Baby, Can You Dig [a Grave for] Your Man?

The Stand
by Stephen King
p. 1978/1990

Stephen King’s extended re-release of The Stand from 1990 (twelve years after its initial publication) was a book recommended and lent to me by my uncle and achieved two distinct landmarks for me: my first book by Stephen King and the longest single book I’ve ever read. My uncle knew it would resonate with me, as it is an epic post-apocalyptic novel—and probably the most famous one ever written.

As far as my former landmark is concerned, I have no excuse for never picking up a Stephen King novel before now. As an avid reader at 28 years of age, and one who has seen countless film adaptations of King’s work, you’d really think it would have come up before now. I even have several copies of his novels lingering in my book collection that I’ve never delved into—probably due to their length, if I’m being honest. It seems strange then, that I would start with King’s longest novel, but some times we all just need a little prodding. To say that I can see now why Stephen King is heralded as one of the most prolific contemporary writers seems a little... ostentatious, so I’ll just add that I was surprised to find that not all of his work is straight up horror. King’s horror novels get far more attention so I had assumed, wrongly, that that was all he was about. The Stand was not without its horrific elements, sure, but it is first and foremost a post-apocalyptic exploration and a character-driven story. I can see why my uncle recommended it to me.

I won’t compare this re-release to the original form of the novel, because I haven’t read the shorter version, I didn’t read any notes closely examining the two, and it would be pedantic to make such a thorough comparison. I will say that there were plenty of times in the first half of the novel where I often wondered if the chapter I was reading was an add-on, because some of the set-up of the wide array of characters could be considered extraneous, but I tried not to read too much into it, because I enjoyed the backstory on all the characters too much. Knowing all that I did about the protagonists made their choices and their struggles mean so much more later on.

Since the first third of The Stand keeps all the survivors apart, I’ll talk first about my impressions of various characters. As is expected with such a lengthy and complex story, my feelings often wavered back and forth for half of the main characters throughout the novel.

Stuart Redman – Stu is inarguably the ultimate hero of the novel, a quiet widower working at a gas station in Texas and thus the only main character around to witness the start of the global pandemic that kills over 99% of the population. I liked him well enough at the start, and at no point did I dislike Stu, but if I’m being completely honest, I grew a little bored of his brooding, alpha male, noble hero complex. I get the impression that Stu’s post-apocalyptic journey is about learning how to be a leader of men (and I guess finding love again?) so then I’m perplexed that he was not only left out of the final stand, but that he also took his leave of the society he helped to create at the end of the story. Sure, people had to move on eventually, but at least wait a couple years before you take off on your epic road trip. What if his unborn child needed a doctor? Are Stu and Fran just going to wing it? It all just seemed irrationally stubborn.

Fran Goldsmith – Here is the character I struggled with the most, and who can blame me, since she’s the only female protagonist worth expanding on? Susan Stern was composed and admirable but died pointlessly and Dayna Jurgens was pretty awesome but also died without accomplishing anything substantial. And Mother Abigail? Well, who can hate the 108-year-old feisty woman who is the manifestation of God’s love? But precisely for that reason, there’s not much to make you think in regards to Mother Abigail, so that leaves us with Fran. I wanted to like Fran, I really did. I liked her stubborn sense of humor, I sympathized with her when we saw how withering her mother was, and I admired her tenacity in burying her beloved father and carrying on in spite of all that was stacked against her... but ultimately I can’t stand her. Fran is totally useless. She takes no direct actions that are of import to anybody and yet ‘somehow’ she makes it on the Free Zone Committee (being the leader’s girlfriend helped, I’m sure). Fran starts out the story pregnant with her boyfriend’s baby and rejects his offer to support her any way she chooses (be that marriage or abortion or anything else), and she’s pretty callous about it, if you ask me. I get that she’s over him, but you don’t just dismiss the father of your child when he says he wants to help because you’re bummed you got knocked up by a cuckold. She makes it worse when she doesn’t even stop to wonder if the father survived (not even once) and immediately finds a new alpha male to take care of her. Now, don’t get me wrong, the plight of a pregnant girl in a post-apocalyptic world is a complex one, and I don’t necessarily begrudge her a smart move like that (i.e. seeking a protector for her unborn child), but the union of Stu and Fran played out more like an epic love story than a complex study of power dynamics, so it doesn’t make her look any more interesting. Fran might have saved face in my book if she had gone on to be useful, but she doesn’t. The only thing she contributes to the Committee is to record their meetings and to be needlessly judgmental while failing to offer alternative solutions. On the journey to Boulder, she keeps a journal that quickly falls apart and is later actually detrimental to the Free Zone. So, thanks for that Fran. Perhaps the birth of her child (the first living baby in the Free Zone) might have meant something, but all that would have happened with or without Fran. At one point it is stated that she represented the Committee’s conscience, but all I saw was a self-righteous (and at times just downright selfish) girl who has no problem moralizing at and guilt-tripping those she hides behind. If at any point this had been addressed, I would have cheered out loud, but everyone seems perfectly content to let Frannie Sue play the part she picked out, and it is so irritating.

