Introducing...SLOW READ with Sarah Stewart Holland and Laura Tremaine
vendredi 31 octobre 2025 • Durée 07:18
We are so excited to tell you about our new project SLOW READ. This is a podcast and Substack community dedicated to reading the books you want at a pace you can handle.
And we’re starting with a modern classic: The Stand by Stephen King
Every other week we’ll have a conversation dissecting this 1,200 page tale, chapter by chapter. The goal is to dive into epic novels with a community of readers who want to go deeper.
We’ll kick off reading The Stand together on January 1, 2026 and we’ll close the circle by June 16th. Six months with one story! It’s the opposite of what the world’s current chaos is screaming, and it’s just what we need.
Stay tuned for our complete reading schedule, more thoughts on the current literary landscape, background on Stephen King and The Stand, and more.
What else you need to know:
* We will be reading the complete and uncut version of The Stand (so make sure you don’t accidentally grab the abridged 1978 version)
* On Substack, members will have access to bonus material including regular book club meetings hosted by Sarah & Laura
Enjoy this short teaser explaining a little bit more about our vision for SLOW READ and why we chose to read a novel about good & evil in 2026
Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss a thing!
Sarah & Laura
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slowread.substack.com/subscribe
Will 2026 be the year of the slow read?
mercredi 3 décembre 2025 • Durée 35:56
Sarah sat down with Simon Haisell of Footnotes and Tangents to talk about how a slow read can add richness to your reading life, why every slow read doesn’t have to be long, and the unexpected downside of reading the world’s greatest authors!
Slow Read: The Stand is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slowread.substack.com/subscribe
Welcome to SLOW READ: The Stand (The Author's Note + A Preface in Two Parts)
This is the inaugural episode of Slow Read The Stand. For this first episode, we just wanted y’all to read the Author’s Note and the Preface in Two Parts. But also, today we wanted to share a little bit about this whole project: why we’re doing a slow read, why we’re doing The Stand, all of it.
If you prefer to read instead of listen, below is a cleaned up transcript of the episodes as well as links to all the books and Substacks we mentioned in this episode…and several fun bonus links and videos!
Sarah: We’re going to deep dive to set us on the right track for reading together for six months. I’m so excited. Have you ever done a slow read before, Laura?
Laura: No. I mean, certainly not like this. In fact, this kind of way of doing a slow read—you introduced it to me. I didn’t even know people were doing it like this. It’s new.
Sarah: Listen, it’s a new thing the Internet has invented. It is a great thing the Internet has invented. I was doing slow reads, I just didn’t know they were called that. Probably four or five years ago, I decided I was going to tackle some classic text over the course of the year. It’s too intimidating to sit down with The Brothers Karamazov and chip away over a month. It’ll just take up all your reading time. And I often read more than one book at a time. So I decided to pick one book and just chip away at it over the course of the year.
I did The Brothers Karamazov, I did Don Quixote, I did —though I don’t think that took me a year. But I really wanted to get bigger, longer texts. I believe in a juicy book, a big book.
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 1 - 4)
lundi 5 janvier 2026 • Durée 56:11
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
This is the second episode of Slow Read The Stand. The Circle is open!
If you prefer to read instead of listen, below is a cleaned up transcript of the episodes as well as links to all the books and Substacks we mentioned in this episode…and several fun bonus links and videos!
Laura: Okay, here we go. Page one. Page one of 1,200. We got six months. We got plenty of time. Sarah, the circle has opened.
Sarah: I don’t even know what that means yet. I don’t even know what “the circle opens” means yet.
Laura: Well, I don’t think you’re supposed to. That’s the whole point. But what we’re discussing today is—he doesn’t call it a prologue, but it is. It’s like a few pages of prologue and then the first four chapters. But before we even do that, he kicks off The Stand with these quotes, these four quotes.
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 5 - 15)
lundi 12 janvier 2026 • Durée 01:24:12
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 episodes as well as links to all the books and Substacks we mentioned in this episode…and several fun bonus links and videos!
____
Sarah: All right. Where are we overall? We’re in it now. Like 100-plus pages.
Laura: We are reading this thing. I’m kind of obsessed.
Sarah: Like more obsessed? You feel like you are experiencing it in a new way? You’re noticing things?
Laura: Yes. So this is my third or fourth read of The Stand. And I feel like maybe it’s because I’m reading with an eye on having to discuss it like this. I’m doing no skimming because I’m reading it out loud to myself. And I am just really noticing... you know what I’m noticing the most in this read is it’s funny.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
The Story of Stephen King
lundi 19 janvier 2026 • Durée 54:57
In this solo episode, Laura puts on her SuperFan hat to share the broad strokes of Stephen King’s life and career, including the stories and trajectories that affect how we read The Stand.
Far from a complete biography, this is an overview with some ideas, thoughts, and themes between the artist and the art. We’ll talk about his success at crossing genres, his addiction years, those wild conspiracy stories, and much more.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
{PREVIEW} REPLAY: The Stand Book Club Meeting (Chapters 1 - 15)
lundi 16 février 2026 • Durée 41:21
One of the best parts of slow reading a book together is talking about it! Each month our SLOW READ community is gathering on zoom for a book club meeting to discuss The Stand.
This episode is a preview of our first SLOW READ Book Club meeting from a few weeks ago where we’re discussing The Stand Chapters 1 - 15.
No spoilers here! Each discussion will only be covering the chapters we’ve read so far in the book. Sarah and Laura lead the discussion with your fellow Slow Readers and it’s so fun to hear YOUR takes on this epic novel.
SLOW READ Book Club meetings are for our paid community! Members get all our Side Quests, bonus material, and our monthly meetings. Each book club meeting is recorded and you can watch or listen to the REPLAY if you aren’t able to attend live.
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 episodes as well as links to all the books and Substacks we mentioned in this episode…and several fun bonus links and videos!
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
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Laura: Can I just say that I like that you took on that project? One of the things that has really spun me out a little bit about “Bookstagram” or “BookTok” right now is that it is like a race in quantity. How many books can you read a year or a month or a week?
Sarah: Mm-hmm. It’s not that I don’t understand how we got here, and I’m all for people reading a lot of books. But there is something that really appeals to me in an analog way of slowing down and sitting with one work for a long time.
Laura: Exactly. I’m an Enneagram One. I can definitely get in that “let me see how many I can check off my list” mode.
Sarah: Me too. Did you know that I’m an Enneagram One too?
Laura: I did not know that! Whoa. Wait, is this a good thing?
Sarah: I think it is. You told me this book is about good and evil, and Enneagram Ones are all about black and white and seeing the world. So I think it’ll be superpowered.
Laura: But we will not be offering a wider perspective because we’ll be like, “Good and Evil.” If we pick clearly who the good and bad characters are and you don’t agree with us, we’re so sorry. Two against one!
So, I can get in that mindset really easily—let me just get through to the end. Let me complete it. I will gulp down a book. I will read a book and then two years later ask, “Did I read that book?” because I read it so quickly. So I really wanted to work on that aspect of myself with the slow reads.
Sarah: But here’s the thing. I read Brothers Karamazov, I read Don Quixote. Did I get as much out of them as I possibly could just sitting down and reading them by myself? No. Because last year I did Footnotes and Tangents , a really lovely Substack run by Simon Haisell . He does a slow read of War and Peace and a slow read of the Cromwell Trilogy by Hilary Mantel. He advises you not to do both at the same time. Did I take his advice? I did not.
So I did both of them last year. I did War and Peace, which I’d always wanted to read. War and Peace lends itself to this beautifully. You just read a chapter a night and he would do these great histories and accompaniment that really enriched my reading. I felt like I got so much more out of the book.
But I kind of wore myself out on the classics set a long time ago. I’ve been on a run of those and I’m tired. I thought, “Okay, who do I want to read more of who has some long-ass books?” And a little light bulb went off and I went, “Wait, I know Stephen King.” And then I went, “Wait, nobody’s doing this yet. And I know exactly who to ask.”
Laura: Because I am a Stephen King evangelist.
Sarah: I know you are. And I love that about you.
Laura: One of the most popular writers of all time, and I have taken him on like I’m his PR hype person. Like he needs me. He doesn’t need me for book sales, but truly what my mission is around Stephen King is that I want more women to read him. I want more midlife women specifically to read him—the kind of reader who would immediately say “no” when they just hear that it’s a Stephen King book. Because they don’t want to be scared, or they’re intimidated by the length. They think horror novels are going to make them scared to sleep at night.
I love that. I really feel strongly about it because I do think that women reading horror in general—and Stephen King is such a good entry point—is important. Everybody knows him. He’s an incredible storyteller. But the reason I want women to read horror is because I think a lot of people are missing out on a whole genre that they think they’re scared of. It is actually so culturally relevant, so creative, and so fulfilling.
Sarah: I could not agree more. This is a genre I don’t have a lot of experience with. The only Stephen King book I’ve ever read is Carrie. But I did read it when you kept recommending him, and it held up so well. It’s so impressive how well that book holds up for a man writing a teenage girl 40 years ago.
Part of the reason I engage with literature is because I so enjoy the craft of writing. And if you know anything about writing, you know that he is one of the best. He is an expert at his craft. I really don’t understand why people, particularly women, say they are scared. If you’ve read Harry Potter, you’ll be OK. I was scared out of my mind at the end of the fourth Harry Potter book. I survived it. People read dark stuff; it’s just not under the genre of “horror,” so they think that’s a totally different thing.
Laura: Well, horror as a genre is sort of akin to saying “romance.” There are a ton of different types. Horror is the same. People think it’s going to be graphically bloody or real “monstery,” and that’s just not true. There is monster horror, body gore horror, psychological horror. Stephen King himself is not the worst of that at all.
Sarah: Right. You think of Jack Nicholson in The Shining. That is just not what the books are, actually.
Sarah: Interesting. Well, fun fact about me—and let’s get this out of the way now while we’re tackling horror and imagery. I am not a visual reader. I do not picture anything in my head almost ever while I’m reading. When people say, “Oh, that’s not how I picture the character,” I don’t picture the character. So that part is not intimidating to me. It’s almost like I have an audiobook in my head when I’m reading.
Laura: Wait, what do you mean? You don’t see anything? How do you understand what’s happening?
Sarah: It’s like I’m listening to it. If it’s describing a woman standing in the kitchen, I’m not picturing a woman standing in the kitchen.
Laura: Not me. That is kind of weird.
Sarah: It is, but it also makes horror super easy for me. I’m not going to be sticking with anything graphic. Horror is my playground. I’m not scared. I’m ready.
Laura: Well, The Stand isn’t horror in the way that word makes you think. The Stand is apocalyptic. There are definitely supernatural elements, but it’s not monsters under the bed. So, I came to you and said I want to do this slow read project with Stephen King, and I bowed to your expertise. You picked The Stand.
I picked The Stand for a few reasons. Now, this is actually not my favorite Stephen King book. I am not a Stephen King expert; I am a Stephen King super fan. I love him, but I haven’t read every single thing. He’s written in several genres in the last 15 years, like crime/cop genres that I skip. But since I was in fourth grade reading the dirty parts of my neighbor’s mom’s books, I’ve loved him.
Since then, I’ve said we are going to study him like we do Edgar Allan Poe or Dickens. Writers that were maybe poo-pooed in their time and then became the classics that they are. That has since come true; people do study Stephen King in college now.
Back to why I chose The Stand for this project. It is my favorite for the record, though I’ll share my other favorites with Slow Read members. I’ve been running a Stephen King summer book club since 2021, and we did The Stand in 2023. I wanted to return to it because it is so relevant in so many ways that are kind of a bummer, but will make for excellent conversation.
Sarah: So you’re not going to get graphic gore, but you might get bummed out about the state of the world?
Laura: Well, its whole premise is a flu-like pandemic that wipes everybody out except for a select few. That’s a tough hang, even six years later.
Laura:Station Eleven, I think, borrows heavily from The Stand. That’ll be a whole episode. There are a lot of novelists and pop culture—even songs like Metallica and Anthrax—that have drawn upon The Stand since it came out in 1978.
