I just learned today they are doing an Anthology of short stories set in the world of Stephen King’s The Stand (by different authors). I had no idea this was happening and I am all for it. The little vignettes in the expanded edition are some of my favorite parts and more of that sounds great.
This has the potential to be fantastically good, or phenomenally bad.
I’m hoping for good.
That sounds like a happy, upbeat show.
Agreed. And 'uperdude (I love that) is absolutely correct that depending on all the factors between writing and filming, it could be a treat or a disaster.
Considering how Hollywood dealt with World War Z (also basically a collection of vignettes) I am very worried.
I should have clarified, this is a book of short stories not a show. Sorry about that.
Oh, then still could be good or crap, but slightly lower chance of crap!
I’ve seen a lot of anthologies done for pre-existing universes, and IMHO the ratio is normally 40-40-20, where the first 40% just miss out or mess with the story, 40% are fair to good, and 20% or so are great.
The closest recent example of which are the compilations for a similarly PA (Post Apocalypse) setting of the Black Tide Rising (biological zombie apoc) series. Which hit that metric above, although others might divvy up the split differently.
Oh my gosh. I expect crap, but I’ll read it anyway.
The authors, from this Yahoo article.
Josh Malerman, Paul Tremblay, Richard Chizmar, S. A. Cosby, Tananarive Due, Alma Katsu, Caroline Kepnes, Michael Koryta, Scott Ian, Joe R. Lansdale, Maurice Broaddus and Wayne Brady, Bryan Smith, Somer Canon, Hailey Piper, Jonathan Janz and more.
I like this idea. I enjoy interquels, gaidens, spin-offs, whatever you want to call them. I’m about half way through the audio book version of The Stand, and I can think of all kinds of interesting side stories I’d like to read about. The adventures on the road that the Fran + Stu, Larry, and Nick groups had on their way to Nebraska, at least those not already told in the book. Maybe a story about Mother Abigail in her younger years. The story she reminisces about when she was 20 years old and was the first Black woman to play guitar at the Grange in 1902 seems like excellent material for a short story. Maybe the apparently less dramatic but potentially still interesting stories of how Ralph and Glen were spending their time before meeting up with Nick and Stu. Maybe the story(ies) about anyone from Boulder or Las Vegas who survived, only to find their hometowns the centers for the post-apocalyptic showdown. Maybe a story about something creepy happening to Fran’s or Larry’s group as they pass through Derry, assuming they passed through their on their journey. Hopefully someone in one of the stories will drive a Takuro Spirit or drink some Nozz-A-La. Maybe Nick and his group passed through Topeka and had an interesting adventure there. I could go on and on 
.
One of my favorite parts was when we visited random people. I think about the guy who jogged himself to death all the time. I’m not OMG EXCITED for this, but I’ll give it a whirl. If it’s endorsed by King, who talks about it a lot on twitter, and about maybe my all-time favorite novel, it probably won’t be all garbage.
Although I paid cash money to see Sleepwalkers in theaters when it came out so…
I am unfamiliar with all of those authors unless Wayne Brady is the same guy hosting Let’s Make a Deal.
I really liked The Stand. I read it as a teenager a long ass time ago. I remember reading Night Surf as part of the Night Shift anthology, and that story took place during the Captain Trips outbreak. (And I believe it actually predated The Stand.) So the idea of more stories taking place in that world isn’t a crazy one.
This sounds about right to me in general, and is about what I expect from this anthology. Some of the stories will be great, some I could skip. And it will probably be a different list for most readers.
And that’s the beauty of anthologies like this. Current writer isn’t your thing? Move on to the next.
It’s been a while, but I believe that Night Surf while also taking place during a global pandemic nicknamed ‘Captain Trips’ is unrelated to The Stand. IIRC, the narrator in the former specifically talks about the flu coming out of Asia.
There are a ton of differences; there was an earlier, lesser illness that preceded it and people who’d caught it might be immune to the new one. The description of the illness was different, as one of the first symptoms was “triangle-shaped marks” of some kind. Society hasn’t broken down as quickly as there are still things like radio stations quite some time after the outbreak.
But it’s clear that this was King’s first stab at telling the story in that world, and later when he wrote The Stand he decided to change some details to better fit the larger story.
I also forgot that the novel Wizard and Glass of the Dark Tower series also took place partially in the same world, as that series involved moving through parallel worlds, and they spent time in a world ravaged by Captain Trips in that book.
Resurrecting this thread because I noticed the book is now available for preorder. It’s called The End of the World as We Know It and comes out in August.
Thank you!
That R.E.M. song is becoming part of The Stand lore. They played it at the very end of the recent miniseries, too.
I loved that nod in Wizard and Glass, and was unsurprised to see it, honestly, given how the Dark Tower series is essentially a linchpin of the entire Stephen King written universe.
I got the impression when I read it that it was an alternate world, wherein everyone, EVERYONE was dead. No Walking Dude, no Mother Abigail… just humanity snuffed. I could have been wrong in my impression, and it’s been some years since I read it,
The Stand is one of my all time favorite books, and by far my favorite King work. Read it the first time when I was 13 or so, and many times since. That book made me a post-apocalypse junkie to this day. Needless to say, I am cautiously excited for the anthology.
After reading much enthusiasm for The Stand in this and the favorite books thread I ordered it from Audible and am about halfway through now. Fun listen with lots of room for embedded stories, but I’m a little distracted at times by the plot holes.
Anyway, I had a slightly creepy experience the other morning as I listened during a morning walk. Just as I was walking past Oakland Technical High school and reading the commemoration of late alum Ricky Henderson on the LED billboard out front, King mentioned Ricky in a bit of dialog. Long shot coincidences are what fertilize our brains for the kind of shenanigans King likes to tinker with.
It could be. It was very open to interpretation. Of course, as was pointed out in the Stand, the concentration of the remaining population was almost entirely due to the supernatural elements. So it could a world as you described, where such were missing - and it’s a few desperate survivors will nothing to every pull them together and “out with a whimper” is is. Or it could be a world in which the heroes quest failed and Boulder is destroyed and Vegas burns out in violence and hedonism… or any other plausible scenarios.
For me, so much is going to depend on Nick - who was my favorite character, because it’s so much harder to show the depth and goodness of his character when they’re mute and we don’t have access to internal dialogs as in a book. Stu’s nice enough and all, and gets the “conventional” hero role, but Nick is where I get “the feels”.