Nick Andros – The deaf-mute drifter who wanders into his purpose was by far my favorite character in The Stand. Ironically, despite being the only protagonist with nothing to lose at novel’s start, Nick probably suffered the most in the period between the superflu and the formation of the Free Zone. His struggle to survive in a world of silence that is full of danger was compelling and I found myself more and more invested in his character growth simply because he is such an unlikely leader, yet that is exactly the role he falls into. Two of my favorite character archetypes are the nice guy and the hard luck character and Nick’s combination of compassion, intelligence, and vision had him falling into those roles nicely... so of course King full on wasted him in a tremendous explosion two thirds of the way into the novel. I’ve thought about this a lot since I finished the book a month ago, and I believe it would have been much more interesting if Nick had survived to the end of the book instead of Stu. I know, I’m totally biased, but I just found Nick Andros to be the more original character while Stu was rather bland and cliché. Seeing the drifter who never fit in anywhere take up the helm and become a leader of men would have been a perfect evolution of the character. Sure, he couldn’t hear or speak, but if apocalyptic fiction has taught us anything, it’s that survivors banding together, helping one another, and creating a community in which everyone has a voice is the only way for society to truly endure. Nick’s life provided that metaphor; his death felt like a cheap ploy to kickstart the reader’s emotional investment. (As I understand it, King was suffering from writer’s block at this point and invented the lethal explosion subplot to get out of it. Killing Nick was, I suppose a ‘kill your darlings’ move by King, but I think I will always resent it, even if I understand it.)

Larry Underwood – Larry was a character I didn’t much care for throughout most of the novel. My disdain for him evened out over time, but I have to admit I never did see the point of him. Thanks to the ‘divine intervention’ that seemingly doomed Stu (but actually spared him), Larry was supposedly forced into a leadership position. This seemed a natural evolution to the course of his character development—to go from a selfish burnout with no prospects to someone worth following, but I don’t think he quite made it there, and even when he did assume leadership, he didn’t do a whole lot of leading. I kept waiting for the moment when he reached out to Randall Flagg’s followers and gave a speech that changed their minds, turned them to the good side. He almost lifts right out and the outcome would still have been the same.

Harold Lauder – Harold is the character that probably goes through the most change. When the superflu hits, he is a lonely, fat, sixteen-year-old self-proclaimed intellectual and the little brother of Frannie’s best friend. He harbors a mighty crush on Frannie that ultimately turns deadly when she unwittingly (inevitably) spurns him. The way Harold assumed Frannie (as the only girl left in town) would be ‘his’ and the dark and petulant turn he took when he didn’t get his way made me think he would fit right in on Reddit if only he were born 20+ years later, grumbling about how the ‘nice guys’ never get noticed with all the other neckbeards. The ease with which I could picture Harold as a real person, and the extent of his possessiveness almost made him a more unsettling character than Randall Flagg himself, simply because he felt so familiar and his deadly actions had a more personal result than many of the things done by Flagg’s own hand. I’ll admit though, that for one brief moment there, when Harold started to fit into the Free Zone in spite of (or rather because of his superb act) I actually got hopeful that he might change into a better man, but my hopes were brilliantly dashed. It’s really unfortunate because Harold could have been an even more powerful character if he had only turned against the Dark Man and stood for something good, but I suppose this is where King’s adherence to the genre comes in. The story of a boy twisted into something heinous and dark by evil fits in much better to a horror story. All that being said, I was surprised to reach the end of The Stand and realize that Harold was actually one of my top characters, not because I admired or cheered for him (I actively despised him for much of the book), but because he was one of the most interesting characters with the most potential.