Sarah: Was it really sort of a definitive apocalyptic text in the 20th century?
Laura: I can’t think of another one that would have been more high profile. But King is very generous in saying where he gets ideas from. He originally wanted to write a big epic tale inspired by The Lord of the Rings. And he was also, weirdly, inspired by the Patty Hearst kidnapping. He tried to write a Patty Hearst type book and it wasn’t working. Then he read an article about chemical warfare and what would happen if it took out the population. He abandoned the Patty Hearst project and put together what became The Stand.
I thought his “Preface in Two Parts” was fascinating. I just think he’s such a funny guy. You can feel him creeping right up to saying, “They made me cut it,” but he’s humble about it.
Sarah: I agree. He’s also kind of corny. He makes dad jokes.
Laura: Yeah, he’s not “cool.” He still comes off as kind of a sci-fi nerd. I thought it was interesting that he says, “It’s not my favorite book, but it’s all of y’all’s favorite book.”
Sarah: He actually has really bad taste in his own work. He hates the movie The Shining. It was really interesting reading the section about the film adaptations. He’s taking us through his casting notes, which feels like something they should have cut!
Laura: So, the Preface in Two Parts came out when the uncut version—the one we are reading—came out in 1990 with 400 pages added back in. When The Stand originally came out in 1978, it was literally too long to be printed with the binding technology of the time. I do have concerns about my spine holding up. I can’t believe you’re doing the paperback.
Sarah: Well, I wanted to take it with me when I travel. But anyway, the 1990 version has some modifications. He updated the timeline and pop culture references, rearranged chapters, and added back about 150,000 words.
Laura: I think he’s right that it makes these characters richer. This is a plot-driven book, but adding back those words makes for a richer experience. There have been miniseries adaptations—one in 1994 with Molly Ringwald, and one in December 2020 during a pandemic, which was such bad luck.
Laura: This book has sold four and a half million copies. Of course it spawned miniseries. It’s currently in development to be a movie. And in August of 2025, a book came out called The End of the World as We Know It, which is basically an anthology of stories set in The Stand universe written by famous horror writers like Paul Tremblay and S.A. Cosby.
We hope over the course of this project to maybe do a watch-along of the miniseries or explore this new book. That is what is beautiful about a slow read—you’re not in a hurry. You can go on “side quests.”
Sarah: We plan on picking up those threads. A book this big has lots of tentacles. We’re going to let them all flow through.
Laura: Let me say one other reason why I chose this when you came to me. I knew that you, Sarah, would be a great person to have a conversation around this story because it’s pretty political.
Sarah: Oh, I’m so excited. I love a political novel. My work at Pantsuit Politics is all about how politics is deep and wide. Often, a piece of fiction is the best way to unpack this stuff because the stakes are low. It’s politics on a micro level—the politics of human nature.
Laura: If 97% of people are gone, nobody is using their Congress card to vote. It’s the politics of how we live in community together.
Sarah: Exactly. Sounds like there’s going to be lots of that in The Stand.
Laura: Should we go through the logistics?
Sarah: Okay. We will be reading The Stand by Stephen King from now, January 2026, to the end of June. Six months. We’ve broken down a reader’s guide for you so you know what we’re going to talk about on every episode. A deadline really helps with a book this long.
Laura: I’ve never done a slow read where you almost have to abstain. You get so into it you want to keep going. But there’s something nice about forcing yourself to stop, let it sink in, and participate in the conversation.
Sarah: We are going to have a subscriber community on Substack where we will have once-a-month Zooms. If you are really into chatting about this in a group setting, that will be available. No matter what, subscribe on Substack to get the reading schedule.
Laura: We want members who are reading it with us to participate. It’s really fun hearing perspectives I hadn’t thought about. If you think an online book club isn’t as satisfying as a real-life book club, let me tell you: yes, it is. The Zoom puts up a nice framework where you can actually talk about the book.
Sarah: Can I tell you what my favorite quote is from The Stand? Can I read it to you?
Laura: Absolutely.
Sarah:“No one can tell what goes on between the person you were and the person you become. You just come out the other side. Or you don’t.”
Laura: Is that our send-off? See you on the other side? It’s a little ominous, the “or you don’t” part.
Sarah: Let’s just assume we will see you on the other side, everyone.
Laura: Yeah. Well, okay, the first one... if he’d just done the Bruce Springsteen quote, I think I’d have been with him. I underlined “and try to make an honest stand.” Okay. Why did he keep going?
Sarah: I mean, he couldn’t have known that Blue Öyster Cult was going to turn into a Saturday Night Live skit, in his defense. In 1978, he didn’t know that this song was going to become such a joke. So I have a little sympathy for the second one.
Laura: Well, I think that he is really wanting you to “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”
Sarah: But all I hear is cowbell, Laura. I also feel like... starting a book off with four quotes is a little bit amateur hour. My snobbery is going to show so early in this conversation, and for the next six months y’all just know it.
Laura: Yeah, it’s like he couldn’t pick. Don’t you have an editor? But I wonder, do we know if the first edition in 1978 had all three? That’s a question I would like to know the answer to. Maybe he was like, “You know what? They made me cut the Bruce Springsteen lyric and I’m putting it back in in 1990.”
Sarah: It’s just a little excessive. Was Bruce Springsteen a big deal in the 70s?
Laura: Well, I think he was already, like, to the cool kids. He wasn’t mass popularity. I don’t know. My Bruce Springsteen education is lacking.
Sarah: I did watch the entire Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary documentary about “Don’t Fear the Reaper” and how the song came to be and how it became a part of the sketch. I can tell you more than I really should know about this song. But I don’t understand the third one. “What’s that spell? What’s that spell? What’s that spell?” That’s not even a good lyric. What’s he doing? I don’t get it.
Laura: Okay, well, that third quote... I wasn’t even sure that that was a real band. I had to look it up. Country Joe and the Fish was an American psychedelic rock band formed in Berkeley, California in 1965. Maybe the idea is that you listen to it—or hear the song in your head. Maybe it’s really more referential to the vibe of the music than the lyrics. But I’m squinting here. I’m really trying to give it the maximum amount of credit for these three, a little bit superfluous, lyric quotes.
Sarah: Well, here’s what you need to know about Stephen King. This is true in every book I’ve ever read of his. He is a real music lover. He will put music quotes or references—like how he always has characters listening to very specific songs when they’re driving the car. He never makes it generic. It is always very specific. He is a music person.
Laura: The first three are music lyrics. And then on the next page where it says “The Circle Opens,” which is the beginning of our story, there’s yet another quote. But this one is from a poet who I was unfamiliar with—Edward Dorn.
Sarah: Yeah, I’ve never heard of Edward Dorn.
Laura: His most famous work is Gunslinger, which came out in 1968.
Sarah: The poet reckoned? Yeah, what are you doing? It’s very Stephen King to me.
Laura: Yeah, it’s so literal. To me, quotes like this should really add to or create a sense of energy or vibe. This feels a little literal. But he’s such a writer for the masses, you shouldn’t need some sort of esoteric background on Edward Dorn for this to make sense to you. I’m leaning on you here. I’m just thinking, “Oh, I bet the more I read, the more these will make sense to me.”
Sarah: I don’t find the quotes in any of his books or the lyrics to matter that much. I’m sure they matter to him. And Edward Dorn, this poet, his most famous poem like I said is called Gunslinger. That is also the name of Stephen King’s first novel in his Dark Tower series. Oh no, he named that after Dorn? Like he was a Dorn fan?
Laura: And what’s also going to matter a little bit—it still isn’t that deep to me—but a pretty main character in The Stand is a big part of the Dark Tower series.
Sarah: Oh. I didn’t know there was connective tissue like that.
Laura: Oh, King’s work is very connected. He is the original Taylor Swift Easter egg. He loves to bury some of his characters as just random side characters in one story and then flesh them out in a whole other novel later.
Sarah: I love that. Like Elizabeth Strout—when she started putting Olive Kitteridge and all the people together. I’m really into that approach.
Laura: So I love Elizabeth Strout, too. It’s not quite like that because with King, they’re not all living in the same universe, really. No, because you got multiverse. Time travel. So like in 11/22/63, for example, which is one of my very favorite King books—and for those who don’t like the horror stuff, it’s so excellent because it’s time travel—in one of the portions where the character goes back to the 50s, he runs into the kids from It. Just a tiny scene. You could read it and never know. But if you know, you know.
Sarah: Well, who are we going to run into in this book? Because everybody looks like they’re going to die.
The Prologue: Charlie and Sally
Laura: So let’s start then. That’s kind of the prologue where we start with this man who is waking his wife out of a dead sleep. Turns out he should have been on the night shift, and he has her get up, get dressed, get their three-year-old baby LaVon.
Sarah: Why do they call her “Baby LaVon”? And also, another very 70s thing—because I know he wrote this in 1978 and then updates it in 1990—but the 70s is peeking through. She was sleeping in a baby doll nightie.
Laura: As we all do. Anyway, the woman gets up. Sally is her name. Which, listen, we’re going to take so many tangents here, but I have to tell you that “Sally” is my Starbucks name.
Sarah: That’s what you put on all your orders?
Laura: Every time. Jamba Juice, wherever. If you have to give your name, I always give “Sally” my whole life. Because my favorite story as a little kid was Judy Blume’s book starring Sally J. Friedman as herself.
Sarah: Amazing.
Laura: So Sally references always perk my ear up. Anyway, back to our people. He’s woken her up in the middle of the night. She’s so disoriented. And in the chaos, we learn that they’re on some sort of a military base where he works as a security guard in one of the towers. And when he was on shift, in the night shift, he happened to notice... right when some sort of alarm went off, the lights in his space turned from green to red. Then he looked at the security monitors where he can see inside this building that he’s guarding. And everyone inside is dead.
Sarah: Oh, my gosh. So there’s supposed to be some sort of immediate lockdown mechanism there that’s triggered when this alarm goes off. But he manages to get out in those 30 seconds.
Laura: Well, because he sees the clock turn red. He sees the clock. He’s like, “I got whatever this countdown is to get the hell out, I guess.”
Sarah: Didn’t think at all. If they’re all dead and there’s a countdown... perhaps I should not flee and expose people to other dangers?
Laura: Look, in Charlie’s defense, wouldn’t you say if he’s working in a security tower, he thinks that he’s away enough?
Sarah: No, because if you’re running, you’re in danger. That’s why you fled. If you’re in danger, then you’re in danger of other people in this scenario.
Laura: I mean, he knows there’s enough danger that he checks the direction of the wind.
Sarah: This is what I’m saying. And then it goes, “You know what I think I’m going to do? I’m going to go run right to the two people I love most in the world.” I’m going to check the direction of the wind and then run right to my baby and my wife.
Laura: They get in the car and that’s all we know. That’s the prologue. Now, I do want to say, again to the 70s of it all, I really liked it when he called her “Sugar Babe.”
Sarah: Listen, one of my first books clubs over at By Plane or By Page , we did Danielle Steel’s breakthrough novel, Passion’s Promise. In the 70s, nicknames... lots of mama, so much mama, “hey mama,” “mama this,” “Sugar Babe.” They were something. They were a real indication of their time, the terms of endearment in the 70s.
Laura: I think we should keep a running list of things that would make good merch. Sugar Babe is a good one.
Sarah: Sugar Babe is such a good one. Okay. I’m noting that.
Laura: I do not want the 70s Terms of Endearment to come back. They should die with whatever this is that’s spreading thanks to Charlie and Sally and baby LaVon’s road trip.
Sarah: Poor baby LaVon.
Laura: Not her fault. Check the wind and then go straight to my three-year-old. Good call, dude.
Chapter 1: Arnett, Texas
Laura: Chapter One. More quotes.
Sarah: Oh, God. I know. What’s he doing? Two more. I don’t even know what these are. These songs? “Baby, can you dig your man? He’s a righteous man.” These are not the lyrics I connect with. The ones that just repeat the same thing over and over again.
