Slow Read: The Stand

Welcome to SLOW READ, where we tackle the books you’ve always wanted to read at a pace you can handle.Hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Laura TremaineWe are currently reading The Stand by Stephen King (unabridged version)You can find our full Reading Schedule hereJoin the SLOW READ community on Substack for bonus episodes, book club meetings, and Side Quests with Sarah & Laura______Mentioned in this episode:* Giants in the Earth by Ole Edvart Rølvaag * The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood * How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan * Contagion (film, 2011) Living Inside the BookLaura: And after a few hundred pages of peaceful community building, some stuff really happens in this section finally.Sarah: I’d say so. I found myself traveling recently to Vegas of all places. And I was driving and I looked up at the moon and it was like fully half. And I’m like, oh, we’re not to the full moon for Tom Cullen. As if I have to wait for the full moon in my life for him to come back. I’m like real in it. I noticed every mention of Boulder. I noticed every mention when I was walking around Vegas. It feels like almost at the pace it’s happening. I’m a little stressed and I’m just in it. The anticipation of what’s going to happen next, especially after this section, is very, very high.Laura: I am having a similar experience by doing this so slowly. I’m reading it so differently than I would read any other novel, which changes your relationship to the character. Of course it’s a reread for me. Where if you’re mildly irritated by a character, you’re just reading so fast that you don’t really sit with those emotions. You’re like, well, that’s sort of annoying, and you just keep it moving because you’re propelled by the plot or by finishing or whatever. By doing it slowly, it really changes the way I think about the characters because, like you said, we’re kind of in it real time, like they’re friends.In the past, when I didn’t have much sympathy for Larry Underwood because he just seemed very narcissistic, on this read, doing it slowly, I’m sort of seeing the fullness of his character differently—and having a lot of sympathy for him until we get to this section and he wore me slick.Sarah: This is always my experience with slow reads. I read War and Peace last year and I just felt like I lived about 20 percent of my life in Russia all year long. When you do a slow read, you also live a little bit in the book. You’re not hopping in and out. You’re not speeding through. You’re just existing there and soaking up all the slow changes and the atmosphere and the annoying people and the people you like and everybody’s choices. That’s why I like it so much.Laura: Because when you read quickly, you get the high level of what an author is doing with a character. You understand if they’re meant to be manipulative or the hero. But when you go slowly, you just feel like you know them. You can sort of think about this book when you’re driving around town doing your errands, like you would think about people you know in real life. It’s just really a different experience, but I’m loving that part.Sarah: Yeah, it’s the best. I love hanging with characters like that. Even when they’re all dying. Even when they’re all dying. Laura: Which brings us to the bummer of this section.Chapter 56: Babies, Bombs, and Bad NewsLaura: Chapter 56, we start out — are the babies dying? This is rough. I feel like this theme is going to hit the mothers among us. The beginning of this chapter, Ralph stops Stu and tells him that a new group is coming in to join the Free Zone. There’s about 40 of them. Wonderful news. There’s a doctor among them. But not so great news is that one of them, Mrs. Wentworth, was pregnant with twins. She delivered on the road as they were walking. And both of her twins die under mysterious circumstances. Everyone’s mind immediately goes to: did the babies breathe air and immediately get the super flu?Sarah: That doesn’t make sense virology-wise, because I’m an amateur virologist now. It would not hang out that long with no host for months and months in the hot summer sun.Laura: But you don’t think the immune people might carry it, but they’re immune to it?Sarah: I mean, I guess, but it has to have something to live off of. There are real virologists listening right now being like, hey, this is why you’re an amateur. Laura: But I wonder if — was there something to what they were trying to say about because the babies were conceived before the flu hit? Is there something then, or if their biological dad had it, does that make a difference?Sarah: Yeah, that seems to be their theory. The smaller story of Mrs. Wentworth is so much like a story in a book I read for Well-Read Mom called Giants in the Earth, which is about Swedish pioneers in like Minnesota, 1800s. This woman along the way loses a child and she kind of loses her mind a little bit, doesn’t want anybody to have the bodies. It really, really reminded me of that story. The idea that if you were traveling to what you perceived as safety with your children or while pregnant and then to lose one of them — I think it’s just a really unique psychological trauma.And with this, the whole conversation got me thinking about with the “no more babies” — this is what I always say about Handmaid’s Tale. Like, people are like, it would never get that bad. I’m like, I don’t think you understand how quickly people would go crazy if there were no babies. I 100% believe people would lose their ever-loving minds and would be able to look past or accept any manner of horror and abuses if they thought it would get them babies.Laura: Well, and it makes King’s choice to have Franny be pregnant such a stroke of genius to this particular story. It really came together in this section because it raises the stakes. Not just Franny’s pregnancy, but like all of humanity’s pregnancy. And it just makes it all more emotional. I’m a little worried — she hasn’t felt the baby move but one time. I keep thinking that too, but she’s not due till January and it’s August. And you don’t feel them as early with your first baby.Sarah: I lost a pregnancy at 20 weeks and then got pregnant way too soon afterwards with Felix. And just that obsession — like all-consuming obsession with feeling the baby move and making sure everything is okay. I remember my doctor being like, come in anytime, anytime. And Felix — he was such a jerk. Anytime they would do an ultrasound, he’d be asleep. I’d be like, move, you jerk. Don’t you understand