One of the most remarkable things about The Stand made possible by its immense length is that each of its three books feels like a completely different story. The first is character-driven and reactionary and feels the most post-apocalyptic because it takes place in the immediate aftermath. There is a lot of world-building and character development, and a lot of tension too because there are so many different characters in various places and so much ground to cover, so you may go almost a hundred pages before you hear from someone again. There is also an element of uncertainty to the whole affair, because you don’t know what kind of a story it is going to be yet. Characters are introduced and developed and shockingly discarded. I mourned the most for the hard-nosed Shoyo sheriff that Nick befriended because I imagined hundreds of pages of their friendship developing before realizing it wasn’t that kind of apocalypse and the sheriff was bound for the grave. The first book is also the most ‘horrific’ of the three, with its nightmarish descriptions of Captain Trips’ effects on people. It’s all so terribly vivid that you almost start to feel paranoid in real life; I know that every time I had a tickle in my throat or a stuffy nose while reading this book, I got a little flutter in the pit of my stomach, a mere flash of ‘what if...?’ in my head.

The second book is where everyone comes together and tries to rebuild society. I thought this part was the meat and bones of the story. I enjoyed watching people develop into their post-plague roles and redefine themselves. This is the other side of post-apocalypse fiction; once you’ve survived, what then? Where do you go from here? How do you decide who is in charge? I liked watching the Free Zone rebuild itself and I could have read an entire novel entirely focused on the challenges faced in a post-apocalyptic society, as explored from all angles and a variety of persons. Come to think of it, I really haven’t encountered a novel like that so far. During Cold War times, post-apocalypse books tended to be pessimistic and focus on small groups of people. In the more contemporary Directive 51, we saw things only from the government’s point of view. There is always a focus on the science side of things and less on the politics and community, as in The Stand.

But there is a third part to The Stand that builds in the background the entire time our survivors are learning how to survive, and that is the titular ‘Stand’ itself. The final part of the novel abandons the Free Zone setting and takes the fight to Las Vegas, where Randall Flagg is building his own army. Everything had been leading to this, so I’m certainly not saying that it came out of nowhere, yet I feel like the final part could have been left off and it still would have been an amazing book. It wouldn’t be the good-vs-evil story King intended to write, sure, but that just goes to show how wide of an array of emotions this book sends you through. 

As I understand it, there is soon to be a new film adaptation of The Stand, and I’m thrilled, especially since I’ve heard that Matthew McConaughey has expressed interest in playing Randall Flagg. Anybody would have balked at this casting suggestion even five years ago, but McConaughey has shown real promise lately, and I think he’d nail this role. Unless they plan on leaving out a lot of characters, it would have to be a trilogy of films, because there is just too much content to cover in one sitting. And since it is set for the big screen, they would probably overdramatize a lot of things and ramp up the action, because Hollywood demands this in their trilogies. As I stated earlier, I would welcome certain drastic changes, but something tells me the stuff I’d like to see moved around would probably stay put, as King probably wouldn’t allow so much editing of the original material. Still, just the thought of a postmodern reimagining of The Stand makes me all atwitter with anticipation. Let’s hope this newest incarnation does it justice.

You Blew It Up! You Damn, Dirty Hippies!

