SLOW READ: The Stand reading schedule
Welcome to Welcome to Slow Read The Stand. We are your hosts Sarah Stewart Holland and Laura Tremaine
This is the fifth episode of Slow Read The Stand.
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!
Mentioned in this episode:
Lord of the Rings by Tolkein
Carrie by Stephen King
Knives Out Wake Up Dead Man (movie)
Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets, and the Fever Dream of the American New Age by Leah Sottile
The Green Mile by Stephen King
Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King
Laura: This is Slow Read, where we tackle the books you’ve always wanted to read at a pace you can handle. We are already about a third into The Stand by Stephen King.
And today we’re going to be talking about chapters 35 through 42, which will bring us to the end of book one. And things are starting to come together or fall apart. I’m not sure which one.
Initial Impressions: The Lincoln Tunnel and Mother Abagail
Laura: Okay, Sarah, chapters 35 through 42, the end of book one. In this section, we get the infamous Lincoln Tunnel scene. We meet Mother Abagail for the first time, sort of. And to me, it feels like the threads of this story that we’ve been reading for 400 pages are finally starting to come together. What do you think?
Sarah: Well, I understand why that scene is infamous, because it was bananas. Bananas. Bananas. Oh, my Lord. I just was like, dude, there are other ways to exit the city. What are you doing? So that was very intense, even as a person who doesn’t get scared usually with text on a page. Very intense.
Sarah: And I was ready for Mother Abagail to show up. I know enough to know about her a little bit. I knew she was like the Randall Flagg—the hero to his villain, sort of. So I was like, okay, I’ve spent some time with Randall. When is the light going to show up in the face of all this darkness? So I was really excited for her to show up.
Sarah: And there is a little more grotesqueness than I expected. I don’t know why. Because I think when you hear about Stephen King and you hear “scary,” you think maybe just violence primarily. And so the gore and strong aversion I feel reading some of it... it hasn’t caught me in total surprise, but I guess it was a little unexpected. But it’s not taking me out. I’m fine. I’m not having nightmares.
Laura: That’s interesting though, that when you think of Stephen King, you think the scariness is going to be violent. I think most people think of monsters.
Sarah: Yeah, like the monster, the violent dad in The Shining. Oh right, I see what you’re saying. As opposed to like Pennywise the clown. But Pennywise is still—I mean, I don’t know if I’ve read it or seen the movies—I’m assuming he actually kills people.
Laura: Yes. Okay, so there you go. Violence. I hear what you’re saying. I think I’m less afraid of the actual violent act as I am the anticipation of it happening. Whether that’s a monster or a psychologically damaged person or both. That fear factor is what’s super scary to me.
Sarah: I will say this: I continue to be so impressed. I think one of our commenters, Michelle, talked about how good Stephen King is at articulating the emotions, particularly articulating fear and fear responses and terror and the way you shut down and shock. Man, he’s just so good at it. And it’s probably because he sees the universe of threat so much bigger and wider than I do. His galaxy of fear is so wide.
Chapter 35: Larry Underwood and the Smell of New York
Laura: Is the story itself what you expected?
Sarah: Well, we’re going to get into it. Because the timeline was never what I expected. From the beginning, I’ve said, like, I just never thought it was going to be such a short timeline. This happens in, like, a couple of weeks. That’s the part that’s been the most unexpected to me.
Laura: Okay, well, then let’s get right into it. So, all right. Chapter 35. It opens with Rita and Larry playing house in her apartment like nothing’s going on. Larry’s inner monologue is like: everything seems to be fine except for the smell. The city is starting to smell.
Sarah: Yeah. And again, because of this timeline, so many things are coming to my attention that I had not thought of even living through a pandemic. You’re like walking into the rooms and they’re like decomposed corpses and you’re just like looking at bones or whatever. And you just don’t think about, like, well, they had to get to that point. And this is the summer in New York City. And if everybody dies, oh, it’s just so bad. I can’t fathom. Because part of me was like, why wouldn’t you just stay in New York City? You’d get the hell out because it would smell. Of course you would.
Laura: I want to circle back to this because obviously this section that we’re talking about today is kind of when they all start to be on the move. And I guess I have questions about that because I don’t know that that’s what I would do. Now, all these side sort of side character vignettes that we’re getting, not everybody is on the move. Some people are just staying put in their houses. And I feel like that would be me.