my stress level? And the doctor’s like, no, he doesn’t. And he doesn’t care.Laura: With your first one, you really don’t know. Eventually it becomes unmistakable that the baby is moving. But there are so many twinges and little flutters, and you want it so badly to feel it that you sometimes will it to happen.Franny being pregnant is really becoming an important part of this story. And story-wise, it also really matters that Stu is not the biological dad. There’s a lot happening here. Sarah: That feels... Mary and Joseph.Laura: Biblical, yes. This whole book has so many biblical things. Well, and we find out later in this section that Nadine’s going to get impregnated by the dark man, which sounds unpleasant to me, personally.Sarah: Cold. Ew.Nadine, Leo, and the Question of LoyaltyLaura: So at the beginning of Chapter 56, Nadine is back in her original house, packing up. And she doesn’t even realize that in the corner, Leo — formerly known as Joe — her little savage companion, is sitting in the corner in his underpants. Are we supposed to love him or what? Because I’m creeped out by him.Sarah: I mean, Stephen King plays around a lot with powerful, psychic kids. And I don’t think they’re supposed to be deeply comforting. Because there is something about when it’s coming from someone who fundamentally doesn’t understand the world yet and isn’t mature enough to have a prefrontal cortex, it just hits different. It reminds me of Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind — he talks about what happened in the ‘60s and why people got so freaked out by psychedelics. In traditional cultures, when you’re expanding your consciousness, it’s like your guide is old. But in the ‘60s it was teenagers, and everyone was like, whoa, everything’s upside down, this is no good. That’s what Leo reminds me of. I’m interested in what he has to say, but it’s in a container that feels like it’s not capable of containing it.Laura: Well, and also it’s interesting that Nadine has a real moment of self-awareness here where she realized she preferred him as Joe, when he was nonverbal and violent and she was the one keeping him in check. Once he meets Mother Abigail and becomes Leo, remembers his name, starts speaking — he chooses to be in a more traditional situation with Larry and Lucy more often and didn’t have as much attachment to Nadine. She discards him, which she realizes about herself. And it’s just telling you a lot about Nadine. She keeps trying to distract herself from what her mission is. She is being called to the dark man and she keeps trying to find reasons not to go. She’s trying to self-sabotage, but she stays on the path ultimately.Sarah: What confuses me is that Leo has this advanced perception of what’s going on. He has some sort of psychic connection. He understood that Mother Abigail was going to make it across the river. So why is he drawn to Nadine? He won’t enter the house with Harold, but he’s so sad Nadine is gone. I’m like, dude, either you understand who’s on the light or the dark or you don’t.Laura: I know. You can’t even argue that it’s because she’s wishy-washy about it all, because so is Harold. Back and forth they kind of go. And I don’t know why Leo has this relationship with Nadine.Sarah: You’re right. It doesn’t really make any sense. I do like that Harold gets so mean to her in this chapter. Like he’s just over her. I think that is good and accurate and interesting — if a relationship is built only on everything but.Laura: A lot of things are happening there. They’re both realizing that they’re about to have to leave the Free Zone and they both have complicated feelings about it. Which is what makes this book better than just everybody in Vegas is bad, everybody in the Free Zone is good. A lot of humanity is going to fall somewhere in the middle. Nadine and Harold are doing some exceptionally odd things, but they’re still having some sadness and regret. They’re sort of attached to the Free Zone despite their own mission. They’re not just one-dimensional evil people.Sarah: Yeah, I mean, I think Harold still loves Franny. Shows you the knife’s edge of love and hate that he’s planning to kill her. But I think he still kind of feels connected to her in some way. It’s also revealed in Chapter 56 that Harold is building a bomb.Spies, Consent, and Tom Cullen’s MissionLaura: We find out Dana is a lesbian. Sarah: Could you blame her after the time in the harem? That might put you off men.Laura: I know, but before that — Sue gives a little backstory to Dana. She had a real brute of a husband back in the day and then just realized, you know what, maybe I like girls. But it’s funny — not like funny haha, because I’m not insulting anyone here — but why in the world would Stu be just shocked that Dana is a lesbian? He’s really bothered by this. Sarah: I bought it even in the ‘90s. I think people were still — and also he was living in teeny tiny Arnett, Texas. How many lesbians do you think there are in Arnett, Texas?Laura: Not that many.Laura: But then they all go to set Tom off on his mission. And listen, I’m sorry. I find this cruel. I do. Sarah: I’m just too interested in what’s going to happen to be wrapped up in the ethics of it. Is there some ableist assumptions in seeing it as cruel? You’re assuming that he’s not up for it. What Nick is arguing, and what I buy to a certain extent, is that he is uniquely suited for this. Not ill-equipped — uniquely suited.Sarah: So it’s not necessarily... Now, is there some consent issues? I feel like he feels coerced.Absolutely. But I mean, I think you could also argue that hypnosis is not mind control, right? It’s a little bit in a gray area. Laura: Except you’re potentially sending him to his own death. It’s not like they’re coercing him to be the local PE teacher.Sarah: Tom has — he loves his house. He loves his whole situation. He is not in the mood for this. But you have to think about what Stephen King is telling you in the scenes way back in the beginning with the tornado. When push comes to shove, he has instincts and capacity that others do not, and can save lives. I can see the case they’re making. I’m not saying I would do it. I’m just saying I don’t think they’re evil and completely cruel to do it. I understand how they got there.Laura: I can see objectively how they got there, but it does feel like they’re taking advantage of someone who is pretty incapable of saying no to them. That said — he also can’t understand his own capacity, and they can.Chapter 57: Destiny, Free Will, and the Drive-InSarah: We both underlined “this is a