“Stu’s very sick, Tom.” I loved it when Nick came to Tom. Hell, Tom and Nick in general. The scene where Nick nominates Tom to spy is terribly heartbreaking…
Also, don’t forget “Cordwood.” ::shudder::
If anyone is interested, I’ve started a thread over here, where we can pretend the Superflu (although we don’t know it’s Superflu yet) is breaking out and we’re sharing stories.
It’s June in the thread, and people are calling in sick to work and the Claritin isn’t kicking in…
There are many of King’s works that I love enough to have reread them over and over and over again. But The Stand was a sore disappointment when I first read it and I’ve never developed any real fondness for it since.
It was the first really blatant case of King doing a great buildup and then practically shooting his own book in the head due to an inability to figure out how to make it live up to its own premises. Great, well-crafted tale of the spreading plague and the gradual polarization, a showdown between good and evil, with our friendly sociologist Bateman around to indict that entity “society” as the wicked one even as we see Boulder starting to replicate all of its structures and patterns. Ma Abigail to be less than happy with the New Jerusalem and its Newly Elected Town Board.
But then the Officially Designated Evil Place and our old friend Randall Flagg sort of become less and less relevant to anything; Ma Abigail dies with little to say, and everything ends up turning on a weird little Children’s Crusade; the Designated Evil Place is erased with a deux ex machina and no more is heard about the possibility that reestablishing the old familiar social institutions is a Bad Thing.
So the upshot of the Great Conflict Between Good and Evil is that everything goes back to normal, evil was defeated but damned if we really know how or why, and aside from a temporary population trough that’ll take a few generations to recover from, it really was “just the flu” after all.
Not that it didn’t have great scenes. Put me down for the escape through the Lincoln Tunnel. If this ever happens in real life, I’m walking over the Washington Bridge, or swimming if necessary.
I don’t see a deux ex machina, I see a theme worked out to its conclusion: When evil people try to harness a mindlessly destructive force, whether it be a novel pathogen, or a hapless pyromaniac, and try to cultivate it and turn it to their advantage, in the end it’s going to be their undoing, and honest, earnest people will endure… for a while.
It might be a little banal, but it’s perfectly consistent and symmetrical. Like a cheeseburger. 
It’s not deux ex machina, it’s a recurring theme in good vs. evil stories. Evil turns in on itself and is it’s own undoing.
My favorite was the one where Larry had spent the night with some girl, who was cooking him breakfast. I remember when I was with my old girlfriend, who would do exactly that - cook bacon and eggs in the nude. How she could handle the grease splatter on her boobs I could never figure out. she also did her homework and housework naked too. Very strange. Being a true gentleman, I never objected.
Psst… that’s because Bateman’s opinion was not necessarily being touted as the One True Belief. Many opinions were formed in that book… and YOU, the reader, are left to draw your own opinion, in the end.
I think that’s one of my favorite parts of the book. And, incidentally, I probably would’ve sided with Flagg…
Hey, that gives me an idea… a new thread! Will you join Flagg, or Abigail?