Sarah: Maybe you want to find other people, I guess, if you’re alone. I think that’s what he does a good job of articulating over the section, like the quiet. You don’t realize like, oh, I really do. Even if it’s as annoying as someone like Rita, you just want somebody. You’ll stick with Harold? Fine. It’s somebody. We’re social creatures. It’d be like, you know, so many people just immediately in solitary confinement.
Laura: What is interesting about how Stephen King is playing that out is he’s not hitting us over the head with that logic necessarily. He’s sort of just letting it be a human reaction for why they’re all on the move.
Sarah: Well, here since I just complimented him, here is my critique: this is what’s wearing me out. I really struggle with how he describes time. So the beginning of this chapter, Larry’s like, he remembers meeting her in the park. Well, yeah, I hope you remember it. It was like two days ago. He says that a lot as if they’ve been together for months. He writes about some of these relationships as if they’ve been hanging out for months. And I’m like, what? They just met.
Critiquing the Women: Rita and Franny
Laura: I have a critique here in this section of—well, it’s kind of a big picture critique, actually. But first, let me start by saying in this section where they’re hanging out in Rita’s apartment in this chapter, I think we’re getting the first hints that maybe Rita was abused or something. She’s very afraid of him. Not afraid of him in, like, a stranger way. Afraid of him in, like, a man-woman dynamic way where she really doesn’t want to disappoint him. She eats the eggs like an abused woman. Now, we know from Larry’s kind of inner monologue that he ain’t a nice guy. But it’s not like he’s hit her or anything that we can see.
Sarah: Maybe this is generational. She’s older. Yeah, I think it’s—listen, I have just decided to, in my mind, ignore any attempts he has made to move this timeline to the nineties and just keep it in the seventies where it was originally written. To me, this is all taking place in the seventies. And to me, that makes a lot of sense for a woman of her age in the seventies. And like Franny’s attitudes make a lot of sense for a woman of her age in the seventies.
Laura: Yeah, that was my point. The women characters, and so far there are very few of them that we’re getting to know on a deep level. Really, Rita and Franny. That’s it. Well, I’m just not loving the way he’s writing women. Some of them feel a little bit more caricature-y to me than the men do. And I don’t love that. There’s just some like fantasy of a woman, like the short description of Rita being like very sexually in charge. Like I was like, really, is this necessary?
Sarah: At the end of the day, a book that is as plot-heavy as this book is, it’s just going to lose something character-wise. It’s just hard. It’s really, really hard to do, I think, to have this many moving parts.
Laura: Well, I was just infuriated about Rita starting on their walk to nowhere in silk pants and strappy sandals. And I’m like, she’s not dumb. This woman’s supposed to be older, she wouldn’t do that unless she literally has no data that you cannot walk in those.
Sarah: A New Yorker, like even a New Yorker with a driver, is not planning to walk to New Jersey in her Valentinos or whatever. She’s just not. No. It made me mad because it diminished Rita. I know no New York woman—not the same woman who’s gonna walk into a dark Lincoln Tunnel, I can tell you that much.
The Lincoln Tunnel Scene
Laura: Okay, tell me your impressions of the Lincoln Tunnel sitch. Again, first of all, there are other ways to exit the city! The Brooklyn Bridge, for example. I did look it up. It is 1.5 miles long. And to walk that in the pitch black, oh, hell no. I kept this line: “The solid darkness provided the perfect theater screen on which the mind could play out its fantasies. Or nightmares.” I was like, no, no, no, no, no. I wouldn’t do it.
Sarah: Well, also just like get a flashlight. Word. You went to stores. Everything’s available to you. That was such a gaping hole in the story because it’s not the medieval times. Like you need more than your Bic lighter.
Laura: I guess now that I’m trying to be fair about it, maybe Larry Underwood with his Bic lighter is the equivalent of Rita in her sandals. Like this is just unbelievable. It makes for a good story, but it’s not real. And also think about this: Of all those cars, none of them’s lights were still on?
Sarah: It was really scary. And just—well, I loved that he also used the term “terror locked mind,” which I thought was like such an incredible phrase. Because, yeah, you just, your mind locked, you locked down.
Laura: It’s one of the more infamous scenes, I feel like, in the book is this Lincoln Tunnel. They’re in that tunnel for a while. He almost kills her. He comes across the family, the Jewish family who had clearly been shot by the stationed military there who were meant to shoot people trying to escape. There’s so much. Have you ever had to run in the dark?
Sarah: Not in adulthood. When I was a teenager, we had an abandoned hospital in my town. And it was freaky. There were like autopsy tables and medical records on the ground. It was terrifying. And we were in there one time and a police officer shouted, “Get back here!” All my friends took off running and I was like, nope, if it’s a killer, I’ll just die. I’m not running. And I literally just stopped. I was the only one who didn’t get in trouble because I did not run. True story.