job for a weasel, not a lion.” I underlined that so much. It’s an interesting quote because you would usually think the opposite — except who are the good guys and who are the bad guys here? The weasels are supposed to be Flagg and his people. We’ve had literal weasel scenes where it’s Flagg. Now suddenly the good guys are the weasels. Because it’s a David and Goliath situation. They’re not going to battle him strength to strength, obviously.Laura: David and Goliath. The ones who do consent well — the judge, Dana — they both seemed like they are fulfilling their destiny, which is the whole book to me. The whole book is asking these questions of destiny, fate, our path, our soul’s mission. Every single character is walking through that in all their different ways.Sarah: Don’t you feel like that happens in real life all the time? Those hard moments where something intercedes and really changes the direction?Laura: I think life is more of a soft merge than a hard right. Almost always.Sarah: Well, I think things happen daily that are nudging us. Like last night I dreamed about a person I hadn’t thought of in years. And I was like, oh, should I reach out to them? I used the term “the Holy Spirit at work” all the time — because something happens or I bring up something and someone’s reading the same book. To me, that is the connective energetic exchange that leads us in directions. But in this book it’s dialed up to like 15. This is not a small child reading your thoughts and telling you to talk to somebody.Laura: If that happened to me, I’d be freaked all the way out.Sarah: Definitely. And may I remind you — in a couple of chapters — literal pushes. Literal “get out of the house” pushes.Laura: That’s what I think the book is doing for us, though. Like, that’s why I read fiction. It’s not because I anticipate a little Mowgli character telling me to go have a certain conversation. It’s because I feel like, oh gosh, this happens in life. You can’t even deny your own path, even if you want to, even if you try.Sarah: I like to think I’m more in control of my path than that. The choice to move home was my choice. Nobody was pushing me to do that. My husband didn’t want to do that. It was me taking the reins and saying, no, I want to go this direction.Laura: Because that was your path.Sarah: Yeah, I mean, maybe. I didn’t think it was at the time. I wanted a certain life, and so I chose a path that would get me to the life I wanted. It’s like a balance. And I think that’s kind of what he’s playing with — we’re dealing with psychic children, and also, can everybody go turn all the appliances off, please? So the place doesn’t burn to the ground. I just like that real balance of pragmatic and psychic going on through all these chapters.Laura: Then we get my favorite scene. Nadine is tasked by Harold with leaving the bomb in the closet at Ralph’s house — that’s where they’re going to have the committee meeting. She breaks into the house, leaves it in the closet. She keeps thinking, should I go in and take that out? Should I dismantle this bomb? But then I love this scene where she is sort of transported by — the dark man enters her. Like possesses her.Sarah: And he was cold. Which is scary because until then he’s been sort of warm and loving to her. She’s drawn to him. He’s attractive. But now suddenly he’s cold. He sort of possesses her, drives her Vespa as her, to the drive-in movie theater.Laura: You like this scene because you clearly don’t go to drive-in movie theaters, because now I’m going to freak out next time I go to our drive-in movie theater.Sarah: I’ve never been to a drive-in movie theater.Laura: What? It’s so fun. It’s the best.Sarah: Well, this scene is so Stephen King. It is so cinematic. It’s obviously an empty drive-in movie theater. And all of the speakers — all of the speakers in the parking spots — fall down onto the ground and start emitting a message. Randall Flagg’s voice. And there’s no power yet when this happens. So it’s just so cinematic. This is my favorite kind of horror. And I got chills. The speaker is the dark man being like, Nadine, Nadine. Talking to her.He communicates with Nadine so differently than anyone else. It’s very dramatic. Even before all this, when she was in college. He is communicating with her in a totally different way. I don’t know if that’s because she won’t hear him otherwise, or because she’s meant for such an important mission that he has to get through to her. But he’s also scaring her.Laura: Wild. Especially the singing at the end. A creepy song really is the cherry on the sundae for me. I thought when he starts singing “I’ll Be Seeing You” — the weirdest. And she is fighting it, but she really can’t, because he’s like half-occupied her body. And then her hair goes totally white.Sarah: Totally white. Wild. So when she goes back and tells Harold — he is so cruel to her. He’s like done with Nadine. D-O-N-E.Laura: Not quite yet. When he sees her white hair, he’s a little freaked out and gets a little hesitant. Like, I don’t know that we should be doing this. And she’s like, it’s too late. Emotions at war on Harold’s face. Anger, horror, shame. Little by little, they drained away. And then like some terrible corpse coming up from deep water, a frozen grin resurfaced on Harold’s face.Sarah: They are back and forth playing with who is hesitating. Maybe we shouldn’t do this. And then the other one is like, it’s too late. That’s something they both said several times. And you kind of want to be like, no, ding-dongs, it’s never too late to do the right thing.The Twins Motif and Twin FlamesLaura: Another thing I want to mention — it keeps coming up in this section — from the beginning with Mrs. Wentworth, but then multiple times things are mentioned about twins. Not just her twins, but I circled a few different references to twins. Which made me think immediately — hashtag Taylor Swift — it made me think of twin flames.Sarah: Well, the drive-in is called Welcome to the Holiday Twin.Laura: That’s one of the things I circled. Twins in all kinds of traditions, mythology, even current traditions — twins and twin flames represent a conjoined connection, a soul connection, a mirror. And it’s different than a soulmate because it can also be a dark and a light. It can be like a mirror. And I feel like he’s playing with that sort of balancing — new way, old way, the choices we make, destiny. There’s definitely this balance beam that feels like it’s constantly happening within the story.Chapter 58: The Bomb, the Committee Meeting, and RIP NickSarah: Chapter 58, Stu reads