Laura: Okay, so The Silvers that are quoted there, they were a real band. They were an R&B band. So he’s just changing genres. Okay, branching out a little bit. I respect it. Their hit singles are called “Fool’s Paradise,” “Boogie Fever,” and “Hotline.” So, okay, that does seem relevant. He’s given us some hints. Now, the Larry Underwood song lyric, I want y’all to just put that in your pocket. I want you to just hold on to it.
Sarah: Okay. I’m putting it in my pocket. I’m going to put it in the pocket of my “suntans,” which is a clothing item I had to Google when I encountered it with Charlie. I was like, what the hell is that?
Laura: It’s just pants?
Sarah: Yeah, they’re just pants. Just a word for pants nobody uses anymore. Why this didn’t make the cut in 1990, I do not know.
Laura: Chapter One. This is one of the more memorable scenes for me in this whole story. The entire book, after Sally and Charlie, opens at a gas station in Texas, just outside of Arnett. A bunch of men are sitting around shooting the shit like they do in Texas. And one of the men, Stu Redman—this is our first introduction to Stu—he looks out the window and he sees this Chevy coming down the road, weaving all over. It slowly runs into the gas pumps.How old are you guessing Stu Redman is?
Sarah: Oh, that’s a good question. I mean, in my head, he’s kind of younger, maybe like late 30s. Because he says he has a wife that... this was quite the sentence: “The womb of his young wife had born a single dark and malignant child.” So I thought, okay, well, so he’s been married, but he seems kind of gristled a little bit. So I was guessing late 30s, early 40s.
Laura: I’d say that too, maybe. But the other guys seem older. I felt like Bill Hapscomb, the station’s owner, and a couple other of them seemed older than Stu.
Sarah: You know what felt timeless about this scene? Being in a small town, growing up in a small town, is men sitting around talking about the same things they always talk about. Inflation. Memories about a past football quarterback star that made it out of the town. Stu was no quarterback. They’re just arguing about money and politics and one of them is dumb as dirt and one of them is maybe a little smarter than the rest of the room. He nailed the group dynamic.
Laura: I totally agree. I really like the stuff about Stu—like he kind of knew he could leave, he should leave, but he couldn’t and he couldn’t really tell you why. Did it make you feel sad for him that he had to work, his baby brother got out, his other brother died, he’s stuck in the town? Or did it make you feel like he was a quiet sort of hero?
Sarah: It just made me feel like I knew him a little bit better because there’s a lot of men in this scene and it’s kind of hard to keep them all straight. And I just felt like I understood and got to know Stu in a way that I kind of like, “OK, this is the guy I’m going to pay attention to.”
Laura: You know, here’s the other thing about Stephen King that people who are new to him—it really does take a minute. If you read him a lot, you know he has so many characters. Like each scene has 10 people and he gives them all first and last names. And you’re like, well, how am I supposed to keep up from Vic, from Bill? And it’s like, these are not distinctive names. Bill, Stu, Eddie. You have to sort of trust him that you’ll learn which ones to hang on to and which ones he’s just using as an illustration. So don’t try to memorize all the people all the time. Don’t try to even draw a character map.
Sarah: That makes me feel better. Anyway, so this car crashes into their pumps. The driver is alive, but barely. He falls out of the driver’s seat. And in a car with a dead lady and a dead three-year-old. Boy, I wonder who it could be. Not only are they dead, they’re like grotesquely dead. Swollen, purple, black eyes.
Sarah: And I have so many questions about Charlie. Why was he still driving?
Laura: He says, “Are they still alive?” But from what he describes, I guess he was just in the fog of his own illness that he couldn’t see that they were very clearly dead.
Sarah: Oh, when he talks about when Charlie crashes in, and the worst part is he says something about... like, his spittle flew.
Laura: And you’re like, oh, no. Not spittle.
Sarah: No, you guys are all good and truly fucked if spittle is flying. But you also got to figure, they don’t really spell this out. And maybe we’re just hyper-aware of this because we just came through a pandemic. But you have to imagine if they have driven from California to Texas, how many places they’ve stopped. Restaurants, other gas stations, bathrooms, snacks. It’s gonna be bad. I feel like as I’m reading this, as opposed to when people read it in 1978 or 1990, post-pandemic I just feel a little bit like the gristled fisherman in Jaws where I’m like: It’s over for all y’all. I’m not even scared. I’m not even anxious for him. I’m so calloused about this. I’m just like, oh well, you’re gonna need a bigger boat.
Laura: I know, but you know, the first time I read this pre-pandemic, it’s not that my logical brain couldn’t have connected the dots of how diseases spread, but I don’t think it would have been so top of mind. I would have been more sort of willing to let it unfold a little as a reader, whereas now we immediately go to spittle.
Sarah: Yeah. And there are a lot of bodily fluids in these first couple of chapters. People have snot. People are coughing. There’s spittle. People’s bodies are swollen, full of fluids. But doesn’t that feel to you like when we all watched the opening scenes of Contagion or Outbreak?
Laura: I loved Outbreak. I love that movie.
Sarah: Where it’s showing how something spreads quickly and how often you’re just in contact with people casually and this thing is jumping around. This is like the earliest version of that.
Laura: My favorite line in that whole section, when the men are baffled and trying to figure out what is happening, is when one of the men says: “Maybe they got a poison hamburger.” It happens.
Sarah: You know what? He’s right, Laura. Considering the current state of our FDA, more right than in other times in American history. Just saying.
Laura: If you saw dead people completely swollen, would your thought be, “Well, they could have gotten a poison hamburger”?
Sarah: Definitely a poison hamburger. No. Anyway, they kind of reassure Charlie as he’s on the floor that his wife and baby are okay. We know they are not. And he dies in the ambulance. After exposing more people with his spittle. And we learn in that moment that patient zero is Charlie Campion.
Chapter Two
Laura: Chapter Two opens in Maine. Stephen King’s favorite place, right?
Sarah: That’s his place. His fictional town of Derry, Maine, is pretty infamous in horror world land. But he sets everything in Maine.
Laura: Well, it was so interesting. We get to this chapter. We get these two new people, Jess and Franny. And I’m like, well, I thought maybe you were introducing us to everybody who survives, but I definitely know all those dudes aren’t surviving. So I’m trying to figure out why are we meeting all these people as we’re going through these first chapters. I’m trying to guard my heart here.
Sarah: Franny is in this parking lot in Maine. She’s staring out at her boyfriend who’s sitting on the pier. She’s about to go tell him she’s pregnant. God, I loved this whole thing about Franny trying to figure out if she even loves this guy or not. She’s pushing on him. She really has a lot of disdain for him. But also, you know, she appears to have gotten pregnant after their very first time. I think that happened a lot in the 70s.
Laura: And she really is like, talking about the pill, and maybe she forgot to take the pill. I’m like, Franny, girl, you forgot to take it. It was kind of a funny inner dialogue. I actually think that this is when you start to see how funny King can be. I thought his inner monologue of Franny’s thoughts were actually hilarious. My favorite was: “He struck a light, and for just a moment, as cigarette smoke rafted up, she clearly saw a man and a boy fighting for control of the same face.”
Sarah: Listen, I live with a bunch of teenage boys. When I tell you that line hits...
Laura: I live with a teenage boy, too. And I underlined that line as well. That’s so good.
Sarah: And you can kind of see that Jess, the boy, he is sort of a doofus pants. Like, he does seem pretentious in the way that Franny is describing him. And yet you also sort of feel sorry for him. He’s trying. He’s blindsided by this news.
Laura: And she’s being pretty mean to him in a way. She tells him she doesn’t want to marry him. She kind of makes fun of his intellect. Well, and then he slaps her.
Sarah: This was giving 70s too. This was giving “sometimes you need a little slap.” Again, he had a chance to update this damn book. So I’m like, you left that in? In 1990?
Laura: No, but I think it definitely happens. I just think it’s less socially acceptable than it was in 1978. Because she’s not like, “Pull over right now.” She’s just like, “Well, it’s okay, you were mad.”
Sarah: It is kind of wild. But I did notice that the tone of this scene, like being with Franny and Jess, is pretty different from being in Texas with the gas station men. It was disorienting almost in a way. Because you’re like, why am I involved in this very intimate relationship conflict when I know I have this 1,200 page epic about a global apocalypse?
Laura: We don’t know what they’re going to have to do with the story, but we’re really getting sort of a scene of what’s happening in another part of the country while these other things are moving east.
Chapter Three
Sarah: Well, and I thought it was particularly interesting because it’s in such direct conflict with Chapter 3. We go back to Texas. And I felt like all this was just one paragraph after the other of: They’ve all got it. Everybody’s got it. They’re going to cough. They’ve got snot.
Laura: Well, the thing about showing up with Norm in Chapter 3, who is one of the gas station guys, is you’re getting a bit of a different peek into this sort of Texas small town. Suddenly we realize Norm is maybe younger than I thought. He’s poor. He doesn’t have food in the fridge. His wife has gone to babysit for a dollar. What was that about? Again, 1990. We didn’t want to update that?
Sarah: Also, we got the N-word. That’s a biggie.
Laura: I was like, whoa, Stephen, 1990, you left that in?
Sarah: Well, here’s the question, though. Is a character being horrendous—in this case racist—a reflection of Stephen King, or does he want you to know something about this character? If you want to know something about this character, it’s as true in 1978 as it is in 1990 as it is in 2025. We got a real insight into Norm real fast. That he is what my grandmother would call “low class.”
Laura: And just kind of... you know, also made me laugh because I think he uses the word “pissant” again. Miserable little pissant.
Sarah: That actually is a word I’m OK with bringing back. Not Sugar Babe. Pissant, though, is pretty descriptive. Maybe we should start using it again.
Laura: Well, I just wonder if in 2025, we’re not reading this book like it was written in 2025. We’re reading it in the context in which it was written. Would you show that a character was racist in a different way? These days, it feels like you just take the N-word off the table as a white author. But if he’s trying to convey something, he got it across.
Sarah: So all the gas station men are coughing. They have headaches. They have phlegm. And then Hapscomb, the owner of the gas station, is at work. He’s back at work the next day. And his cousin, who works for the state patrol, stops by to tell him that the health department is on their way. Because, turns out, what Charlie Campion had and what his family died from is contagious. And he just wants his cousin to know. In fact, it was not a poisoned hamburger. And another one of the brain trusts says, “Looks like it wasn’t a cold.” Maybe it ain’t a cold. I’m like, guys, does a cold make you swell up purple like an inner tube?
Laura: Well, and then they sort of bring up that the Atlanta Plague Center is also going to come visit. I had not heard of the Atlanta, like, CDC or whatever until COVID-19.
Sarah: Really? I feel like Ebola was always like the scary one before COVID.
Laura: Remember monkeypox? Isn’t that what Outbreak is about?
Sarah: No, that’s just monkeys. It wasn’t a monkey pox. I love Outbreak. Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo. Put it in my veins. I loved it so much.
Laura: Maybe we should do a watch along. I feel confident it does not age well. But you know, it’s funny that we’re talking about this six years post-COVID. Are we now to a point where we can... I don’t know. I don’t want to say like laugh about it, because there’s been humorous healing all along. But what do you feel about the distance between where we are now versus like, you know, the year in 2021 where you could not read a book like this?
Sarah: Well, I mean, that’s what I’m saying. I feel good enough about it that we’re hosting this. I feel good enough about it that we’re doing a six month read along with The Stand. But I mean, like I read Station Eleven last year. There’s like a game called “Pandemic” that my husband had and I was like, get this the hell out of here. I ain’t never playing that. So maybe there were some things I was not ready for, but I feel way past the idea of: I don’t want to talk about pandemics. I think it kind of helps you process it in a weird way.
Laura: I do, too. I feel the same way, except that any trauma that I would have suffered from the COVID-19 pandemic was almost all emotional and within myself. I wasn’t working in a hospital. I didn’t lose an immediate loved one. And that’s a different experience than so many other people had.
Sarah: You know, it would be foolish to say that we’re done processing it. When COVID started, we had an epidemiologist researcher on, and she was like, “we’re still studying the 1918 pandemic.” Like, we’re still studying the data. So can you imagine how long we’ll be talking about and thinking about and writing big old fiction books about pandemics?