Directive 51 
A Novel of Daybreak
by John Barnes

p. 2010

John Barnes’ Directive 51 is the latest in the slew of post-apocalyptic fiction novels in my repertoire, but unlike most of the others I’ve read, it is not a product of Cold War propaganda, but rather a modern day take on the apocalypse, in that it hits us where it counts—technology. Directive 51 is the first in a trilogy of novels (titled the Daybreak trilogy) detailing an attack on the world using bio-terrorism that targets all mechanical and plastic materials, effectively reducing us to pre-industrial-revolution times.

Let’s start with what exactly Directive 51 is. It’s real, for starters, a term coined under the Bush administration, but existing, in some form, under some other title, for a couple decades, according to the afterword by Barnes. It’s the rule that states what happens when the president is found unfit to lead the country, and that is precisely what happens when Daybreak—the name for the underground eco-terrorist movement—is unleashed on the planet. The search for a fitting president in the crisis loosely provides the basis for the first installment in this trilogy... and it’s exactly as boring as it sounds.

Directive 51 is fundamentally an ensemble story, but indispensable government agent, Heather O’Grainne, often takes center stage. Heather works for the department of 'Future Threat Assessment’, a group meant to anticipate crimes and prevent them, and since the story picks up on the very morning that Daybreak (a worldwide coordinated event amongst thousands of different groups and millions of participants) is unleashed, I think it’s safe to say that Heather is probably terrible at her job. But we’re supposed to see her as the smartest person in the room, so it’s probably a good idea to adopt a ‘Just shut up and go with it’ attitude from the start.

A lot of the characters in this story have the potential to be interesting. A lot of the first part follows various ‘Daybreakers’ as they deposit their instruments of destruction around the U.S. and a couple of them are mentioned later, but for the most part, they are dropped without ceremony or just plain presented as brainless, selfish hippies. If Barnes was intending for their cause to be sympathetic, he failed miserably, but I don’t think he was; I think he had every intention of bashing young eco-crusaders for the dirty hippies he thinks they are.

Barnes isn’t very transparent in general. Despite the fact that two party politics really have nothing to do with the conflict, it is repeatedly stressed that the acting president when Daybreak occurs is Democratic, and when he suffers an untimely mental breakdown, his replacement—another Democrat—quickly turns tyrant and stages a coup, actually succeeding in murdering the first president so he can’t reclaim power. The new president is a Republican who had been planning to run in the upcoming election anyway. It is mentioned that he leans towards religious fundamentalism, leading me to suspect that this president will also be problematic when he tries to sneakily impose his beliefs on the American people, vulnerable in this time of crisis... but that entire thread is dropped and it turns out this president is, like, the best prez evah and exactly what America NEEDS... until he gets martyred in a nuclear attack. His replacement? Another Democrat who lets power go to his head... of course. Very subtle, Barnes.

Dropping story threads is something else I have issues with. I understand that this is a trilogy and this is only book one, but nothing really happens. There are a small handful of actions scenes interspersed in a 500 page book, and the rest is all talking, and not even fun or interesting talk at that. Lots of talk is forgivable if the reader is enjoying themselves, but Barnes’ dialogue is forced and his characters are too bland. All of them are either no-nonsense government officials who were too stupid to do anything right or dirty hippies who only thought of themselves. I didn’t find myself rooting for any of them and any of those I thought could be interesting were dropped halfway through. So much for that.

But Directive 51’s biggest problem is in the subversion of its genre. The reason I love reading post-apocalypse stories is to see how ordinary people adapt and survive, but none of Directive 51’s characters are regular people; they are the most important people in the country, literally, and as such they don’t really get to experience the full realm of Daybreak firsthand. They get showers and electricity and access to the last working forms of transportation where others do not, because they are that important. The full depth of human struggle of Daybreak—the starvation, the riots, the ravages of disease—are not felt and these characters are not relatable.

I will give Barnes one thing though—his ratio of female to male characters is impressive and his women are strong and smart and not totally lacking in a couple spare dimensions... The only time I raised an eyebrow was when Heather—our lead hero and at one point, somehow the only voice of reason and stability in the entire government—decided that the best idea, in the wake of a worldwide attack kickstarting the end of the world as we know it, was to get pregnant immediately with her sure-to-not-survive-the-apocalypse handicapped boyfriend.