Harold’s ledger and they’re like, oh, no.Laura: But they don’t know exactly. They don’t know he’s going to bomb the committee meeting. They go to the damn committee meeting. There’s a few things that they really misjudge.Sarah: Also, this is the first inkling I have that I’m like, I don’t love Stu right now.Laura: Why? I love Stu.Sarah: I know we’re meant to love Stu. I’m just like, I’m going to need a little bit more from you. Also, I’m impressed with the burial subcommittee. I mean — 25,000 corpses and better than 8,000 a week. Holy crap. They’re not individually digging graves, but that’s a lot of corpses to move.Laura: I mean, listen, that is the Lord’s work right there. That’s rough. From a storytelling point of view, I love that King is doing this. Not only do you have the committee members, but you also have these subcommittee people — the burial guy, the power guy — basically the main leaders of anything good happening in the Free Zone.Sarah: And then Franny’s like, we got to get out of here. I think the implication is that she also has — something is going on. Everybody has the dreams. And she’s fighting it more than a small child would or an old woman would or a Tom Cullen would. It has to be a very intense, very pivotal moment for her to not be able to deny that energetic connection.There are also some themes here of women in particular — but really anybody — denying their own instincts or defaulting to politeness instead of safety. She doesn’t want to look hysterical. She doesn’t want to interrupt the meeting. They’re saying important things. Like, after everything y’all have lived through, you should feel comfortable being like, I don’t know how to explain this, guys, but we got to get out of the room. You’re having drinks about the dark man. This is a safe space in which to exclaim, I think we should go.Laura: I agree. But it’s really hard to shake off the old ways of being.Sarah: There’s a seeding of control when you acknowledge that these messages come through and you don’t understand them, but you have to listen to something you don’t understand and follow instructions you might not understand. I think that’s a lot for a human mind. I want to feel like I’m still more in control than maybe I am. I want to feel like I have my hands on the reins and I’m not just riding a horse with no idea where it’s heading.Laura: Well, Franny in particular is really powerless in this section. She’s feeling a lot of fear around Mrs. Wentworth’s babies dying. She didn’t get a say on Tom Cullen being sent on his mission. She didn’t get much of a say in making Stu her partner as marshal. She has no power right now.Sarah: It’s about to get worse before it gets better, Franny. But she did have the instincts. She has the ethics. But she’s not being listened to, and that dampens your voice. That makes you not want to shout to the committee, we’ve got to run. But she did. And saved her life, and saved Larry’s life, and saved Stu’s life.Maybe not Nick.Laura: So the bomb goes off. Nick is in the closet trying to get it. But listen, RIP. So sad Nick died. Also, we were really reaching the limits of having a deaf-mute involved in the plot. You understand? Like, there’s only so many times you can say, well, he had to read out loud what he wrote down.Sarah: No, I disagree. It felt so different to me, the earlier parts of the book where we were with Nick and we were in his head. Now, when he’s just a participant in all these committee meetings and we have to wait for him to communicate through Ralph or Glenn — no. That was getting a little awkward.Laura: Did you call me ableist at the beginning of this episode? And now I’m going to call you ableist.Sarah: I’m not ableist. Nick is the reason I’m standing by Tom Cullen getting sent off. I like him. I’m just saying, story-wise, plot-wise, it was getting a little tedious. I did like how his sixth sense — not his intuitive sixth sense, but because of his lack of abilities, he can hear or sense things differently. He’s the one who felt like there was a bomb. He gets into the closet, he’s trying to dismantle it. But it ends up being the end. And we’re really out of luck because the burial guy also got killed. Who’s going to bury all the pieces of Nick? Ultimately, nine people die in Harold’s explosion.Laura: Could have been worse. He killed two of the guys that were nice to him on the freaking burial committee. Nick, we lose. Sue, we lose. Four random townspeople. Two more die later. But here comes Mother Abigail. She’s back.Sarah: She’s back. She’s eating herself, which is information I did not need from Dr. Richardson. Did you need to know that her poop had sticks in it?Laura: I didn’t need to know that either. We wanted a doctor, but I’m not sure everybody was hungry for this level of information.The Second Community Meeting: Mob Mentality vs. LeadershipSarah: I say that like I did not enjoy his vibe at the house — but I thought his vibe when they all go to see that she’s barely alive was really beautiful. How everybody was just intuitively gathering outside Lucy and Larry’s house. And at the second committee meeting, the big meeting with everybody, his vibe was good. It was a little bit giving Dr. Fauci. Just like, I’m going to show up, I’m going to tell you what you need to know, and you can get mad at me or not. I didn’t create the situation. I’m just reporting on it, friends.Laura: Well, you see the community itself — the whole Free Zone community — go from kumbaya, we were all drawn here by our dreams, we love each other, to being ready to defend themselves at all costs. And I feel like we’ve lived through this. We lived through this with 9/11. We went through a week of kumbaya before we were ready to go to war. We lived through this with COVID, where we went through a month of kumbaya, we’re all in the same boat, to a deeper divide than we’ve ever had.Sarah: And I feel like King captured it pretty well here. Going from kumbaya to how are we going to defend ourselves against the dark man mob mentality. I really liked Glenn’s approach so much better than Stu’s. Stu was just sort of freaked out and disappointed. Glenn’s approach of having a little plant that could shout something and kind of ease some of the tension — let some steam out of the kettle — I thought that was such a smarter approach. Just accept that this is a natural human tendency in a group to leave the kumbaya moment. But that doesn’t mean we just go, oh, no, what do we do. Let’s exhibit some leadership.Laura: I thought that part was really good. And also I loved this Glenn quote: they talked