Sarah: I thought it was so interesting how much of this section we talked about traffic jams. Humanity’s last traffic jam was quite a dilly. That was such a funny way to put it, but I’d never thought about it. I’d be like, oh yeah, of course.
Laura: The car thing, including in the tunnel, but just all the cars, it’s very cinematic. Like that is one of the things that you can really picture that everyone has a reference point for is this kind of traffic jam. You know, and it’s what everybody sort of fears in a way.
Chapter 36: Harold, Franny, and the Realities of Pregnancy
Sarah: Chapter 36. Harold and Franny. I thought this was so, so sweet where he talks about like, “I didn’t think I cared that they died... I got fooled. I miss them more and more every day.” Poor sweet Harold. Also, I think this is a fairly accurate portrayal of grief. Pregnant Franny has decided she’s got to go find the only other living being in their town, which is Harold.
Laura: The visual of Harold in his swim trunks run mowing is almost as cinematic as the Lincoln Tunnel.
Laura: Well, Harold’s 17 and he doesn’t have much emotional EQ. He does not. But we’re getting a lot of his backstory here. We’ve had a lot of Franny’s backstory, and with Harold, this is where we’re sort of learning that he felt like he was the black sheep in his family. We’re getting sort of a little more understanding of where his obnoxious personality might have stemmed from.
Sarah: But he’s really smart, actually. He has all this nerdy science knowledge. He’s also the one that comes up with the plan that is not a bad plan to try to walk to Stovington where he knows there’s a CDC situation. He has sort of like a logistical brain.
Laura: Look, I’m not going to get into, like, a total male-female binary, but I’ll tell you right now, when it says in this section that this was the first time that Franny has thought about who was going to deliver her baby, I call bullshit. What are you talking about? No pregnant woman would have not thought of that for multiple weeks.
Sarah: Well, she’s 19. The timeline is so short. And she wasn’t even sure she was going to keep it like a week ago. I can almost buy that your timeline just gets closer and closer to your life. Oh, right, nine months I’m going to have a baby. Wonder what that’s going to be like.
Laura: The second I peed on that stick, I was like, how’s this thing going to get out? I thought about it constantly.
Fear and Human Nature
Laura: Did you notice in this whole section how many rape references there were? Apparently it only takes two weeks for every man to either become a wild, untamed rapist or for every man to be worried about a wild, untamed rapist. I mean, it just, it was everyone’s first thought.
Sarah: I think his thesis is that what prevents the breakdown of civilization is this is gonna be one of the first things. If that structure breaks down, then you have these instincts. I mean, I think we can safely assume here that Stephen King is pretty pessimistic on human nature. He believes that humans are capable of terrible, terrible things.
Chapter 37: Glenn Bateman
Sarah: Let’s get to Glenn Bateman. I just loved him. I thought he was a trip. I understand why Stu meets up with Glenn Bateman, then leaves him and is like, boy, I’m lonely, and goes with Harold and Franny. I’m like, you should stick with Glenn. He’s a good hang.
Sarah: I don’t know if I was in Los Angeles and I needed to walk somewhere, where would I go? I would probably start walking towards Fort Campbell. I would walk towards a military installation.
Laura: Well, wait. So we’re still in Chapter 37 where Stu has met up with Glenn Bateman, who is a sociology professor. He also serves from a story point of view as a guide, like in The Hero’s Journey. He is explaining to Stu a little bit about society.
Sarah: Well, and he’s like throwing up some red flags. Like, I think the future of babies in utero is very uncertain. I will be stealing the toast: “May we have happy days, satisfied minds, and little or no low back pain.” It’s so funny.
Laura: Bateman talks a lot about religion. He says: “It’s during the last three decades of any given century that your religious maniacs arise with facts and figures showing that Armageddon is finally at hand.” This is an interesting thing to note because this is as close to Armageddon as human history has experienced.
In every, every Stephen King story I’ve ever read, there is an aspect of religion. He is constantly examining how extreme religion has affected society. It’s going to come up over and over again. You can already see with Randall Flagg that there’s clearly like devil imagery.
Chapter 38: The Second Epidemic (No Great Loss)
Sarah: Chapter 38. The second epidemic. Poor Sam Tauber. That was the saddest thing. I hadn’t even thought about a little kid being abandoned like that.
