Summary
The Stand almost defies classification. While it is certainly a horror story in the sense that frightening events and supernatural powers are depicted, it also qualifies clearly as science fiction or epic fantasy and even as a political allegory. This last aspect is immediately apparent in the events which open the novel: Nearly all of the world’s population (99.4 percent) is killed in only three weeks after a superflu virus escapes from a U.S. Army biological warfare installation. The world as all have known it is destroyed.
A few people inexplicably survive to pick up the pieces. Stu Redman, a laconic Texan, is taken to a disease laboratory in Maine, where the few remaining government scientists hope to discover what has given him immunity. Realizing that the government plans to use him as a guinea pig, Redman flees the laboratory and soon meets Glen Bateman, formerly a New Hampshire sociology professor. Other survivors throughout the country also appear: Nick Andros, a deaf-mute genius, is wandering around rural Oklahoma, where he meets the retarded but amiable Tom Cullen. Larry Underwood, a rock singer on his way to New York, finds the city devastated. Soon, they and other characters begin having disjointed, prophetic dreams of a “dark man,” Randall Flagg, the personification of evil, and of Abigail Freemantle, a black woman more than a hundred years old who serves as God’s instrument and prophet. Each character is drawn toward one of the two: Some find Freemantle in her old cabin in a Nebraska cornfield; others follow Flagg in what appears to be the beginnings of a reborn American society in Las Vegas.
Flagg gathers to himself a large number of average-citizen types, who are deceived by his cunning into believing that they are salvaging civilization. He has also claimed many of the dregs of surviving humanity, such as Donald Elbert, a mad pyromaniac, and Lloyd Henreid, a mass murderer. Together, they help Flagg assemble a massive arsenal of destruction. As his technological power grows, Flagg begins to display supernatural powers: He can transform himself into animals and control minds.
With little more than Freemantle’s goodness and visions to guide and inspire them, Redman, Bateman, Underwood, and Ralph Brentner (a good-hearted farmer) undertake a long and torturous journey on foot to Las Vegas, where they plan to battle Flagg face-to-face. Redman breaks his leg in the desert and must be left behind, but the other three are eventually picked up by police cars under Flagg’s authority. In a tense encounter with Bateman, Flagg forces Henreid to shoot and kill the sociologist. Despite his superiority in numbers and weapons, Flagg has begun to fear the power of goodness. He stages a melodramatic public trial, accusing Underwood and Brentner, held captive in steel cages, of trying to sabotage his new society. The crowd of ordinary people, beginning to be aware of Flagg’s deception and evil, starts to protest, but Flagg silences them with a display of supernatural malevolence, burning a protester down with a fireball.
Suddenly, Elbert, who had been sent by Flagg to find an atomic bomb, returns with it in tow on a cart. The bomb’s radioactivity has sickened him and driven him insane, but he has persisted in his mission. Flagg becomes nearly hysterical with fear, for the fireball he had launched has grown in the sky and assumed the shape of a great blue-fire hand—the hand of God—headed for the bomb. Flagg disappears, and in his place for only a moment is a half-seen vision of a horrible being, perhaps Satan. The hand of God reaches out and ignites the bomb,...
(This entire section contains 965 words.)
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destroying all.
Back in the community started by Freemantle and her followers, called the Free Zone, Redman, who was rescued and has recovered, is disturbed by the way in which all the flaws of pre-superflu America seem to be reappearing: creeping red tape bureaucracy, and even authoritarianism. He senses that the victory over Flagg’s forces may not, after all, be complete. In the final scene, Redman and a few others decide to leave the Free Zone and head for Maine, where, perhaps, they can live without the evils which seem inevitably to arise from civilized society.