like people who have kept the huddled-up secrets of their guilts and inadequacies to themselves for a long time, only to discover that these things, when verbalized, were only life-sized after all.My friend calls this the parasite theory. You just put the parasite on the table, and then we can go, ooh, you might need more medicine for that one. Or, see, look, it’s not that bad. I got a parasite about that size too.Sarah: You call it manipulation. I call it leadership.Laura: Wait, that’s merch.Sarah: They’re not saying you don’t have a right to feel or talk or think about all these things you’ve bottled up. They’re just saying, let’s do this first before we take a vote. Let’s not take the committee vote from a place of bottled-up fear. They’re afraid, and before they can get it all out — if someone had nominated someone they liked, they would have accepted it. They didn’t like Ted Frampton. You get a Ted Frampton from a scarcity mindset. Those are the people that exploit scarcity. You have to let people process and get it out and be a little less afraid in order to really weigh their options.Laura: I think it’s so condescending to be like, you can have your feelings, but we’re really going to do what we want to do behind the scenes.Sarah: No, it’s not condescending. Feelings are relevant, but they are not always reality. Listen, you’re talking like somebody who’s never run for office, so I’m going to pull that card right now. I have run and served in office. And you get in a meeting where people are just spilling their stuff all over the table and you’re like, what is the point of this? And I’m supposed to empower these people to make decisions right now when all they really want to do is just be mad? It’s just acknowledging how humans are. It’s inevitable that they go from kumbaya to let’s eat the young. You don’t want to empower people in those moments. You want to use a process to direct them to a more reasonable state of mind. It’s not that you’re going to cheat them out of their vote. The founding fathers spent a lot of time on this — let’s slow the process way down with checks and balances so that it’s not easy in these passionate moments to do a lot of dramatic things.Laura: It’s anti-populist.Sarah: Yeah, a little bit. And you know what? Fine with it. Sounds good to me. This particular moment in America’s history.Mother Abigail’s Final InstructionsLaura: But then before she does, Mother Abigail has some things to say. And in like the span of 12 hours, the power comes back on. The day after the committee meeting, Mother Abigail summons the committee to her bedside where they are shocked at how bad she looks.Sarah: How do you feel about the great, god-ordained character being so weakened?Laura: I think that’s great. How did Jesus die? Not in a blaze of glory. Surrounded by criminals on a cross. I think he’s really playing with these threads — Randall Flagg is all powerful and wants that power and exerts it over other people, whereas she has this power but sacrifices it because of her own pride, to empower others. They could not be in sharper contrast to each other.Sarah: But I think it’s crazy he never tells us more about her journey in the wilderness. We never got a glimpse of her on that journey. Like, it’s just a black box. She’s coming back and pooping sticks, and that’s all we know. Except that she knows the instructions.Laura: She did come back with some pretty hardcore instructions. Y’all are going west. One of you is not going to make it. There’s going to be a stand. I won’t be there because I’m dying.Sarah: This is the dun-dun-dun moment of the book when she says, it is there that you will make your stand. And then: with God’s help, you will stand. So this is where we get what the book is now coming to. I kind of like that she says it so explicitly. And I think the title is so strong. It’s not standoff. It’s not standdown. You know, it’s the stand. It’s really a strong, but a little ambiguous, title. What does that even mean before you read it?Laura: But here’s the thing — she’s telling them some things very explicitly, but then she’s leaving a lot open-ended. She tells them they have to go — and Franny, no likey this instruction. She is very upset to the point where Mother Abigail grabs her wrists and heals her of her hurt back and messed-up neck from the couch falling on her during the bombing. And she sees a vision of an empty nursery. But when Franny’s like, is the baby going to make it? Mother Abigail is like, rah, rah, rah. See you later. I’m dying now. So she doesn’t get the whole thing.Sarah: The mission Mother Abigail has spelled out is that the four men — Larry, Stu, Ralph, and Glenn — have to start walking west. They can’t take anything with them. No food, provisions, luggage, nothing — weapons, I don’t even think. They have to wear the clothes on their back and just start walking.Laura: But they did put on better shoes. And you know what? Kudos. Let Rita have not died for nothing. All I’m saying. Wear better shoes.Sarah: But we’ve talked completely through this whole book about how he is treating women in this story. We killed off Sue. Franny is a hysterical, hormonal woman. Nadine has very little agency — she’s basically just a vessel apparently for Randall Flagg’s devil. I defend a lot of what King does with women and I do not think King is anti-women at all, having read so much of his work. But in this story, it feels like he always just sort of wanted to ditch the women and get down to the men making this walk.Laura: Yeah, a little bit. I think so. The baby has to be a boy because she’s the Virgin Mary who’s not really a virgin, and the baby is Jesus. Except for — Franny being pregnant is the X factor here. I kind of respect Franny being like, this god sucks, I don’t want to follow this god. At least she tries to fight back. Then she gets healed.Sarah: No, it does feel a little bit like that to me. Like we just had to get down to these four guys and then they start walking. And Larry says, I feel like this is the end of everything. And I’m like, me too. What the hell are these four dudes going to do? Maybe with an assist by Judge Ferris and Tom Cullen, perhaps. Fingers crossed. How the hell are they going to take on Randall Flagg?Laura: I have concerns.Sarah: I have concerns. I also think it’s interesting that he’s picking up the walking again. As someone who just drove three hours from Utah to Vegas going 80 miles an hour — this is a hell of a journey they’re about to take from Boulder, Colorado to Las Vegas on their feet.Laura: He loves to walk. Larry took a walk. Stu took a walk. Stu’s walk was healing. Larry almost died. Trashcan Man was walking. Flagg is called the walking dude. There’s always walking. There’s power in walking.Sarah: I’m just saying this is a long walk with no food and no water and just better shoes. This is my beef with Hadestown at the end. I’m like, this is just men on their bullshit. Follow the directions. It’s not that hard.Laura: Well, we should end with Larry’s quote.Sarah: I feel like this is the end of everything.Laura: I hope not, because our sign-off is “see you on the other side.” So I hope there’s another side.Sarah: There’s another book — a whole other book left.Next Up: Book Three begins! In the meantime, Sarah and Laura are also discussing the film Contagion — watch it, binge it, rent it before the next episode so you’re ready for the conversation. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slowread.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to SLOW READ, where we tackle the books you’ve always wanted to read at a pace you can handle.Hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Laura TremaineWe are currently reading The Stand by Stephen King (unabridged version)You can find our full Reading Schedule hereJoin the SLOW READ community on Substack for bonus episodes, book club meetings, and Side Quests with Sarah & LauraIf you prefer to read instead of listen, below is a cleaned up transcript of the episode 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:* The Stand by Stephen King* Cujo by Stephen King* Kojak (CBS, 1973–1978, starring Telly Savalas)* The Message (Bible in contemporary language)* Erin Hicks Moon’s Substack* Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey (the 90s movie with the two dogs and the cat)Welcome to Slow Read: The Stand. We are your hosts Sarah Stewart Holland and Laura Tremaine.This is episode [N] of Slow Read: The Stand.If you prefer to read instead of listen, below is a cleaned up transcript of the episode 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:* The Stand by Stephen King* Cujo by Stephen King* Kojak (CBS, 1973–1978, starring Telly Savalas)* The Message (Bible in contemporary language)* Erin Hicks Moon’s Substack* Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey (the 90s movie with the two dogs and the cat)Chapter 52 - Mother Abagail’s CrisisSarah: We are now deep into Stephen King’s The Stand.Laura: Deep.Sarah: Deep. And this week we’re talking about chapters 52 through 55 and all the ridiculous things it contains. Do you like what I did there with “ridiculous things”?Laura: Oh yes. God. Killing it. Laura: All right — we are now in the heat of August and the chessboard is being set. We spent all our time in this section in the Free Zone, where society is forming, spies are aligning and alighting on their missions. We are burying bodies, having elections, thinking about law enforcement. But first, we start in Chapter 52, where our Free Zone fearless leader is actually a not-so-fearless leader. We start with Mother Abagail, who seems to be having a bit of a spiritual crisis. What did you think of this section as a whole? Because I was reading it thinking — is this a horror book? Is this a literary book? What are we doing?Sarah: I got a little bored when I was writing up the summary and kind of getting ready for this episode. A lot of things happened that I thought were interesting as I was reviewing it. But while reading it, I kept putting it off. I think I was just a little — I’m ready for something to happen. And I’m also terrified one of these people I like is going to get killed. So I’m both ready for something to happen and dreading it.Laura: Well, what was interesting is that we are deep into this book. This is the final third, maybe even the final quarter. And this felt like a lot of world-building. We are world-building 800 pages in, which is interesting as a writer and a craft storyteller, but as a reader it definitely changes the pace. Also, because I’m reading every word of this book aloud, I stop and underline or make little notes when I get to interesting things I want to talk about. And this section, more than any section we have read thus far, I made the least amount of notes. Almost no notes or underlines until Chapter 55 — the last chapter we’re going to talk about today. And then I had several, all kind of coming from the same source, which is Judge Ferris. But in general, this hundred-page section — it was not a nothing burger because there are a lot of important things that sort of happen here, but nothing super notable or memorable to me.Sarah: Yeah. I would be interested in how much this got changed between the 70s version and the 90s version. It was too much logistics for me. Though I mean — this first section in Chapter 52 with Mother Abagail, where she’s really battling it out, I thought was incredible. I’m always struck by Stephen King’s knowledge of the Bible. I underlined: Acts was the last book in the Bible where doctrine was backed up by miracle. And I was like, wow, that sounds true. Did I double-check it? I didn’t. But it sounded true.Laura: So much religion. There’s always a lot of religion in this book. And it’s really humming in the background in this section, because what we get from this first moment is that she is struggling Sarah: — she feels like she’s battling pride, and she also learns that it was not God who saved her from the weasels. It was Randall Flagg who called the weasels off. I thought that was really scary. She kind of feels like God has gone silent, so she pieces out. And that changes the dynamics of so much within the Free Zone, because she’s not there as their guidance.Laura: Did this change the way you think about her?Sarah: No, because I felt like this was very true to who we knew she was — someone very centrally focused on her relationship with God, consistently hesitant, even afraid, of what she’s been called to do. The way she was battling with this, and seeing the way they kept leaning on her and leaning on her, which was building her pride and changing the way they were thinking about themselves — it rang really true to me. What about you?Laura: Well, it’s very Jesus-y to take to the wilderness and pray about it. I thought it did change things for me a little, because it can read as abandonment — of your post. Maybe not the initial day she leaves, but as the week to ten days goes on and she’s still gone. I mean, I guess you can also see it as a fulfillment of her role. She got everyone here. That was her main part in this history, and now she’s going to peace