and twin flames represent a conjoined connection, a soul connection, a mirror. And it’s different than a soulmate because it can also be a dark and a light. It can be like a mirror. And I feel like he’s playing with that sort of balancing — new way, old way, the choices we make, destiny. There’s definitely this balance beam that feels like it’s constantly happening within the story.
Chapter 58: The Bomb, the Committee Meeting, and RIP Nick
Sarah: Chapter 58, Stu reads Harold’s ledger and they’re like, oh, no.
Laura: But they don’t know exactly. They don’t know he’s going to bomb the committee meeting. They go to the damn committee meeting. There’s a few things that they really misjudge.
Sarah: Also, this is the first inkling I have that I’m like, I don’t love Stu right now.
Laura: Why? I love Stu.
Sarah: I know we’re meant to love Stu. I’m just like, I’m going to need a little bit more from you. Also, I’m impressed with the burial subcommittee. I mean — 25,000 corpses and better than 8,000 a week. Holy crap. They’re not individually digging graves, but that’s a lot of corpses to move.
Laura: I mean, listen, that is the Lord’s work right there. That’s rough. From a storytelling point of view, I love that King is doing this. Not only do you have the committee members, but you also have these subcommittee people — the burial guy, the power guy — basically the main leaders of anything good happening in the Free Zone.
Sarah: And then Franny’s like, we got to get out of here. I think the implication is that she also has — something is going on. Everybody has the dreams. And she’s fighting it more than a small child would or an old woman would or a Tom Cullen would. It has to be a very intense, very pivotal moment for her to not be able to deny that energetic connection.
There are also some themes here of women in particular — but really anybody — denying their own instincts or defaulting to politeness instead of safety. She doesn’t want to look hysterical. She doesn’t want to interrupt the meeting. They’re saying important things. Like, after everything y’all have lived through, you should feel comfortable being like, I don’t know how to explain this, guys, but we got to get out of the room. You’re having drinks about the dark man. This is a safe space in which to exclaim, I think we should go.
Laura: I agree. But it’s really hard to shake off the old ways of being.
Sarah: There’s a seeding of control when you acknowledge that these messages come through and you don’t understand them, but you have to listen to something you don’t understand and follow instructions you might not understand. I think that’s a lot for a human mind. I want to feel like I’m still more in control than maybe I am. I want to feel like I have my hands on the reins and I’m not just riding a horse with no idea where it’s heading.
Laura: Well, Franny in particular is really powerless in this section. She’s feeling a lot of fear around Mrs. Wentworth’s babies dying. She didn’t get a say on Tom Cullen being sent on his mission. She didn’t get much of a say in making Stu her partner as marshal. She has no power right now.
Sarah: It’s about to get worse before it gets better, Franny. But she did have the instincts. She has the ethics. But she’s not being listened to, and that dampens your voice. That makes you not want to shout to the committee, we’ve got to run. But she did. And saved her life, and saved Larry’s life, and saved Stu’s life.
Maybe not Nick.
Laura: So the bomb goes off. Nick is in the closet trying to get it. But listen, RIP. So sad Nick died. Also, we were really reaching the limits of having a deaf-mute involved in the plot. You understand? Like, there’s only so many times you can say, well, he had to read out loud what he wrote down.
Sarah: No, I disagree. It felt so different to me, the earlier parts of the book where we were with Nick and we were in his head. Now, when he’s just a participant in all these committee meetings and we have to wait for him to communicate through Ralph or Glenn — no. That was getting a little awkward.
Laura: Did you call me ableist at the beginning of this episode? And now I’m going to call you ableist.
Sarah: I’m not ableist. Nick is the reason I’m standing by Tom Cullen getting sent off. I like him. I’m just saying, story-wise, plot-wise, it was getting a little tedious. I did like how his sixth sense — not his intuitive sixth sense, but because of his lack of abilities, he can hear or sense things differently. He’s the one who felt like there was a bomb. He gets into the closet, he’s trying to dismantle it. But it ends up being the end. And we’re really out of luck because the burial guy also got killed. Who’s going to bury all the pieces of Nick? Ultimately, nine people die in Harold’s explosion.