Because, sure.

This foolhardy logic aside, Heather did a great job as lead and I’m sure she and all the other characters introduced in Directive 51 continue to grow and have adventures in the next two novels in Barnes’ trilogy... but I’m clearly not the target audience for them.

Victory At Any Cost

Triumph
by Philip Wylie
p. 1963

Something about Triumph feels really familiar to me... and I don’t think it’s because I just happen to read a lot of Cold War era post-apocalyptic fiction. The basic plot of Philip Wylie’s Triumph is almost exactly that of Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7, the book that initially sparked my interest in this very specific genre some years back, so the comparisons in this review are inescapable. Both novels feature protagonists sequestered in a secure, deep, underground base following worldwide nuclear holocaust and their struggle to survive in a world they destroyed in an instant.

Triumph’s chief protagonist is Dr. Ben Bernman, a scientist who happens to be spending a weekend at Sachem’s Watch, the estate of millionaire, Vance Farr, when the world’s arsenal of nuclear technology is unleashed. Luckily for Ben, Vance Farr is The Man Who Thought of Everything, so when the sirens go off, Farr and his friends and family retreat to his vast underground shelter, where anything they could possibly need to survive a long nuclear winter awaits. Not much of import happens in the two years they spend underground; despite a lot of attractive young people of various races congregating in limited space, a few extramarital attractions, and one character’s rampant alcoholism, nothing really dramatic takes place amongst the ranks of the survivors of Sachem’s Watch. People learn to cooperate pretty quickly and—with the exception of one moment of insanity near the end of their internment—jealousy and racism are miraculously not issues.

I found this novel a bit dry, especially in comparison to Level 7, which is strange when you consider that Triumph focused on fourteen civilian survivors (including a billionaire who built a miracle bomb shelter, his alcoholic wife, his Italian-Irish mistress, and a wunderkind Japanese technowhiz, among others) whereas Level 7 was a vague narrative focusing on military personnel who lacked even first names. I think this is because where Level 7 maintained an air of mystery by being so stingy with the details, Triumph tended to overload us with facts, particularly with dry interludes on the remaining American military and their vengeful attempts to bring down the ‘Russkies.' If Vance Farr is The Man Who Thought of Everything in regards to bunker life (he even thought of providing roller skates for entertainment!) then Philip Wylie is The Author Who Thought of Everything in regards to surviving nuclear holocaust. However, I thought the most engaging parts of Triumph were the sporadic diary entries of one survivor describing daily bunker life in her words, and not the 'scientific' or philosophical rambling of the men. I tended to zone out when Ben and Farr were talking tech.

Then there were the jarring segments where the violence of the surviving outside world were described in shocking detail that was atypical of the rest of the book. I feel these were done for shock value and added very little to the story.

naïve.

My initial feeling towards Triumph was dislike. When I read Level 7, I was impressed by its progressiveness. The language was vague and provided no indicators of whose point of view we were getting; it could be ‘us’ or ‘them’ and in the end, neither side mattered because everyone perished at their own folly. Triumph, on the other hand, was not so subtle in their ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’ attitude. The constant references to ‘Reds’ and ‘Russkies’ getting ‘what they deserved,’ the revenge-driven interludes with the military, and the obsession with being the ‘winners’ or the last men standing all left a bad taste in my mouth, as it seemed terribly naive.

However, I am willing to lend Wylie the benefit of the doubt and say that this opinion was presented solely as a contrast to the progressive peaceful stance taken by the survivors of Sachem’s Watch. Many times throughout the book, the characters discuss racial relations and how interesting it is that the survivors are so amalgamated—white, black, Japanese, Chinese, Jewish, Italian, rich, poor—it’s a real 'We Are the World' down there. The attitudes presented may seem dated by today’s politically correct standards, but at the time, they were progressive. Everyone gets along and race is rarely, if ever, a matter of contention, so it seems fitting that in the end the fortunate, well-meaning survivors of Farr’s estate—and not the men whose revenge drove them to the inevitable murder-suicide of the entire northern hemisphere—seem to be the only living things to escape the ruins of America unscathed.