out. But as she’s wrangling with her pride and who really called off the weasels and going into that mind swirl — I didn’t totally believe her. Whereas in the past, every inner monologue we got from Mother Abagail, you believed her. You had a lot of trust in her discernment and her connection to God or the universe. In this section we’re meant to follow her mind swirl as she tries to get right with God, but because that has wavered, it made me waver in her. And not to jump ahead, but as time goes on and she’s still not there and they come to the conclusion of like, we’re running this society without her — I also felt sort of the same way.Sarah: Well, and I think that’s the point. They were becoming too dependent on her and it was affecting her. It is one thing to be locked in through a process of discernment when you’re by yourself. You know, it’s super easy to discern when my kids aren’t here. But once you have hundreds of thousands of people all looking at you like, what should we do? Should we bury the body? Should we form a law enforcement agency? Should we be in charge? Do you want to be our president and veto everything? I can see how that would disrupt the signal, if you will. The idea that this is about her and God — this is not about her being the leader of this community. So she has to go and get back to that. And the fallout is big within the community, but largely positive, I felt like.Sarah: I mean, from the moment this happens, you have so many people who want to go searching for her and save her, and they have to debate — should we go search for her? She left of her own accord, but she’s an old woman. And I think it was very interesting that in the face of all this debate, it became an opening for Harold to assert some leadership and build some goodwill with Stu and Ralph, and go look for her. Laura: Except that, for the democracy of it all, you’ve removed your main check and balance. If you take away the person who has the veto power — she’s not in charge of everything, but she had that — someone has abdicated the throne here.Sarah: No, that’s exactly it. You live in America in 2026. The temptation, when you have one person, to continue to consolidate power within that one person and make it easy on the rest of us who don’t have to go through the messy work of democracy — it’s oh so very tempting. The check is the people. The check is the other people on the committee — who are voting in concert right now, but that might not always be true.Sarah: What we’ve seen over the last several years, several decades in America, is it’s just so easy to organize around, to just be like, well, we’re really just dealing with the one person in charge.Laura: Our actual real-life America in 2026 moment in time is what has this top of mind for me — why it felt more prominent as a theme than maybe when I’ve read this in the past. I agree with what you’re saying theoretically, but I also feel like with Mother Abagail — she wasn’t trying to rule the whole thing, she was just a check, a balance, a veto power, because she does have a connection to the above. I mean, she wasn’t wanting it, but they wanted her to. And I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. I hear what you’re saying about the power belonging with the people, but they haven’t established enough of a hierarchy or structure to check one another.Sarah: We’re getting to the town meeting.Laura: I know, but what I’m just trying to underline is that it does change the way I think about her character. It does, for me.Harold, Franny, and the Return of KojakSarah: They do decide to go search for her. There is a search party — Stu, Ralph, Harold. Harold goes on a real journey over the course of this section, and it starts here when they’re out in the middle of nowhere and he brings a gun and thinks about just killing Stu and Ralph right there. He’s a little bit disarmed by Stu’s kindness, but he’s still giving in to the dark impulses. He’s thinking constantly about his ledger — which could be some sort of psychic connection, because at the very moment he’s thinking about it on the search party, Franny’s breaking into his house to see if she can find confirmation that he, in fact, read her journal. She breaks into his basement and goes up into his living room, at which point Nadine Cross knocks on the door.I just want to say — I hate scenes like this. I hate every moment in a horror movie where you’re sneaking around in the dark and you just know somebody. I’d rather just a chase scene. I’d rather a murder scene. I hate the tension of them.Laura: I think Harold just plain chickened out on shooting Stu. He’s still a literal teenager. He’s even though he has now physically changed — he’s fit, lost his acne, looking different — in his mind he’s still this scared, nerdy, pimply kid who cannot shoot someone in the woods. I think he just plain chickened out, which — good. We’re all the better for it. Franny breaking into his house — again, not totally sure how consistent this is with her character and what we know about preggos.Sarah: I was going to say, pregnant people are not looking to bring on a lot of risk. Though you could argue that hormonally it might make you do something crazy. But there is a lot of this — leaving an imprint in the store, with her shoe in the dust, because he gets home and realizes the door is open and sees the imprint. The way he was kind of trying to stalk her shoes at several points in the story — I was like, okay, we get it. I just think all of this, the thumbprint, the shoe print, is fitting together a little too neatly for me.Laura: Yeah, this is the part of the story that is the most sort of bookish. We talked about this on the last episode Sarah: — he would never write something like this now. He’s a much better writer. Laura: The finding the smudge in her diary, and then her piecing it all together. This just seems very far-fetched. You know, this is a side note, but I am finding it very fascinating how people chose the houses that they chose. Harold’s house is far out, on the edge of town, dark, wood-paneled, shades drawn, door locked. For some reason I don’t totally understand, Franny and Stu have chosen some kind of an apartment. Tom Cullen’s house — to jump to the end of the section — they describe as really zany. They’re choosing their places of dwelling, and it’s just kind of interesting.Sarah: Oh, it would be so fun to go into town and be like, where do I want to live? I can live anywhere.Laura: Right! Why would you choose the random condo? Sarah: Okay, the last section of this chapter is big. It