Laura: Could have been worse. He killed two of the guys that were nice to him on the freaking burial committee. Nick, we lose. Sue, we lose. Four random townspeople. Two more die later. But here comes Mother Abigail. She’s back.
Sarah: She’s back. She’s eating herself, which is information I did not need from Dr. Richardson. Did you need to know that her poop had sticks in it?
Laura: I didn’t need to know that either. We wanted a doctor, but I’m not sure everybody was hungry for this level of information.
The Second Community Meeting: Mob Mentality vs. Leadership
Sarah: I say that like I did not enjoy his vibe at the house — but I thought his vibe when they all go to see that she’s barely alive was really beautiful. How everybody was just intuitively gathering outside Lucy and Larry’s house. And at the second committee meeting, the big meeting with everybody, his vibe was good. It was a little bit giving Dr. Fauci. Just like, I’m going to show up, I’m going to tell you what you need to know, and you can get mad at me or not. I didn’t create the situation. I’m just reporting on it, friends.
Laura: Well, you see the community itself — the whole Free Zone community — go from kumbaya, we were all drawn here by our dreams, we love each other, to being ready to defend themselves at all costs. And I feel like we’ve lived through this. We lived through this with 9/11. We went through a week of kumbaya before we were ready to go to war. We lived through this with COVID, where we went through a month of kumbaya, we’re all in the same boat, to a deeper divide than we’ve ever had.
Sarah: And I feel like King captured it pretty well here. Going from kumbaya to how are we going to defend ourselves against the dark man mob mentality. I really liked Glenn’s approach so much better than Stu’s. Stu was just sort of freaked out and disappointed. Glenn’s approach of having a little plant that could shout something and kind of ease some of the tension — let some steam out of the kettle — I thought that was such a smarter approach. Just accept that this is a natural human tendency in a group to leave the kumbaya moment. But that doesn’t mean we just go, oh, no, what do we do. Let’s exhibit some leadership.
Laura: I thought that part was really good. And also I loved this Glenn quote: they talked like people who have kept the huddled-up secrets of their guilts and inadequacies to themselves for a long time, only to discover that these things, when verbalized, were only life-sized after all.
My friend calls this the parasite theory. You just put the parasite on the table, and then we can go, ooh, you might need more medicine for that one. Or, see, look, it’s not that bad. I got a parasite about that size too.
Sarah: You call it manipulation. I call it leadership.
Laura: Wait, that’s merch.
Sarah: They’re not saying you don’t have a right to feel or talk or think about all these things you’ve bottled up. They’re just saying, let’s do this first before we take a vote. Let’s not take the committee vote from a place of bottled-up fear. They’re afraid, and before they can get it all out — if someone had nominated someone they liked, they would have accepted it. They didn’t like Ted Frampton. You get a Ted Frampton from a scarcity mindset. Those are the people that exploit scarcity. You have to let people process and get it out and be a little less afraid in order to really weigh their options.
Laura: I think it’s so condescending to be like, you can have your feelings, but we’re really going to do what we want to do behind the scenes.
Sarah: No, it’s not condescending. Feelings are relevant, but they are not always reality. Listen, you’re talking like somebody who’s never run for office, so I’m going to pull that card right now. I have run and served in office. And you get in a meeting where people are just spilling their stuff all over the table and you’re like, what is the point of this? And I’m supposed to empower these people to make decisions right now when all they really want to do is just be mad? It’s just acknowledging how humans are. It’s inevitable that they go from kumbaya to let’s eat the young. You don’t want to empower people in those moments. You want to use a process to direct them to a more reasonable state of mind. It’s not that you’re going to cheat them out of their vote. The founding fathers spent a lot of time on this — let’s slow the process way down with checks and balances so that it’s not easy in these passionate moments to do a lot of dramatic things.
Laura: It’s anti-populist.
Sarah: Yeah, a little bit. And you know what? Fine with it. Sounds good to me. This particular moment in America’s history.
Mother Abigail’s Final Instructions
Laura: But then before she does, Mother Abigail has some things to say. And in like the span of 12 hours, the power comes back on. The day after the committee meeting, Mother Abigail summons the committee to her bedside where they are shocked at how bad she looks.