Laura: But or and... I don’t know, there’s been so many other things happening trauma-wise to process in the last five years on top of the pandemic. It feels like the hits have kept coming.
Sarah: Yeah. I got a bad feeling about “the hits keep coming” for our friends here in Texas.
Chapter Four
Sarah: We are at the beginning of this journey. This circle has barely opened everybody. It does feel like Chapter 3 is all just... “Oh, by the way, everybody has it.” And then Chapter 4. This is when we start to get, finally, a little bit of some explanation of what’s really going on here. Although, as we already discussed, our minds have very easily filled in these blanks a lot easier than a reader who read this before 2020. They might need to be spoon fed a little bit differently.
Laura: Yeah. And they’re talking about communicability. And I’m like, oh, people would have no idea what that means. Stephen King’s “99.4% communicability.” I’m like, oh, I’m there with you, buddy. I was already there. I don’t need Mr. Starkey back at the base to explain to me why this is bad.
Sarah: Well, and you aren’t sure when we meet Starkey, who gives us insight into Project Blue, whatever they were studying or working on... they finally give it a name: “A-Prime Flu.” But when we meet Starkey, we aren’t sure, is he a bad guy? Is he a scientist? Is he a good guy?
Laura: I mean, are there bad guys or is there just a prime flu? In my mind, even though you told me this is about the battle of good and evil... until I guess I get a little bit further in chapter four and I’m like: Is this a fucking lab leak? Are you kidding me? I had not put that together from old Charlie. But this was a lab leak?
Sarah: Yeah. Well, I think in a lab leak scenario, you still have to ask if there are good guys or bad guys here. Like, did we create this virus or were we containing this virus and it leaked or both? Was this a weapon of warfare or was this science or both? I felt there was a good and bad guy question when we meet Starkey.
Laura: Yeah, especially when he’s describing the cafeteria, which I found very confusing.
Sarah: Oh, wait, I love this part. This is one of the biggest imagery for me of the whole book. Why are people dropping dead in their soup? Is that just how fast it kills you?
Laura: It appears that this thing is very, very, very airborne. So as soon as it was out in the building, the lab... and they shut down. But I mean, it killed them before Charlie left the tower. So we’re talking about within seconds.
Sarah: I mean, I don’t know how—like this isn’t real microbiology realistic. Viruses wouldn’t kill you this quickly because they couldn’t spread. They want to spread. They want to live.
Laura: So I guess his sort of theory of the case is that in the lab, first of all, it’s more concentrated, maybe. And that’s why it’s killing these people so much more quickly. He also mentions that it mutates so quickly that you can’t create a vaccine for it.
Sarah: He also is just downing downers the whole time. Just swallowing them dry. One downer after the other. Again, very 70s coded. They love downers in the 70s. And there’s like... I don’t know. This is what also sort of made me think of like, is this a good guy, bad guy scenario versus like a neutral government program? That his son-in-law dies by suicide. The second this thing gets out, he’s like—and his son-in-law is the head of Project Blue. And Starkey is obviously some sort of high up government official. You’re also getting the hints that it was secretive because Charlie Campion, our escaped security guard, doesn’t have any proof of where he lives. He mentions that he’s been collecting hazard pay. There’s obviously a lot of secretiveness around this.
Laura: My favorite line in this chapter was: “Somewhere along the line, you have to stop guarding the guardians or everyone in the world would be a goddamn turnkey.”
Sarah: A goddamn turnkey.
Laura: Wait, I like turkey, man.
Sarah: Oh, let’s keep turkey. It’s turnkey. But that is true, kind of. You have to quit guarding the guardians at some point.
Laura: But I have to mention, we cannot move past this chapter without mentioning this image that sticks so much in my mind about this whole thing that Starkey is also obsessed with. He keeps watching the monitors of the building where everyone’s dead because he can still see the cameras working. And he’s looking at the cafeteria where people are dead by the Twinkie section. And the one guy is face down in his soup. You will spend eternity with your face in a bowl of soup. In italics.
Sarah: Suppose someone walked up to you and said you will spend eternity with your face in a bowl of soup. It’s like the old pie in the face routine. It stops being funny when it starts being you.
Laura: I mean, couldn’t that be the whole thing with The Stand? It starts being scary when it starts being you.
Sarah: Merch alert.
Laura: Okay, so that’s sort of what happened in the first four chapters. Wait, wait, we can’t move on from chapter four until we note that Arnett is under quarantine, and all the guys at the gas station are being tested, but Stu keeps testing negative.
Sarah: It’s true. Stu.
Laura: But does that mean anything? Because Charlie Campion tested negative for 50 hours.
Sarah: I think it does. I think it does. I’ve decided it does.
Laura: Only time will tell. Only pages will tell.
Homework & Next Steps
Reading Assignment:
For next week, we are tackling Chapters 5 through 15. It’s about 84 pages. We can do it!
Bonus Content:
The Side Quest: One of the bonus offerings for paid subscribers on Substack is a section called “Side Quest.” This week we’re going to talk about the logistics of carrying around a 1,200-page book that you’re reading for six months. Become a paid subscriber so you don’t miss the full discussion!
Slow Read: The Stand is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Laura: There are funny parts that I feel like maybe I gave a little chuckle or a wink to in the past, but I was maybe more focused on the plot. And this read, I’m like, I’m so enjoying this. This is not my favorite Stephen King book of all time, but maybe it will be by June.
Sarah: What if it rises in the rankings? Rereading reminds me of rewatching The Sopranos. I was just so in it the first time that when I rewatched it, I would laugh out loud. I think the first time through you miss something. So much of the humor or the absurdity—in the reread, you really do get it.
Laura: Well, and clearly when you reread something and you already know what’s going to happen, you’re catching the red herrings or you’re catching the foreshadowing in an entirely different way. Especially in a book like The Stand where there’s 40 bajillion characters.
Chapter 5 - Larry Underwood & The 70s
Sarah: Chapter 5. We’re starting with Larry Underwood.
Laura: This is our introduction to Larry.
Sarah: We’re finding out Larry is a one-hit wonder. Spoiler alert. Well, I guess he’s not going to get a chance to do any more hits now that I think about it. So we’re with Larry, and we’re understanding the backstory of what happened to him in L.A. I underlined in this chapter every time drugs were mentioned. And let me tell you something: It’s a lot. Larry’s doing a lot of drugs. It was the 70s.
Laura: It didn’t even bother me.
Sarah: It didn’t even bother me, it’s just... oh, there’s a lot. He’s with “hop heads.” He is taking uppers. He’s also doing dope. He’s taking cocaine. There’s an eight ball. There’s “Reds.” An amphetamine hangover. I’m telling you, there was pot and there was coke.
Laura: Am I just going to be the jaded Los Angeles person? I didn’t even bat an eye. Not because I live in a drug den—although, weird spoiler, I actually do live in a former celebrity drug den house.
Sarah: I love it.
Laura: But I felt like that part describing Larry’s life in L.A. was a little cliche—music industry hangers-on, Malibu—until he goes on the walk on the beach with his friend. Or colleague.
Sarah: Who is a trust fund baby so he doesn’t get “gobbled” up. Oh no, I said gobbled. Oh God. Now it’s infecting my own language.
Laura: That part was interesting to me because the guy ran a bunch of numbers. He was sort of talking about how much he’d spent on the drugs, how much he’d put down on the car, how much the rent on the Malibu house was. It was like a behind-the-scenes. You don’t really see the lived reality of sudden fame and the toxicity of that. It’s not enough money to maintain what people expect of you. It runs out really, really fast.
Sarah: We get a lot of Larry’s backstory before we get to Larry getting to New York. King has this line about New York had “all the charm of a dead whore.” I thought that was a real impactful sentence.
Laura: Stephen King loves a dead whore. They’ll show up in every book at some point. But there was one throwaway line about how when he throws everybody out of the house, they’re going to act like “you’ve gotten too big for your britches.” And I have seen this. Someone getting healthier or rising to meet their success moment makes other people feel left behind.
Sarah: There is a line from an Oprah Winfrey Show episode that has lived rent-free in my brain for 30 years. A woman had lost a dramatic amount of weight and she said, “All of my friends were supportive until I got thinner than them.” That feels really true and reflective of human behavior. If you are the friend that’s a mess, I want you to clean up to a certain point. And then after that, you’re not fulfilling the role in my life that I had for you.
Laura: Since we know this is a pandemic book, we can kind of see what’s about to happen to the world. Larry getting his success like weeks before... what a bummer.
Sarah: Yeah. What a bummer. You’re going to make it—like winning lotto tickets right before Captain Trips kills everybody. That sucks.
Laura: What I really like about this chapter is Stephen King quickly shows you that he’s not going home because it’s some soft place to land. He’s not going back to his mother because she is some super nurturer. Alice is a tough cookie.
Sarah: I did underline at the very end of the chapter: “He was the only one allowed inside his heart, but she loved him.” It’s really... as I was reading all these chapters, one moment I’m rolling my eyes at a dated reference, and then the next minute, he will just land something that you’re like: Whew. That is true. He will just sucker punch you with something that feels so true.
Chapter 6 - Franny, Peter, and The Workshop
Laura: Chapter 6. We’re back in Maine with Franny and her father, Peter, and she is telling him that she is pregnant.
Sarah: Lots of parenting. I don’t know if you picked this conglomeration of chapters because there’s so much parenting going on here, but wow.
Laura: You have Larry and Alice. We know almost nothing about Larry’s father. But everything with Peter and Franny is through the lens of Peter’s relationship with Franny’s mother, Carla. I didn’t feel like at any point Stephen King was making an argument about good parenting or bad parenting. I think he was just saying: Here’s a bunch of parenting types. Here’s a bunch of marriages. And it felt so true to me.
Sarah: When she says she loved it when her dad talked this way... “It wasn’t a way he talked often because the woman that was his wife and her mother would and had all but cut the tongue out of his head with the acid which could flow so quickly and freely from her own.” That is some true-ass shit. I have seen that. Have I maybe cut my own fair path of acid with my own tongue? Perhaps. I admit nothing.
Laura: Peter is great. I love the line: “64 has a way of forgetting what 21 was like.” That makes me cry. And I thought the way he spoke about abortion... he just was like, look, do you know how much healthier our national abortion debate would be if everybody stated how they felt about abortion with their own experiences?
Sarah: I underlined the whole passage of him talking about abortion because, even if I would come to a different conclusion than Peter does, you kind of can’t fault where he’s coming from. It was such a good example as opposed to Carla, which I also underlined: “She slapped three coats of lacquer and one of quick dry cement on her way of looking in things and called it good.” God, Carla.
Laura: Poor hateful Carla. We’re going to get to that. We’re not to the parlor yet. We’re still in the workshop with beautiful, grace-filled Peter.
Sarah: I do wonder why we’re not really given an explanation for why Franny has come to the conclusion that abortion is not what she chooses. She just says, “I have my own reasons.”
Laura: I honestly think that’s pretty realistic. I think a lot of people will say, “This is what I want to do, and I really can’t explain why.” Especially for someone as young as Franny.
Chapter 7 - The Spread & The Fear
Sarah: Chapter 7. Vic Palfrey dies. Vic, I hardly knew ye. I’d love to be sad, but I forgot which one you were.
Laura: This is where we start to sort of understand the pandemic part.
Sarah: It is affecting and frightening to read. It reminds me of The Lovely Bones. You’re so busy being afraid of it in an avoidant way, but then when somebody writes it first person... I didn’t think about how horrifying it must be to live it. To know you’re going to die and feel like that’s coming for you. Just to think: I’m here, I’m drowning in mucus. I’m going to die.
Laura: It’s just scary. I would rather sit with a monster or the rat eating the cat’s body in New York than I would with that scene of knowing that it’s coming. These are the scenes we’re scared of. These real-life human people scenes are so much scarier. It’s not the extraterrestrial. It’s the humanity, the vulnerability of humanity that’s so scary.
Sarah: Also in this chapter, we spend some time with Stu, who is starting to put the pieces together because he is, in fact, not drowning in phlegm.