Laura: The second epidemic is survivors who were immune to Captain Trips, but they end up dying anyway of natural causes. I hadn’t really thought about like, oh, yeah, in the immediate aftermath, like people will just have accidents. And the theme was like: “no great loss.” I thought that was so, so interesting, that sort of narrative and the repetition of that particular phrase.
Laura: This is my favorite type of King writing. My favorite, favorite, favorite. Just like the pop, pop, pops all over. Just the little vignettes. He gives them a full name, a tiny bit of backstory where you know enough about their backstory to kind of be invested.
Sarah: Does he sit around and keep a running list of all the absolute worst ways to die? I think he does. I think this is why I love it so much. It feels fun. It feels creative. And that’s one of the reasons I like horror as a genre. His mind is deep and wide, yo.
Chapter 39: Lloyd and the Man with Red Eyes
Sarah: Chapter 39. Lloyd is starving and miserable in his stupid jail cell and he’s eating a rat. He’s trying to eat the guy in the neighboring cell.
Laura: I don’t care about cannibalism! That is annoying to me. I really didn’t. The unnerving part to me is him singing “Camp Town Races” over and over again.
Sarah: I made a note of that, too, because I think that this is fascinating as a writer that Stephen King gives us these refrains. In this one, it’s just “do-da, do-da.” That is artistic writing. He’s really, really good at putting you in the person’s head and making you understand quickly that they are coming unhinged.
Laura: Anyway, Randall Flagg shows up. Even someone as depraved as Lloyd, when Randall Flagg shows up, he says, “If you’re real, you’re the devil.”
Sarah: He goes to prisons. It’s kind of a brilliant move, honestly. Villains know where to find their team. What did you think about the fact that there were astrological signs on his belt buckle?
Laura: To me it felt like a wink to the occult. Lloyd felt terror but also “the pleasure of being chosen.” It made me think of the history of cult leaders. Cult leaders are the people who will say: “No, you’re not crazy. You’re chosen. I hear you.”
Chapter 40: Nick Andrus and Mother Abagail
Laura: Chapter 40. Get out of Arkansas, Nick! Which he does. Nick now has an infection in his leg, which he sort of cures himself. And then we meet Mother Abagail, iconic literary figure. Through Nick’s dreams. This is the first time that we’ve seen a dream that wasn’t about Randall Flagg or that wasn’t like super scary.
Sarah: Randall shows up first and says, “fall on your knees and worship me.” That’s like the devil to Jesus in the desert. But then there’s Mother Abagail. I heard my grandfather’s voice in my head when I was reading the hymn she was singing.
Laura: Did it strike you in any kind of way that she was Black?
Sarah: Yeah, I mean, I guess it’s giving a little bit the “magical Negro” thesis from Spike Lee and others who talked about that.
Laura: King is one of the primary criticism receivers of the magical Negro concept—the idea that you can’t just have a powerful Black character, they have to have magical powers and they are going to save mostly white people. This is something that famously comes up in The Green Mile.
Chapter 41: Larry and Rita’s Ending
Sarah: Chapter 41. Bye-bye, Rita. We hardly knew you. God, I loved Larry Underwood just singing the national anthem naked. That was so funny. But then we get the horror of Rita drowning in her own vomit. She made it through the Lincoln Tunnel and then you had her die of a drug overdose. Do you think she OD’d on purpose or do you think she just choked on her vomit?
Laura: I feel like it’s ambiguous, honestly. I was very upset with him for not burying her. He ain’t a nice guy. But he’s immediately affected by the silence. He shouts back: “Come back. Whoever you are. I don’t care. Come back.” It adds to the creepiness factor that now you’re sleeping alone in the park, but you’re not really alone.
Chapter 42: A Jar of Cookies
Sarah: Last chapter in book one. I really like Stu. I think I’m developing a crush on Stu. My absolute favorite line in the whole chapter: “Ain’t he going to be surprised when he finds out a girl is in a jar of cookies?” Love it.
Laura: His self-awareness, the way he maneuvers Harold and calms him down—I just really liked Stu.
Sarah: Stu clocks right away that Harold is feeling the responsibility of taking care of Franny. But also so ultra aware that he’s going to lose Franny at any point in this story. Because he never really had her, to be honest. You feel compassion for all three of them for different reasons.
Laura: All right, next episode will be kicking off book two. We’re a third of the way through the book, y’all. Can you believe it already?
Sarah: It’s going fast. See you on the other side.
Next Up:
We are reading Chapters 43 through 44 but first - next week we’ll finally be discussing Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green!
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