Sarah: How do you feel about the great, god-ordained character being so weakened?
Laura: I think that’s great. How did Jesus die? Not in a blaze of glory. Surrounded by criminals on a cross. I think he’s really playing with these threads — Randall Flagg is all powerful and wants that power and exerts it over other people, whereas she has this power but sacrifices it because of her own pride, to empower others. They could not be in sharper contrast to each other.
Sarah: But I think it’s crazy he never tells us more about her journey in the wilderness. We never got a glimpse of her on that journey. Like, it’s just a black box. She’s coming back and pooping sticks, and that’s all we know. Except that she knows the instructions.
Laura: She did come back with some pretty hardcore instructions. Y’all are going west. One of you is not going to make it. There’s going to be a stand. I won’t be there because I’m dying.
Sarah: This is the dun-dun-dun moment of the book when she says, it is there that you will make your stand. And then: with God’s help, you will stand. So this is where we get what the book is now coming to. I kind of like that she says it so explicitly. And I think the title is so strong. It’s not standoff. It’s not standdown. You know, it’s the stand. It’s really a strong, but a little ambiguous, title. What does that even mean before you read it?
Laura: But here’s the thing — she’s telling them some things very explicitly, but then she’s leaving a lot open-ended. She tells them they have to go — and Franny, no likey this instruction. She is very upset to the point where Mother Abigail grabs her wrists and heals her of her hurt back and messed-up neck from the couch falling on her during the bombing. And she sees a vision of an empty nursery. But when Franny’s like, is the baby going to make it? Mother Abigail is like, rah, rah, rah. See you later. I’m dying now. So she doesn’t get the whole thing.
Sarah: The mission Mother Abigail has spelled out is that the four men — Larry, Stu, Ralph, and Glenn — have to start walking west. They can’t take anything with them. No food, provisions, luggage, nothing — weapons, I don’t even think. They have to wear the clothes on their back and just start walking.
Laura: But they did put on better shoes. And you know what? Kudos. Let Rita have not died for nothing. All I’m saying. Wear better shoes.
Sarah: But we’ve talked completely through this whole book about how he is treating women in this story. We killed off Sue. Franny is a hysterical, hormonal woman. Nadine has very little agency — she’s basically just a vessel apparently for Randall Flagg’s devil. I defend a lot of what King does with women and I do not think King is anti-women at all, having read so much of his work. But in this story, it feels like he always just sort of wanted to ditch the women and get down to the men making this walk.
Laura: Yeah, a little bit. I think so. The baby has to be a boy because she’s the Virgin Mary who’s not really a virgin, and the baby is Jesus. Except for — Franny being pregnant is the X factor here. I kind of respect Franny being like, this god sucks, I don’t want to follow this god. At least she tries to fight back. Then she gets healed.
Sarah: No, it does feel a little bit like that to me. Like we just had to get down to these four guys and then they start walking. And Larry says, I feel like this is the end of everything. And I’m like, me too. What the hell are these four dudes going to do? Maybe with an assist by Judge Ferris and Tom Cullen, perhaps. Fingers crossed. How the hell are they going to take on Randall Flagg?
Laura: I have concerns.
Sarah: I have concerns. I also think it’s interesting that he’s picking up the walking again. As someone who just drove three hours from Utah to Vegas going 80 miles an hour — this is a hell of a journey they’re about to take from Boulder, Colorado to Las Vegas on their feet.
Laura: He loves to walk. Larry took a walk. Stu took a walk. Stu’s walk was healing. Larry almost died. Trashcan Man was walking. Flagg is called the walking dude. There’s always walking. There’s power in walking.
Sarah: I’m just saying this is a long walk with no food and no water and just better shoes. This is my beef with Hadestown at the end. I’m like, this is just men on their bullshit. Follow the directions. It’s not that hard.
Laura: Well, we should end with Larry’s quote.
Sarah: I feel like this is the end of everything.
Laura: I hope not, because our sign-off is “see you on the other side.” So I hope there’s another side.
Sarah: There’s another book — a whole other book left.
Next Up: Book Three begins! In the meantime, Sarah and Laura are also discussing the film Contagion — watch it, binge it, rent it before the next episode so you’re ready for the conversation.
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