Laura: A couple of things about Stu. He is likely smarter than his other gas station counterparts. He is bringing his past life experience to this hospital table. And thirdly, for me, this is the first hint that we get that Stu Redman might be attractive.
Sarah: Oh yeah. I very much hung up on the description of his tan.
Laura: Well, also, he just has a confidence that is attractive. He’s not easily bullshitted. Is that a verb? I just made it one.
Sarah: He feels like a cowboy. I am reading some Westerns alongside this, and he definitely has that vibe. He has a certain type of quiet swagger. Don’t you love a quiet swagger? I’m looking at you, Tim Riggins.
Sarah: I would like to point out that he used the word “pissant” again in this chapter, which I think we should bring back. And another phrase I think we should bring back is “doesn’t know shit from Shinola.”
Sarah: Motion to return “doesn’t know shit from Shinola” to the vernacular. Motion carries.
Laura: Sarah, we blew past my merch idea.
Sarah: What’s your merch idea?
Laura: The entire Larry Underwood chapter... all I could think of every time I read that the name of his hit was “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” I put it on the Spotify playlist.
Sarah: I just feel like this is so 70s. People were not using “dig.” I don’t want to bring that one back. That one can stay dead. No, I cannot and I will not “dig my man.”
Laura: I’m going to do it, you guys. I’m going to work on that sweatshirt design. Just because it is so funny and so specific.
Chapter 8 - Everybody Gets It
Laura: Chapter 8. This one is just pandemic specifics. This is just the logistics of the very lethal chain letter that is Captain Trips.
Laura: This chapter, I’m making notes. This is the sole sentence that I wrote for Chapter 8: Everybody gets it. Everybody gets it. Everybody.
Sarah: It doesn’t matter how obscure the contact is. The virus hits and attaches. The part I underlined is where the family is driving and the dad says: “Fuck Jesse James, Ed grumped. Ed, Trish cried. Sorry, he said. Not feeling sorry in the least.” That sounds like something Leanne Morgan would describe about Chuck Morgan.
Laura: I love this kind of chapter because I feel like you’re getting these tiny slices of humanity—the bridge club friends, the poker night. It seems like Stephen King is literally enjoying himself writing these tiny little snippets. And I think this is probably my COVID lens more than anything, but I feel like there’s an aspect of this that is just... people got it because viruses spread among human behavior. Not because anybody was doing it right or doing it wrong or being selfish. Viruses like to spread. That’s what they do.
Sarah: I don’t know. Why not? Lean in. It’s actually a great accompaniment because he talks about viruses going to virus, but also the reality that history matters. This virus was created in a lab. So it was just spreading through normal human behavior, but it didn’t get out there through normal human behavior.
Chapter 9 - Nick Andros & The Bullies
Laura: Chapter 9. Poor Nick Andros. Here comes Nick. He got the shit beaten out of him. And for what?
Sarah: I think it really bothered them that he was mute.
Laura: Another thing about Stephen King—he has some really strong themes throughout all of his work, and one of them is bullies like this. Like Biff from Back to the Future. That type of bully who is literally low IQ, maybe comes from a wealthy family, but is just violent for violence’s sake.
Sarah: I think it’s really good though, because coming off Peter, it would be easy to get in a place of “people are good and they’re doing their best.” And I feel like he shows up and is like, “Yes, some people are. Some people, however, are bad, cruel people.”
Laura: Poor Nick ran up against four of them in the dark. And it’s so true to small town life that the guy would be the sheriff’s brother-in-law. I know I probably should have felt the most sympathy for poor Nick, but when the sheriff was like, “that’s my wife’s brother,” I was like: Oh buddy, I’m so sorry, Sheriff John Baker.
Chapter 10 - The Gobbling
Laura: Chapter 10. Gobble, gobble, Sarah.
Sarah: No, no. Guys, it’s so bad.
Laura: So Larry wakes up from a hangover. And he says: “He vaguely remembered being gobbled like a Purdue drumstick.”
Sarah: That is bad enough. I wrote “Oh my God” in the side of my book. He says gobble like three more times.
Laura: He talks about it so many times! I was like, if you don’t stop with the gobbling, I’m going to throw a spatula at your forehead.
Sarah: This is what I underlined: “The girl’s name was Maria, and she had said she was what? Oral hygienist? Larry didn’t know how much she knew about hygiene, but she was great on oral.” Then he says the line about gobbling. Stephen King, stop it.
Laura: She’s making him breakfast topless.
Sarah: Always how I fry bacon. In a half slip. That’s always how I cook hot, greasy foods. Is in a half slip with my tits out. Makes perfect sense to me as a woman.
Laura: But I do like the refrain of “I thought you were a nice guy.” In some ways, she’s his conscience. We’re getting the sense that, dadgummit, Larry is trying to be a nice guy. It is not in his nature, actually. He has that “it factor.” He has that thing. But how that plays out in real life is hard.
Chapter 11 - Alice Underwood & The “Taker”
Laura: In Chapter 11, he’s trying to get to his mother. He gets there and she says: “Sometimes I think you’d cross the street to step in dog shit.”
Sarah: I must steal that. Because I absolutely know people like that.
Laura: And then she says: “I think you’re a taker. You’ve always been one. It’s like God left some part of you out when he built you inside of me.” The taker part really got to me. It made me think of Scott Galloway talking about being a “net surplus” to society versus a net negative. Larry, you’re a net negative. You’ve got to be a net surplus.
Laura: Are we going to get to see what would have been if the virus didn’t wreck everything? Because what if his music would have been the net surplus? How many times do we hear about great artists—like the Steve Jobs or whatever—who are really selfish in real life, and yet their contribution to the world is an outsized benefit?
Sarah: I do want to take a hard turn and say... Should we chalk our child’s first bad word on their forehead and make them walk around the block?
Laura: Wait, was that brilliant?
Sarah: I think it was. Alice Underwood did that to Larry. I don’t know if you’re picking up on what I’m laying down here, but I’m not really a proponent of gentle parenting. So I think it’s a great idea..
Chapter 12: Carla in the Parlor
Laura: How are we not going to applaud Alice when the next chapter we get Carla in the parlor?
Sarah: God, okay. The parlor is scary. I don’t ever want to go to the parlor.
Laura: Did you have compassion for Carla, given she’d lost her baby boy?
Sarah: 100%. I know people who have hardened in the face of hardship, exactly as Peter describes her. When Peter gets onto Carla... he says to her: “If she decides to keep this baby, you are going to give her the best baby shower.”
Laura: Listen, small town life. I have witnessed the withholding of a baby shower from someone who got pregnant out of wedlock. It is cruel. That just knifed my heart a little bit.
Sarah: Carla is mean. She tells Franny she’s a “bad girl.” I just love the “bad girl.” That’s kind of like a joke I tell my children. I’ll be like, “You’re a bad baby.” And one time I said it to Felix when he was pretty little, and he went: “No, I amn’t.”
Laura: The most interesting part was when Peter comes in and he takes responsibility. He says: “I let you harden... I was not the sandpaper that should have showed up... so I hold responsibility for this, too.” That’s a really complex portrait of parenting. We cannot control each other, but we can influence each other.
Laura: Did you feel a difference between Carla slapping Franny and Peter slapping Carla?
Sarah: I just felt like there was a lot of slapping in the 70s, honestly. Just a lot of face slapping. I’ve never been slapped in the face.
Laura: Well, I have. And let me tell you, it is humiliating. It is degrading. To me, when Carla slaps Franny, it is meant to be degrading.
Sarah: When Peter slaps Carla... at least the vibe I felt like Stephen King was trying to put across is it was disruptive. It was to snap her out of it. Like Cher in Moonstruck. “Snap out of it!”
Laura: I hear you, except then he says “you’ve been needing that for a long time.”
Sarah: He could have left that out.
Laura: Also, when Franny came in covered in blood... Carla’s immediate reaction was about the rug. But then she switched.
Sarah: Who as a mother hasn’t said something they didn’t mean to say out their mouth? I have had a child bleed all over my house who then wept because he thought I was going to make him sleep outside because I had threatened them if they got my new paint job dirty. Bonus: Blood actually comes out of paint real easy.
Laura: But then Peter ruined it a bit for me when he called Carla “it.” He kept calling her “dry,” like a dry age.
Sarah: I did like the imagery of how he would retreat to the workshop to heal his heart, and she would retreat to the parlor where she could have a mask on of perfection.
Chapter 13 - The CDC and “The Man With No Face”
Laura: Chapter 13. We’re back with Stu at the CDC facility in Atlanta. His standoff, refusing to get his blood pressure taken, has worked. And Dick Deetz, another military man, comes in.
Sarah: I do not understand the thing he is wearing to block his nasal passage and why that would matter if your mouth isn’t covered. He says it looks like a two-pronged silver fork. What the hell? Was he breathing in something else? Can’t it just be a mask, Stephen? You’re overthinking this, buddy.
Laura: So Deetz comes in and he’s basically like... I’m not all the way up the chain of command, I can’t tell you everything. But, fun fact: Everyone from Arnett that came in with you is dead. You are not. We do not know why. And I loved this line when Stu asks the question everyone asks: “Whose fault is this?”.
Sarah: Deetz says: “Nobody... On this one, the responsibility spreads in so many directions that it’s invisible.” I thought, oh man, that is so good. That is so true in so many circumstances. People hate to hear that. They want to blame somebody. They want justice.
Laura:“It was an accident.” Do you believe him?
Sarah: Yes. Even if this is a military-created virus, even in something as big as the United States military, it’s not going to be one person who says, “This is my idea... and I authorize it”. It’s never going to work like that. There’s going to be a million people who allowed it to advance. It’s just too big of a bureaucracy.
Sarah: And this is also where Stu has a very vivid dream.
Laura: Yes. This is big.
Sarah: A vivid dream of cornfields and crows. Something dark is in the corn. “He sees two burning red eyes far back in the shadows... Those eyes filled him with the paralyzed, hopeless horror that the hen feels for the weasel. Him, he thought, the man with no face.Oh, dear God. No.” What does it mean, Laura?
Laura: This is the first time that he has been referenced in The Stand. The man with no face.
Sarah: Stephen King loves dreams. He likes mind control and dreams.
Laura: So pay attention when there are dreams. Also, if you don’t know, a very scary story that Stephen King wrote is The Children of the Corn. He loves to put some scary evil in the cornfields.
Sarah: What’s he got against corn? Well, and Stu says it must have been Iowa or Nebraska... but he had never been in any of those places in his life.
Chapter 14 - A Gary Cooper Exterior
Sarah: So Chapter 14, Deetz is recording his official report. This is where we learn that he has a “Gary Cooper exterior,” Stu Redman.
Laura: Yes. Okay.
Sarah: And that he dreams a great deal.
Chapter 15 - A New Day?
Laura: Then the last chapter, Chapter 15, we get a little visit from Patty Greer, the nurse.
Sarah: I thought this was really good, too. Again, I think this is my post-COVID lens, but he talks about how she sneezes and... she didn’t even catch it. She didn’t even catch it even though there’d been signs everywhere saying “report any cold symptoms no matter how minor”. She didn’t even think about it.
Laura: It makes me think about how people get frustrated telling people the same thing over and over again. Or like the famous Disney World example where people will ask “What time is the five o’clock parade?”.
Sarah: It’s so easy to roll your eyes at people asking stupid questions or doing what we think is stupid. But I thought it was very empathetic and great how he wrote about it. She wasn’t doing anything wrong. She didn’t even think about it. She didn’t even clock her sneezes as a minor symptom. But guess what? That’s so human to me. And this chapter ends with: “A new day had begun.”
Sarah: I don’t think a new day begun. I think all the days are coming to an end. We’re sunsetting a little. It’s a closing.
Next Week:
We will be reading Chapters 16-25 for next week’s episode, but if you want extra credit, check out John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis or watch out for our Outbreak rewatch episode.
Up Next: The Side Quest
Head over to the paid subscriber section where we are discussing Motherhood. See you on the other side!
If you prefer to read instead of listen, below is a cleaned up transcript of the episodes as well as links to all the books and Substacks we mentioned in this episode…and several fun bonus links and videos!