 

The World is Over; Now What?

Alas, Babylon
by Pat Frank
p. 1959

Without really intending to, June sort of became ‘Apocalypse Month’ for me, as all three novels I read that month dealt heavily with the end of the world, and all in vastly different ways. But whereas Good Omens and The Devil’s Cat were worlds on the brink of apocalypse, thwarted at the last moment, Alas, Babylon is one of those postwar apocalyptic novels that explores what happens after the world has suffered a nuclear holocaust. The last one I read like this was Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7, and any comparisons between the two are apt.

It’s an interesting thing, the mentality that existed in Cold War era fiction. Whereas post-apocalyptic fiction was nothing new, the threat of nuclear holocaust added a new dimension to the genre with the implication that—at least in this instance—humanity is directly responsible for its own downfall and have no one to blame but themselves for the bleak world they left for the future, if indeed there is even a future left.

Alas, Babylon centers on the day to day trials of Randy Bragg and his town of Fort Repose, Florida, in the direct aftermath of a nuclear exchange that devastated the United States to the point where it became a third world nation in a matter of minutes.

Randy was a largely directionless but amiable young man who only thrived in his postwar world because he was warned by his older brother, a military man who saw the incident coming in time to send his family to Randy for protection. Suddenly saddled with numerous responsibilities, Randy does what he can to protect those closest to him—his sister in law and their two young children (who are remarkably well composed, given the circumstances; perhaps a bit more composed than what is natural), Randy’s girlfriend and her father, the town doctor, a couple of elderly female neighbors. Randy also warns the black neighbors who worked for him prior to the nuclear exchange (referred to in the novel as ‘The Day’) and a relationship of mutual assistance forms, which is crucial to the town’s survival. There are moments when the way the black characters are depicted feels a bit uncomfortable, but I have to say that—given the time frame in which it was written (1959)—Pat Frank is relatively politically correct, all things considered. Randy is a forward-thinking and fair-minded man, and it helps spur him on in his newfound ability to lead, a role previously alien to him.

Another thing I was mostly impressed by was Pat Frank’s depiction of women. I have been saying for years now—ever since I got into early science fiction—that it was my goal to find a male author who wrote positive roles for women prior to the seventies. Thus far, Alas, Babylon is the closest I’ve come to meeting this goal. There are still times when Frank slips into cringe-worthy clichés—such as Randy’s sister-in-law, Helen, momentarily becoming obsessed with Randy as a replacement for her husband, and Randy’s later appraisal that women cannot be relied upon to think for themselves some times,

“The more he learned about women the more there was to learn except that he had learned this: they needed a man around.”

but prior to this incident, Helen Bragg was a remarkably outstanding pillar of control and support. Randy’s girlfriend is portrayed as independent and free-thinking. The elderly female neighbors are hardy and independent as well, and even Randy’s eleven-year-old niece has a moment of determined brilliance when she takes the initiative to provide for her new community, comptently, I might add. But it was the most jarring revelation—that, as a result of The Day, the only remaining official left to hold the office of President is a woman, and Fort Repose accepts this with little argument—that made me question whether Pat Frank was a pseudonym for Patricia. (It’s not, remarkably.)

One of the aspects of fifties and sixties science fiction that I have come to realize, regrettably, is that there are few characters with standout personalities. The same can be said here, as Alas, Babylon, was a very perfunctory story, without much zest in the characterization department. That said, I did like Frank’s style of writing, particularly when he ramped it up for the end of chapters. This was not a book I read in one sitting, but I was okay with that, because the way every chapter ended was so poised that it left me with something to think about for hours afterwards, until I had the opportunity to resume reading.

It’s fitting that I concluded my ‘Apocalypse Month’ with a book that actually went to the brink, with finality and solemnity. It felt like a good way to cap off my month of living on the verge of destruction, and I already can’t wait to see what the next one will be like.