The Stand is an extremely complex work. King has intricately interwoven his fears about the political direction in which he believed the United States was moving with a more universal story of the clash between good and evil. Yet the question recurs: How are good and evil to be defined? Many, perhaps most, of Flagg’s followers are average people simply seeking to re-create the life they had known before the superflu destroyed almost everything. They are used, manipulated, and deceived by Flagg for his own purposes, yet King seems to be saying that they are somehow responsible, too—that evil is inherent in the order and rules necessary for any society’s continued existence. Even the Free Zone is not immune.
For the first time in King’s novels, The Stand takes an explicitly theological position: While Satan is never specifically named or portrayed, it is clear that God is the force behind Freemantle and that faith in God is what sustains and gives power to her followers. Clearly, then, God is the source of goodness, but what, exactly, does that mean? Redman, Underwood, and the others who work for the Free Zone are certainly not saints, and their faith is often weak, yet they remain the representatives of what King sees as good. The critical point appears to be that they also have faith and trust in one another and humanity in general, and they simply wish to avoid harming anyone. While this may be a simple message, King shows that translating it into action is supremely difficult.
Summary
On an air force base in California, a highly contagious flu virus is accidentally released, but a panicked employee escapes before the base is sealed, spreading the disease across the Southwest. The “super-flu” depopulates the country in a four-week period in July, 1985.
The only survivors are naturally immune to the disease, and within a week, each one dreams about two opposing forces, one heralded by the aged, pious Mother Abigail, who has received messages to prepare a meal for unknown guests. The other force is represented by the evil Randall Flagg, the infamous “walkin’ dude” or the “creeping Judas.” Flagg’s first convert is Lloyd Henreid, a convicted murderer starving in a jail cell in a prison of the dead. Just when Henreid seems forced to survive by cannibalism, he is mysteriously released: At Flagg’s command, Henreid bows down and worships him. The two set out across the country.
Meanwhile in New England, Harold Lauder and Frannie Goldsmith begin to look for a cure for the super-flu. To impress Frannie, Harold climbs on a barn roof and leaves a sign to inform any survivors who want to know where they have gone. On their trip, Mother Abigail calls them west in dreams, and on the way they meet Stuart Redman. Harold immediately becomes jealous of Redman, and begins to turn toward the dark force.
Larry Underwood, meanwhile, has also begun to go west following the signs left by Lauder.
Meanwhile, the deaf-mute Nick Andros is also called by Mother Abigail from his home in Arkansas to her house somewhere in the Midwest. Andros meets Tom Cullen, a mentally disabled youth, and immediately feels sympathy for him. Even though Cullen will never progress beyond the mental age of six, he shows great wisdom. When the two men meet a beautiful girl in town who tries to seduce them, Cullen convinces Andros to avoid her, for he recognizes that she is from the “dark side.” Like the other survivors, the two proceed west.
When the group gathers, their numbers are swelled by more, including Glen Bateman, an aging sociologist, and his dog, Kojak. Meanwhile, supernatural events begin to happen as Mother Abigail undergoes a harrowing encounter with the dark man and his creatures—weasels who attack her from the darkness.
Soon the survivors reach Boulder, Colorado, where they find the city mysteriously free of dead bodies. Now two groups emerge, one in Boulder and the other centered around Las Vegas, headed by Randall Flagg. Flagg’s dictatorship immediately begins gathering weapons and training fighter pilots. The democracy at Boulder organizes their community under Andros’s direction. Stuart Redman is appointed chairman of the executive board, and decides to send spies, including Tom Cullen, west into Nevada. When Tom is hypnotized in preparation for the trip, he becomes lucid for the first time and becomes “God’s Tom.”
Nadine Cross, who has been spurned and abandoned by the man she loves, turns to Harold Lauder and perverts him to the dark side. Harold then plans to assassinate the Boulder leaders. In the ensuing battle, Nick Andros is killed, while Nadine Cross and Lauder escape to the dark side.
Flagg’s plans deteriorate. Underwood, Redman, Henreid, and Ralph Brentner go west at God’s command and witness Flagg’s destruction by the wrath of God. The survivors of the climactic events then return to Boulder to revive civilization.