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Laura: Today we’re talking about Chapters 16 through 25, where the Captain Tripp’s super flu pandemic rages on. Two gangsters have a shootout in a gas station in Arizona, and our deaf-mute character, Nick Andros, basically becomes the sheriff in Arkansas.
Sarah: The sheriff of nobody.
Laura: And Larry Underwood takes care of his sick mom in New York City. And then we finally get a little more backstory to the origins and architects of this virus and of Project Blue.
Sarah: Shit’s getting dark. I don’t know how to say it any other way.
Laura: Do you think so? Because I felt like this section, with the exception of one chapter which is one of my favorites, felt a little slow to me.
Sarah: What are you talking about? We got so many villains! We got some real murderous, scary people showing up. It feels like things are starting to fall apart. This is going to be fertile ground for dark people, dark energy, dark acts. I was kind of ready for people to start dying in bigger numbers... and now that it’s started, I’m like: Oh, no.
Chapter 16: Poke, Lloyd, and the Crime Spree
Laura: Chapter 16.
Sarah: This section comes in hot.
Laura: We meet Poke and Lloyd. These are two criminals.
Sarah: I need to say this first off: In my head, I pronounced it “Poke” like a poke bowl the whole time.
Laura: I know. It’s because I’m from Oklahoma, so I was like, yeah. To poke around, to be a poke... that’s definitely a rural nickname.
Sarah: No, a poke is like a cowboy. Like “Go Pokes.” See, look at these regional differences. Meanwhile, I’m pronouncing it like I live in California and eat poke bowls all the time. Anyway, they kill a bunch of people really fast. They killed six people in the last six days.
Laura: He calls it “pokerizing,” meaning he’s killing them, which is pretty intense. Not as bad as “gobble,” but it’s up there.
Sarah: These dudes have gotten out of prison. I understand that they need money, but the immediate killing left and right... I’m like, how did you think this was going to go? The part with Gorgeous George... that is a real common situation in crime fiction. You get a lower level guy who’s protecting the kitty or whatever. But then the prolific killing? I’m like, you people want to go to jail.
Laura: I don’t know how realistic it is, but it felt like glimmers into kind of what Stephen King has always wanted to write about. He’s known for his horror, but as you can tell, there has been very little supernatural elements so far. What has been scary about this story is the violence. In the last decade plus, he has taken a real turn to crime fiction.
Sarah: I don’t mind the violence—The Sopranos is one of my favorite shows of all time—but I want the portraits of the criminals to be complex. And this felt a little one-note.
Laura: To me, it felt like every other storyline has had a touch of the flu in it. And other than maybe the arresting cop having the sniffles, this has nothing to do with anything else we have read thus far. So you’re kind of asking yourself: What does this have to do with anything?
Sarah: It’s kind of a weird wash to listen to this and be like, well, yeah, that’s a violent, terrible way to die... but you might have just drowned in your own snot like everybody else is right now.
Laura: You’re kind of zooming out. Like, well, they don’t know it, but we know it.
Chapter 17: Starkey, Project Blue, and the “Miserable Worm”
Laura: Chapter 17. We are back to Starkey, the head of Project Blue. And we finally sort of get a little bit of the backstory to not just the origins of Project Blue, but maybe the decades-long corruption that might be happening here.
Sarah: That there are these figures so deep underneath the public’s knowledge that are actually controlling everything. Starkey has known the man that’s now the president since college.
Sarah: Here’s my first question: I don’t understand the centrifuge. I thought a centrifuge is just a really big fan thing. Are they running out of air?
Laura: Starkey is in an admin building watching the monitors. But then he goes into the cafeteria and cleans the guy’s face off. He had to kind of bust through the gates to get back in there and everybody’s dead.
Laura: I’m skipping ahead because right now all we get is that he calls the command “Troy,” which basically means: Don’t let the story get out. That also doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. At this point, I’m like: You guys know it’s out and everybody’s going to die. What exactly do you think you’re containing here?
Sarah: Do you think they’re just trying to keep public panic at bay? They just need everybody to die without panic on the airwaves? Here is also a funny thing that I did reading this chapter. When he says: “And one of their number, a man who could now dial directly to the miserable worm who had been masquerading as a chief executive...”I read “Worm” as “Woman”. I thought the president was a woman! I thought that was going to be such an interesting choice. But no, the president is a man.
Laura: Starkey is thinking back on this quote: “If you find your mother raped or your father beaten and robbed before you call the police... you cover their nakedness because you love them.” He’s justifying to himself telling them to murder the journalists. Because what we’re learning about Starkey is that he would cover himself and the government and the country above all else.
Sarah: That is how people justify things like murdering journalists and quarantining whole towns. Because it’s not about the people anymore. It’s about the institution.
Laura: But when you see it framed as love... that is such dark nationalist territory to me. That in 2025, when you’re just like “country above all else”... it gives me a pit in my stomach. Because the institution is going to be left when everyone’s dead. What are you worried about? People are not stupid. They are starting to figure it out.
Chapter 18: Nick Andros, The Sheriff of Shoyo
Laura: Chapter 18. We’re with poor Nick in Arkansas. And everybody’s dead but him.
Sarah: Including the soldiers trying to block the road.
Laura: Nick basically becomes the sheriff because Sheriff Baker is so sick. And Nick decides to write down and fill in some of the holes of his backstory. We learn that he becomes an orphan early and is sent to a foster care system where the state provides a deaf-mute man, Rudy, to teach this kid how to read and write.
Sarah: I really like that part. But before we get there, I have to call out a hilarious moment. Nick is with the Bakers and he says: “Nick, watching them, wondered how two people of such radically different size got along in bed.” I was like, oh goody, it’s not just me.
Laura: I have definitely thought that about people. Just have some logistical questions.
Sarah: I really liked the backstory with Rudy because we’re in the age of positive parenting, and Rudy... well, he slapped Nick. It was a very physical learning. I just thought that was a very accurate portrayal of how a man taught him. He slapped him across the face to get his attention, but he was very kind and taught him everything he needed.
Laura: I got spanked growing up. I’m not traumatized. But getting slapped across the face... it is a humiliation. But it didn’t feel that way with Rudy. It was different than with Carla and Franny.
Sarah: I think what was impactful to me is that Nick was checked out. He was cynical and didn’t trust anybody. And when Rudy shows up and uses that physicality to pull him back... to say, “Oh, come back here with me.”
Laura: I also underlined this part: “It’s going to be a great day for the deaf mutes of the world when the telephone view screens the science fiction novels were always predicting finally came into general use.” Oh my God. Now we’re reading it and being like: Yep, we FaceTime each other every day.
Sarah: We also learn in this chapter that Nick is starting to have vivid dreams. He is dreaming about endless rows of green corn looking for something and terribly afraid of something else that seemed to be behind him.
Laura: Also in Chapter 18, Sheriff Baker actually dies. And one of the prisoners dies. So things are progressing.
Sarah: The most important part to me is when Dr. Soames gives Nick a little speech. He says: “I repeat, someone made a mistake and now they’re trying to cover it up.” He is right. But he also alludes to like... educated people are not supposed to believe these stupid theories, and we get to the end of our life and we’re like, Oh shoot, maybe all of that paranoia was the right thing.
Laura: It’s the paradox of conspiracy theories. There is often something there that doesn’t make sense. But people want to turn it into something organized with a central villain.
Sarah: I think it’s interesting that Nick is such a young character amidst all these old people who are praising him or trusting him. They see something in him. He’s sort of like an old soul.
Laura: He doesn’t have loyalty to anything. He’s been failed in a lot of ways. Born with a birth defect. Parents died. Never adopted. Out on his own since 16. He has no loyalty to anything... which is interesting as the story is going to go on.
Chapter 19: Larry Underwood
Sarah: Nick is in such sharp contrast to Larry, who we go back to in the next chapter. Larry’s mom, Alice, is sick as a dog in New York City. And he’s like, Hey, I’m going to go walk around Times Square.
Sarah: I underlined this: “Her idea of nutrition was vague, but all encompassing.” Same. That’s 100% me. Also, why do we think this is the first one we get a picture of? There’s a random illustration.
Laura: Here’s the part where I thought the contrast between Larry and Nick was intense. He’s thinking: “Why did it have to happen after I got the good news? And most despicable of all, how bad is this going to screw up my plans?”
Sarah: That was relatable to me. Am I a narcissist?
Laura: No. I think there’s always that voice.
Sarah: When my child was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, the first thing I thought about was our upcoming vacation. I’m not even playing. I was like, Oh my God, are we still going to go? How bad is that? But I think everybody has that.
Sarah: I also wonder if as Enneagram Ones, the way that our brains work is like: This is the way. And when a wrench has been thrown to the way, we’re like: Wait. That is not what I had planned.
Chapter 20: Franny, Maine, and The Pie
Laura: Chapter 20. We check in on Franny in Maine. She has decamped to a hotel. She is trying to write a letter to a childhood friend.
Sarah: This chapter felt a little filler to me. But her trying to write a cheery letter without revealing her pregnancy... it was giving Instagram captions 2025.
Laura: I underlined where she says she felt like “that bug” that swelled up when it felt threatened. “The gestalt was maybe even a better word.” That’s the second time he’s used gestalt. I had an old school therapist in his 70s who was really into gestalt. It’s just another little flicker of the 70s.
Sarah: We’ve been signing off our episodes with “See You on the Other Side,” but do we need to change it to her sign-off: “Believe in me and I’ll believe in you”?
Laura: I thought that was such a funny way to end a letter. Why would you write that to a friend? I don’t know if I’ve ever said anything like that in my whole life.
Sarah: At the end of the chapter, she gets a call from her daddy that Carla is sick as a dog. And she thinks: “Responsibility is a pie... You’re only kidding if you think you’re not going to have a cut a big, juicy, bitter piece for yourself and eat every bite.”
Laura: Did not love that metaphor.
Sarah: This kind of gets at what we were talking about... Franny’s trying to figure it out. If you take the whole super flu away from it, she is at a real crossroads in her life.
Chapter 21: Stu Redman was Frightened
Laura: Chapter 21 starts out with: “Stu Redman was frightened.” And he’s like a tough guy. So if he’s scared, we shall be scared, too.
Sarah: My quibble with this chapter is they have moved him from the Atlanta CDC to a facility in Vermont. And I have questions. How did that happen logistically? Everybody’s sick. What’s going on?
Chapter 22: The Face in the Soup
Laura: Chapter 22. You guys, Chapter 22 is one of my favorites.
Sarah: This is the one that’s your favorite? Why do you like every time the dude with the face in the soup shows up?
Laura: Because that imagery is strong. When the whole thing is over, I’m still going to remember the guy who died in the cafeteria with his face in the soup.
Sarah: Starkey has been fired by the president. And he goes back into the facility. He’s quoting Yeats—but he calls him “Yeet.”
Laura: I thought that was such a funny little detail. He’s trying to be intellectual and philosophical and he’s just butchering it a little bit.
Sarah: And then he watches Frank D. Bruce’s soup head on the monitor. “The soup congealing in Frank D. Bruce’s eyebrows worried him more, much more.”
Laura: Everything before he sits down on the floor and puts the gun in his mouth is fascinating to me. Because you’re getting the smallest glimpse of these people who work in this facility who absolutely know what’s coming. Two of them decide to copulate right there. A group of them run for the elevator. There’s the man who has time to make a sign to put around his neck: Now you know it works. Any questions?
Sarah: That’s stark. A last gasp of sort of protest or defiance.
Laura: I love this scene because it tells you so much about human nature. It reminds me of the 9/11 documentaries... the people who choose to shoot themselves or the people who choose to sit and eat their soup until it gets them.
Chapter 23: Randall Flagg
Laura: Chapter 23. We meet Randall Flagg. I underlined so many things in this chapter. He is one of literature’s greatest all-time villains. I actually will probably do a bonus thing just about Randall Flagg.
Sarah: Is he just the devil? It feels like he’s just the devil.
