IN THE COMMAND OF THE KING

Here’s a little behind-the-scenes tidbit. The management has asked your friendly correspondent to avoid going overboard on matters related to Stephen King. (And that would sometimes include authors related to Stephen King, a total of three.) This makes sense to him. After all, this column only appears four times a year, and King gets more than enough coverage elsewhere; he doesn’t depend on this column to publicize his latest doings, fun as it is to imagine him incessantly kissing my ass for a few column lines, like I’m Burt Lancaster as the influential gossip monger in Sweet Smell of Success. What would Papa Steve do without me? And I mostly obey this guideline, with somewhat less success in this calendar year, because it really is a better use of what space I have to advocate for people who are news to you. But sometimes I bend the rule, as when a new Holly Gibney novel comes out, or, as in this case, when a pair of works come out that use King as the fertile mine from which riches flow.

The first this time would include Francis Lawrence’s motion picture The Long Walk, based on the novel originally published under King’s pseudonym Richard Bachmann, about a dystopian future where, once a year, boys are encouraged to compete in the titular contest. In it, boys are driven on a forced march where anyone who slows or collapses is executed by soldiers, and only the last competitor left standing is awarded a fortune and a wish that the totalitarian leader, the Major (Mark Hamill) is allowed to grant. The viewpoint player is Ray Garrity (Cooper Hoffman, the talented son of the doomed Philip Seymour Hoffman), who, as in the novel, experiences that horrors that follow as an allegory for the carnage of war.

I have long held that this novel was one of King’s best, a splendid and horrific allegory for the Vietnam War, written when that conflict was in the recent past. It is certainly more spare than much he’s penned since, and the movie hones it still further by cutting the number of contestants from one hundred to fifty and narrowing the novel’s plethora of character arcs to subplots around Garrity and his foxhole friendship with Peter McVries (David Jonsson), which becomes a brotherhood that cannot be broken even when both know that at least one of them will be. It’s the spine of the film in a way that it could not be for the book. It’s a fine distillation, well-wrought by everyone involved. The source author and Mark Hamill have been very good to one another this year, and I expect an Oscar nomination, if not a trophy, for Hamill’s work in the prior 2025 King adaptation, The Life of Chuck.

The End of the World as We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand
Edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene
Hardcover / Ebook / Audiobook
ISBN: 978-1668057551
Gallery Books, August 19, 2025, 800 pages

The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s THE STAND is for some stretches a book better to anticipate than to read. The main problem is that many, many of the stories replay the same emotional beats, by which I mean some hapless protagonist waking up in a location littered with bodies due to the ravages of the killer flu known as Captain Trips, having those dreams about the Dark Man or Mother Abigail, dealing with local human predators, and then either surviving to hit the road, or not. It is not a book best binged. You’re better off keeping it on a handy shelf and dipping in, to read one story or another. That way repetition won’t pall.

But, seriously, these are some of the field’s best, and a large number of them go interesting places. Meg Gardiner gives us “Bright Light City,” in which one Danielle Cooper is stuck in Las Vegas just as the world is depopulated, meaning that if she doesn’t want to join up with the Dark Man, it’s an exercise in getting out. Tim Lebbon’s “Grace” is set aboard the Space Shuttle, doomed to remain in orbit while a fight for the future of the Earth plays out among the doomed astronauts. Joe R. Lansdale’s “In A Pig’s Eye” is a tale about a survivor fighting one of the local crumbs, one of many—but by God’s sake, it’s Lansdale, and that should be sufficient explanation why it stands out. “Lenora” by Jonathan Janz finds pathos in a man caring for an infected, and deeply affectionate, dik-dik. “Wrong Fucking Place, Wrong Fucking Time,” by C. Robert Cargill, is about some movie geeks who finally have time to watch all the VHS tapes they want. “The African Painted Dog” by Catriona Ward is about two members of the named canine species surviving the plague, escaping confinement by humans, and then escaping mistreatment by other humans; it is written in their point of view, and Ward genuinely captures the wild canine voice. “Till Human Voices Wake Us, And We Drown” by Poppy Z. Brite introduces its own fantasy element in the form of a captive mermaid. Josh Malerman’s “I Love the Dead” gives us the apocalypse in the form of a single-minded Jerry Garcia fan.

I shamefacedly confess that I have not yet gotten to the book’s final section, where consensus assures me I will find superb stories by Catherynne Valente, David Schow, and others about the world after the novel’s conclusion. I intend to get there, but for now I must stop long before I get to Boulder. (I do like to believe that my destination would be Boulder, but maybe I know myself too well.) I apologize to any authors whose stories I yet omit. I must take a break. But before I go I will mention the best so far: “The Story I Tell is the Story of Some Us,” by Paul Tremblay, which after five hundred pages of tales that mostly duplicate the same beats of people wrestling with post-traumatic stress after their loved ones die from the killer flu, after all that, goes to the exact same place and somehow, unaccountably, wrings emotions that the others do not. Tremblay’s teenager rejects the calls to action by both the forces of good and evil and refuses to be a player performing on someone else’s stage. Tremblay’s prose is tremendous, as always, and it interrogates the premise rather than swear fealty to it. It is a tour de force.