Sarah:“There was a dark hilarity in his face... It was the face of a hateful, happy man... a face to make small children crash their trikes into board fences and then run wailing to their mommies with steak-shaped splinters sticking out of their knees.” Yee! So scary!
Laura: I felt very scared reading this chapter. But in the iteration of Randall Flagg as we’re meeting him now, he is a man. He doesn’t have much memory before his current iteration. But he also levitates off the ground.
Sarah: It’s awkward to make parallels to Jesus because it’s the opposite... but evil made man is the opposite of good made man.
Laura: I also find it fascinating that Randall Flagg is a big reader. “Flagg was an equal opportunity reader.”He read all the pamphlets.
Chapter 24: Lloyd’s Lawyer
Sarah: Chapter 24. Lloyd has a very long talk with his lawyer. And everybody don’t panic. This is where I will dust off my legal degree and say: This is not a thing. Lawyers do not tell their clients what to say like that. That is so illegal and a massive ethical violation.
Laura: You don’t think that happens?
Sarah: No. Of course, I think it happens sometimes. But this is pretty overt. Lawyers usually want just enough doubt. They’re not going to layer on the doubt to where point it becomes unbelievable.
Chapter 25: The End of Shoyo
Sarah: Chapter 25. Listen. I like Nick, but this chapter was entirely too long.
Laura: We’re getting a lot of detail on what happens when everybody’s dead. How are you going to feed yourself? What happens next? Nick is 22 years old and no one has any context for what is happening. This is so bizarre.
Sarah: There were elements of this chapter that bubbled up for me some of the trauma of those early days of COVID-19. Like: It is so surreal that this is actually happening. Nick is in that same sort of denial.
Laura: He watches the TV and notices the newscasters are giving skewed information. No weather report. No sports reporting. I loved that part.
Sarah: I want to know what everybody else thinks. Is it scarier if Randall Flagg shows up after everybody’s dead or in your everyday life?
Laura: I feel like when everybody’s dead... who gives a fuck?
Sarah: No, because when everything is upside down... if he showed up in everyday life, there are more tools available to you. There’s more people to help you. I’m better in a group. The idea that this monstrous presence shows up and you’re by yourself... that’s rough.
Next Week:
We are covering Chapters 26 through 34. It is 94 pages. We can do hard things.
Laura: And I’m Laura Tremaine. Welcome to Slow Read, where we tackle the books you’ve always wanted to read at a pace you can handle. We are currently reading The Stand by Stephen King, and today we’re going to talk about Chapters 26 through 34.
Sarah: Things are getting real gruesome as society fully collapses. We’re going to talk about that and the maggots and the swelling and the “bonbons” of bodies. And hopefully get to all that before we go “tharn.” Did I say that right?
Laura: I think you did say that right. Can I just say, first of all, this section has probably one of the worst scenes in the whole book. It’s short, but it’s awful. And as I was reading this section, all I could think was: I’m really worried that I told all the readers that this book isn’t very scary.
Sarah: Well, it’s not scary. It’s just gross.
Laura: I really thought, damn, we should have given people a warning last week. I don’t want to say this section is inconsequential, but by the time we get to the end of the book, this won’t be what stands out. This is like a bridge section from all the setup.
Chapter 26: The Media and the Military
Sarah: Chapter 26 is quite a doozy. It really is like... let’s go around the country and show you the collapse of American society. First shout out to the great state of Kentucky, my home state. There is, in fact, no “University of Kentucky Louisville.” That’s just the University of Louisville. But I was excited either way.
Laura: Can I just tell you that I am still reading every word aloud. I was reading this one aloud in bed and Jeff, my husband, came to bed and listened. And he was like, “This is scary.”
Sarah: What I found so interesting is we start in Kentucky, we go to Boston, Los Angeles, Missouri, New York City, Des Moines. And there’s a real focus on colleges and media. It’s either protests at college campuses or media defying this military shutdown of information.
Laura: He talks about how the Kent State protesters get mowed down. Stephen King being of the age and generation that he is, that is a callback to one of the biggest events of his young adulthood. He almost reenacts it in a way. I actually just got chills because I think that was very purposefully placed.
Sarah: I just thought it was so interesting that he was almost hyper-focused on media. Like the Los Angeles Times distributing about 10,000 copies. But actually, as I say this, the flow of information makes sense because we’re on this compressed timeline. We’re not to the part where people are truly out of food. We’re not to the part where the electricity has shut down. The media would fall apart first. So now I’ve talked myself into that this is a brilliant move.
Laura: We’re definitely not to people running out of food because almost everybody’s dying. They don’t even have a chance to run out of food.
Sarah: I also really liked what Harold tells us later—that Mother Nature doesn’t work this way. The way that everyone’s dying and it’s happening so quickly means that something else is at play here. This isn’t just something that occurred in nature.
Laura: Can I just share my naivete right here? I just don’t immediately default to “government conspiracy trying to kill us all.” I don’t.
Sarah: Yeah, I don’t either. I absolutely think that people underestimate the power of the federal government to exert its will. But that power comes from size. And size means secret keeping is incredibly difficult. No one can keep a secret. Literally no one.
Chapter 27: Larry and the “Rancid Bonbons”
Sarah: Chapter 27, Larry Underwood in New York City. Everybody’s dead in New York City, which means there’s just a lot of bodies. This whole section was really... I mean, he’s walking around the city encountering rotten corpses. It’s really, really gross.
Laura: Well, and it’s very cinematic. Setting that scene in New York City makes it so we can all picture what the streets would be like completely empty and with dead bodies everywhere.
Sarah: This was the “rancid bonbon” chapter with Larry where I was like, I didn’t need that. I could have gone my whole life without hearing a dead body described as a rancid bonbon.
Laura: What did you think about when Larry and Rita go to a steakhouse and cook a dinner?
Sarah: I mean, we’re saying there’s plenty of food, but is there plenty of food people know how to prepare? I don’t know what else you do. In those initial shocks, it’s so surreal. You do kind of cling to whatever normal, pleasurable experience you can find.
Laura: What did you think about Rita as a character?
Sarah: I was fascinated. I couldn’t quite... was this Rita’s Yankee Stadium moment? Did she go to Cartier and just go to town?
Laura: I picture Rita as a Real Housewife of New York City. Like she’s done a lot to her face. She’s dripping in diamonds. And like the opposite of Stu, she has no skills to survive.
Sarah: I’m intrigued by their partnership and where they’re going to go.
Franny and Harold
Laura: Let me tell you what partnership I’m much less invested in. And that is Franny and Harold. Harold was weirding me all the way out.
Sarah: I’m surprised you’re mentioning them as a partnership. Did you just get that vibe right away?
Laura: I just mean like they’re the only ones left there. And Harold was weirding me out. I got some red flags.
Sarah: Good instincts. Imagine, because we all have these people at every stage of our life where you’re like, If there’s only two of us left on this planet... For Franny, it’s her friend’s little brother. The worst. If it was these assholes who I’m stuck in Paducah with post-pandemic, I’m going to be mad. I’m just telling you, the survivors are skewing... not great. Not a great cross-section of humanity.
Sarah: But do you really think that the survivors would be like the ultimate hero pinnacle of society people?
Laura: It does feel like there should be like one or two more “normals.”
Sarah: Stu is normal. Franny’s normal. That’s all I’ve got, Laura.
Laura: I don’t think Larry is un-normal in the same way. He’s just so selfish. It feels like his weaknesses are going to be very easily exploitable, which is my concern as we get further into this chapter, because there seems to be one person in particular ready and willing to manipulate and exploit.
Chapter 28/29: Stu Goes “Tharn”
Sarah: Back to our normies. Stu is back in Stovington, Vermont. He’s still at the disease control center. Everybody’s dying. And he’s worried like, they’re either going to kill me or I’m going to get trapped in here and starve to death, which is a truly terrible way to die.
Laura: This is where we get “going tharn.” He talks a lot about Watership Down and the rabbits and going tharn. I loved the sentence: “Going tharn, a good word for a bad state of mind.” It’s sort of frozen in the headlines. And he doesn’t freeze.
Sarah: But then, oh my God, he gets stuck in this damn hospital. I felt like he ran around that hospital for 25 pages. I was like, Just get out of here. And then as he’s finally in the stairwell, someone grabs his ankle.
Laura: This is an imagery tie-in to It. Even if you haven’t read it, you know the clown coming out of the sewer. My dog has an irrational fear of storm drains. She will pull your ass all the way across the other side of the street not to walk in front of a storm drain. So this is just cellular.
Sarah: And he has to kill Dr. Elder to get him out of his way. Here’s what’s interesting to me: this idea that people’s dying pursuit would be violence. That in these final moments of a human life, someone would try to take some people out with them. That is not my experience of humanity.
Laura: But I think Dr. Elder, for example, that wasn’t his primitive source coming out. He was under orders to kill Stu. But he’s dying. He’s literally delirious.
Sarah: I think the closest equivalent is like a natural disaster. And people’s instinct in a natural disaster is to help people. I’ve seen it.
Laura: Okay, but what if it’s not about violence? What if it’s about a denial of what’s actually happening? It’s a clinging to the status quo. If I can follow my role as a military member, then that will protect me in a way. I definitely buy that.
Sarah: So Stu gets away. He gets out. He doesn’t go tharn.
Chapter 30: Arnett
Laura: We go back to Arnett, Texas. This is a very short chapter. But because there’s nothing there, it’s dead. The town is silent and dead.
Chapter 31: Randall Flagg and the Network
Sarah: Okay, buckle up. Now we’re to Chapter 31 with the dark man, the walking man, the faceless man, Randall Flagg. We start this chapter with a minor character named Christopher Bradenton.
Laura: Bradenton appeared in Chapter 23. He was a conductor on one of the underground railway systems by which fugitives moved. Randall Flagg exploits this network.
Sarah: This was giving One Battle After Another the new film.
Laura: The premise is that there is this network out there that continues to exist where people are in this secret communication with each other. I thought that was really interesting to place Randall Flagg within that. It’s not ideologically driven. It’s just exploiting the secretness of these networks.
Sarah: Bradenton is delirious. So Randall Flagg—or Richard Fry—shows up. He’s sitting on his chest trying to get the keys to a car. And I’m like, dude, I thought the last chapter we established you could fly. Why do you need a car? And why do you give a shit if you have the papers? Everybody’s dead.
Laura: We are going to play with throughout the story of: Is Randall Flagg man or monster? Is Randall Flagg man or devil? When he is acting as a man, I don’t know that Randall Flagg totally knows. He’s going to do some things like need the car that are very human. And then he’s going to do other things where you’re like, That’s not human.
Chapter 32: Lloyd in Prison
Laura: Here’s what we do know. Poor Lloyd is about to starve to death in prison. Oh, poor Lloyd and his hamburger fingers.
Sarah: I was like, did you have a plan? You thought, I’m going to hamburger my fingers to get this bedpost.And then he got the bedpost and he had no plan at all.
Laura: No, he just uses it to bang on the bars. Well, he’s smart enough to sock away a dead rat to eat later. He did save some food.
Sarah: I used to think the worst way to die would be to be crushed by a crowd. But this might be a close second. I’ve watched a single documentary about a crowd crush experience at a sporting event, and it haunts me. But being stuck in a prison with rotting bodies and no food... pretty close second.
Chapter 33: Nick and the Bully
Laura: Then we go back to Arkansas with Nick. Back to my concerns about would a dying bully stumble out of the woods, delirious and sick, and be like, You know what I’m going to do with my last dying 10% of energy? I’m going to beat the shit out of Nick Andros. I don’t know, man.
Sarah: It felt very bookie. Like, of course the villain is going to stumble back. It was giving zombie.
Laura: I also quibble with the idea that Nick Andros, who cannot hear, doesn’t feel when someone enters a room behind him. Every person with hearing problems that I’ve ever known, their senses are very differently abled. So the fact that Nick doesn’t hear him bust in... unrealistic.
Sarah: I thought you were going to say you quibble with the fact that Nick Andros is sitting around reading Jane Eyre.
Laura: My answer to the side quest of what would you do when everyone’s dead is not sit around and read the classics. Because guys, it’s going to get to a point where shit’s going to fall apart. You’re going to have nothing but books left. Save it for then, friends. Be watching your DVDs before the electricity plants go down.
Chapter 34: Trash Can Man
Laura: Final chapter, Trash Can Man. Donald Merwin Elbert. First of all, with a name like that, why wouldn’t you be burning shit down?
Sarah: Baby Donald had a rough start. This is a sad story. His father kills his siblings. His mother escapes. The father is killed by the sheriff... who his mother then marries. I literally wrote “Oh my God” beside that part.
Laura: And the poor sheriff, I had a lot of sympathy for him. He was like, This boy is not right. We need to get him some help.
Sarah: He burned a church. He burned some lady’s pension check. And he gets electroshock therapy treatment. I really liked the way he articulated how tenuously he was gripping onto normality. He’s like, I had it. I had a grasp on it and I just couldn’t quite hold it.
Laura: It’s obviously setting us up to see what’s going to happen with Trash Can Man next. He is also enacting our theme of the side quest: What would you do if you were alone and could do anything? He has been dying his whole life to go blow up those big gas silos. And so he’s like, I’m going to go do it. Here’s my chance. Chance of a lifetime.
Sarah: I thought this was so powerful. He sees a bug stuck in gasoline and he says: “It was a world that deserved to burn.” And then a little bit later, he said: “There was a whole country ripe for burning under the summer sun.”
The TV Station
Laura: We didn’t talk about the scene that I find to be one of the scariest in the whole entire book.
Sarah: The one in the local TV station where the men have lined up the other men and are shooting them on camera?
Laura: Yes. It was so disturbing. The scene itself is awful. And then we get to see it through Franny’s eyes when she turns on the TV. There were so many things happening—race stuff, history stuff, tribal stuff. It was purposely being televised.
Sarah: I think there’s something about the televised aspect and the complete detachment from any law and order. It was very much giving “inmates running the asylum.” It felt like a horror short story. It felt like Friday Black or Chain Gang All-Stars. I was really disturbed by that scene.
Why Read Horror?
Laura: I think now might be a good time for a little pep talk about why we read horror.
Sarah: I need a pep talk.
Laura: We read horror because it lets your mind and imagination play out some things that sort of already always linger back there. Some part of us, we’re all scared of the monster under our bed. And horror gives us a playground for that.
Sarah: I think true crime is scarier than horror. In Cold Blood really shook me.
Laura: I think true crime is playing around with the presence of violence, whereas I feel like horror is playing around with the presence of death. And to me, that’s different. Facing the reality that we will all turn to ashes and dust can be freeing in a way.
Sarah: Well, and to just pep talk anyone on The Stand in particular... I do want to say without any spoilers that the book is about to get a lot more relational. No more rancid bonbons.
Laura: Please tell me there’s no more rancid bonbons.
Sarah: I’m not going to promise that to you! But we’re about to move to: Okay, everyone’s dead. Now what happens? And what happens is going to be pretty relational.
Next Week:
We are reading Chapters 35 through 42. It is 96 pages. We can do it!
Up Next: The Side Quest
Head over to the paid subscriber section where we are discussing what we would do if the city was suddenly empty. See you on the other side.
Laura: I’m Laura Tremaine. Welcome to Slow Read, where we tackle the books you’ve always wanted to read at a pace you can handle.
Sarah: Today is a little bonus episode. When we started, the movie Outbreak came up because I was sort of obsessed with it at the time. And we said we’re going to rewatch Outbreak and talk about it. So that’s what we’re going to do today.
Laura: I mean, I have lots to say. I would like you to know that my first note is: Kevin Spacey. Ew. That’s the first thing I wrote.
Sarah: My first note is: That type of monkey is not actually from Africa.
Laura: Well, listen, we’re playing real fast and loose because my second thing was the witch doctor. We start in Africa several years ago and we’re rolling with some real deep stereotypes here.
Sarah: Yeah, I just don’t feel like this kind of movie would get made today. Not the overall plot of a pandemic, but the African stuff was way “other.” There were overly wise Africans, overly uncivilized Africans. It was just a total racial component that was not a flattering portrayal. Even the fact that we’re just saying “Africa.” They’re in Zaire, but it just was not great.
Laura: It was the 90s. It was a different time.
The Insane 90s Cast
Sarah: Should we back up and explain that Outbreak, first of all, has an insane cast? This was, I mean, I was obsessed with this movie.
Laura: I loved it at the time. I also liked The Net. Remember that one with Sandra Bullock where the Internet’s coming for her? I think there was something about movies that were speaking to this interplay of politics and culture and government and things that could happen through the lens of that.
Sarah: But yeah, it has a superstar cast. Dustin Hoffman is the lead. Rene Russo. I loved Rene Russo back in the day.
Laura: She’s stunningly gorgeous. You didn’t watch Tin Cup with her and Kevin Costner? You must go back and watch it. They are so good together. She had a real moment in the 90s.
Sarah: But, you know, what happens with every era... you go back in the 80s and the men are still existing and making movies like Harrison Ford. But could you name a single woman who was the lead in any of the Indiana Jones movies? No, because none of them have careers anymore. Especially if they were beautiful. If you are beautiful, it’s really hard for people to stay on board with you when that part of you goes.
Laura: So you have Rene Russo, Morgan Freeman, Donald Sutherland, a little baby Patrick Dempsey.
Sarah: He’s so young. And listen, Cuba Gooding Jr. This was the year before Jerry Maguire.
Laura: That tracks for me. He’s good in this. Jerry Maguire was his breakout, but he’s a pretty major part of Outbreak.
Sarah: Why is Donald Sutherland always the bad guy? Why don’t they ever let this poor man be the good guy?
Laura: It’s his face. His face is scary. And also he has a gravelly voice. Now, he is the good guy in another one of my 1990s favorites that I recently showed to my children: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the movie with Kristy Swanson.
Sarah: But he is excellent. Dustin Hoffman is excellent. But do you buy Dustin Hoffman in this particular role? I do not buy that you would ever be in the military, Dustin Hoffman.
Laura: Well, I did see that they had originally tried to cast Harrison Ford and a bunch of more traditional leading men. But the director ended up really liking casting Dustin Hoffman because he thought it gave it complexity. It sort of had a Jurassic Park feel of like, they were supposed to be nerdy scientists who just happened to be hot.
Sarah: Except for then again, Kevin Spacey shows up. My husband Jeff and I watched it together, and we both came to the conclusion of: Problematic, awful, terrible, no justification. Kevin Spacey is a brilliant actor, but he kind of overacts a little bit in this. He chews up some of that dialogue. Like, why is he such a smartass?
Laura: It’s such a bummer that someone so brilliant is a bad person. Think of all of the problematic, brilliant artists. This comes up all the time. Can you support the art and not the artist?
Sarah: See, this is why when they’re not bad people and they’re also talented, my devotion knows no end. Like George Clooney. Or Julia Roberts. By all accounts, Tom Hanks is a nice guy. I just think there is a delineation between being very, very good and genius level. I know you’re not going to sit here and tell me that Kevin Spacey is a genius and George Clooney isn’t.
Laura: No, George Clooney is looks and marketability. That’s not genius.
Sarah: Oh, I disagree. We are getting far afield. Back to the virus with 100% mortality, Laura.
The Virus & The Director
Laura: 100% mortality. I think this is really important to mention because the director of Outbreak is Wolfgang Petersen. Before we started it, my husband asked if this was Steven Spielberg. I looked it up—Wolfgang Petersen directed The NeverEnding Story, Air Force One, The Perfect Storm, Troy, In the Line of Fire. These are good 90s mid-range action movies.
Sarah: I liked it when it was real-world action. It didn’t have to be intergalactic action in order to get made.
Laura: Okay, we have 100% mortality. This virus would never spread, even through a monkey—especially a monkey that’s not actually from Africa. It really bothered my animal-loving family. They literally could do nothing but focus on the fact that these monkeys are Central American monkeys.
Sarah: Even in the 90s, that was a pretty gross error. Now that we’re all amateur virologists because of COVID, we know that. Although there is a moment where Morgan Freeman says, “If the mortality is that high, anybody will die before they spread it.” So there was an acknowledgement of that. But there was also the part where the monkey was carrying both an airborne version and not an airborne version.
Laura: Speaking of weird choices, I thought it was very weird to leave the President of the United States out of it entirely. We don’t even see his face. We only see a cabinet meeting. Why no actual President?
Sarah: Maybe they spent all their money on the generals. I felt like you could have made Donald Sutherland the President and have the exact same role.
The Scary Scenes vs. Reality
Laura: The scenes I definitely remember from being obsessed with it in the 90s... I remember the aquarium scene where the guy in the pet shop gets it and falls over onto the bank of aquariums.
Sarah: Was that upsetting for your husband?
Laura: No, because we read on IMDb ahead of time that they used fake plastic fish. And then I definitely remember the scene where he looks in the camera and says: “They all got it in a movie theater.” I remember being in the theater and everybody being like, Oh my God.
Sarah: Well, to tie it closer to The Stand, the scene where it’s being spread... in both The Stand and in our lived experience in 2020, that scene probably didn’t give me the shivers in the 90s. I would have been like, Oh, this is anthropologically interesting. But now you’re like, Oh no, they’re all coughing on each other. Don’t do it.
Laura: Before I pressed play, I had mixed it up slightly with the movie Contagion. In the early scenes of Contagion, them all being in bars and hanging out and spreading it without knowing... that is scarier to me than the portrayal of them all getting it in Outbreak.
Sarah: I did like the scene where the little boy is about to take his cookie and the mom says no. Listen to your mothers about their germs!
Laura: Did you think about how funny it is that they have these giant windshield headpieces where you can see their entire faces the whole time? Clearly someone was like, “We’re going to have to design movie-worthy protective gear so we can see the famous faces we paid for.”
Sarah: I thought the scene where the mom has to leave her family was really sad. When she says, “You can’t hug me,” I’m like, It’s too late. They already have it.
Laura: I thought it was kind of a commentary on scientists being dum-dums. One scientist chops his fingers off in the centrifuge. Dustin Hoffman doesn’t notice there’s a rip in his suit. Kevin Spacey snags his suit. Morgan Freeman has the cure and keeps it to himself.
Sarah: The anti-Fauci crowd would have lots to work with in Outbreak.
Laura: Also, when Donald Sutherland says, “Be compassionate, but be compassionate globally,” I was like, oof. That’s a real trolley problem. Can you kill just the child to save the world?
The Ending & What’s Next
Laura: Let’s talk about the ending because it’s truly crazy. It’s such an anticlimactic ending. They save the town, he comes to Rene Russo’s bedside, they make a little joke, and then the movie’s over.
Sarah: She gets better. They’ve made her look healthier. But then it’s just like... okay. It’s just everything’s okay.
Laura: Also, why do all the bombs have parachutes? I don’t think bombs have parachutes in real life.
Sarah: Let me tell you how much I do not know about bombs. A universe. But mainly it just made me think... I really want to watch Contagion again.
Laura:Contagion came out in 2011. No wonder that’s what most of us pictured in 2020. I think we should watch that one next.
Sarah: I’m into it. All right. We’re watching Contagion next. Except honestly, I do have to say after I watched Outbreak, I genuinely thought it was decent from a plot storytelling perspective. But there’s nothing interesting about watching a virus spread anymore. It’s just... all of it feels different now.
Laura: I think Station Eleven, the TV show, is better than the book. You think the scary part is the virus spreading, but it really is all that happens after that that’s so interesting.
Sarah: True of The Stand, true of Contagion, certainly true of Station Eleven. That’s where the interesting stuff starts to happen. And Outbreak is so focused on preventing that, that you miss some of the most interesting interpersonal, societal stuff.
Laura: In Outbreak, I did not feel a creative vibe. I felt like, This is a bummer. Because now we know.
Sarah: So we saved you guys. Don’t rewatch it. Just listen to this conversation. Or if you rewatched it, we would like to hear if you think our takes are hot or not.
Laura: Thanks for joining us for another bonus episode of Slow Read. We will be back in your ears next week with Chapters 26 through 34.