is the Return of Kojak. Now, you tell me things reappear — I just want to confirm, this is not the Kojak from Kojak the novel. Laura: Are you talking about Cujo?Sarah: Oh, Cujo! I thought it was Kojak.Laura: No, Kojak is a dog name. I think that is a famous dog name. I think there was a 70s, 80s TV detective named Kojak.Sarah: I think that’s like a popular dog name at the time.Sarah: Well, Kojak is a crime drama TV show. Telly Savalas. It aired on CBS from 1973 to 1978 — so again, super relevant when the book came out, and in the 90s people were like, what? But now that Kojak has made his hero’s journey from being abandoned by Glenn Bateman up in New England, following him to Nebraska, getting attacked by wolves, hiding out and recovering under Mother Abagail’s porch, and making it all the way to Boulder — maybe I will name my next dog Kojak. Because damn, brother, what a journey.Laura: I know. If you’re a dog lover, this is kind of a heartbreaking part.Sarah: Well, it’s the 90s movie. What is it with the two dogs and the cat? (Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey!)I watched it with my kids. It actually holds up pretty well. I also skipped the part that we start here with Glenn Bateman, where he’s musing about the passage of the age of rationalism. At the end of all this rationalism is a mass grave. And he says now we’ve moved into dark magic. And this is my favorite part — when he’s talking about Randall Flagg, he says: Maybe he’s just the last magician of rational thought, gathering the tools of technology against us. And I wrote — sounds like Elon Musk, no?Laura: Yes, yes. Right? Little Jeff Bezos?Sarah: There’s also a bit of foreshadowing when we’re talking about Kojak — did you catch it?Laura: Yeah, he lives another sixteen years after Glenn Bateman.Sarah: Yep. Also — was this dog a puppy, or is this dog supernatural? That’s a long time for a dog to live.Chapter 53 - The Town MeetingSarah: Chapter 53, we’re to the town meeting. This was one of my favorite parts in this entire section.Laura: It doesn’t surprise me.Sarah: Not even just the meeting — this moment. Stu gets up here to start the meeting and the people cannot stop clapping. And Larry is watching all this. And he says: We’re applauding ourselves, Larry thought. We’re applauding the fact that we’re here alive together. Maybe we’re saying hello to the group of selfie-in. That’s so good. I loved it so much.Laura: I thought that was really emotional. It reminded me of in Los Angeles the week of 9/11 — there was a thing at the Hollywood Bowl, which is the big outdoor amphitheater, and they played the national anthem, patriotic songs. This was the Friday after 9/11. And it was very much like what’s being described here, where people just stood and cheered and clapped and cried. I mean, so magnify that situation with what this would be — so much even more so. But if you’ve ever been to a church service where something like this is sort of happening, where there is this collective noise-making that’s really emotional and bonding at the same time.Sarah: Well, and they do all those things — they adopt the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, Franny leads them in singing the national anthem. But then, because this is Stephen King — we get Larry being like, yeah, but America’s gone. America was gone. We can do all this all we want. But America was gone. I thought that was very intense.Laura: Isn’t it interesting what Larry’s doing in this section? First of all, we’re so invested in Larry in the first half of the book. We know so much of his backstory. We’re following him on the journey from New York to Boulder. Larry is a big part of The Stand. And now his relationship to the story and to the reader, I feel like has shifted a little. In the beginning where we’re getting to know Larry and he’s like a budding celebrity and he’s not a nice guy — we’re reading him kind of like a character. Well, now suddenly he seems as relatable as anyone else. He’s almost a stand-in for the reader in some ways. He’s having some skepticism. He’s observing the ad hoc committee. And we’re sort of seeing that observance for us — like every other section when you’re in it with Stu and Ralph and Glenn, you’re in it with them. And Larry is a little bit on the outside of the circle looking in.Sarah: I like his growth. I like that you hear his internal debate. Because he’s even right up until the official vote like, oh my God, should I really be on this committee? I can just say I don’t want to do it. But Harold doesn’t give him a chance, because Harold raises up and nominates them as a block — Stu, Fran, Nick, Glenn, Ralph, Larry, and Susan — to become permanent Free Zone committee members. This wound that he nurses, the same committee he was excluded from. And Stu sort of recognizes what a power move this is — to shut down any sort of debate and be the one whose great idea it is to put them all on the permanent committee. And it passes.Laura: Do you feel like this is how this would really go down?Sarah: No. People love to debate. They’re so excited to be voting again — you think they’re just going to be like, okay? I mean, maybe, because he does say they spent hours and hours on Mother Abagail’s sudden disappearance. So maybe they were so concerned with her that they’d just speed past this part. That makes a little sense to me. And then they get this great moment with Judge Ferris, where they discuss her leaving and the Bible verses she wrote on the back of her note. Here, I thought this would be helpful — Erin Hicks Moon, who I know you know as well, has really converted me to the Message, which is the Bible in contemporary language. [LINK] So I looked up these two verses in contemporary language. The first, Proverbs 11:1-3: Without good direction, people lose their way. God hates cheating in the marketplace. He loves it when business is above board. The stuck-up fall flat on their faces, but down-to-earth people stand firm. The integrity of the honest keeps them on track. The deviousness of crooks brings them to ruin. And then Proverbs 21:28-31: A lying witness is unconvincing. A person who speaks truth is respected. Unscrupulous people fake it a lot. Honest people are sure of their steps. Nothing clever, nothing conceived, nothing contrived can get the better of God. Do your best. Prepare for the worst. Then trust God to bring victory.Laura: That is some relevant language to what we’re facing here in the Free Zone. That’s much better than the old King James language he was using. I’ve got you, Mother Abagail. I’ve got what you’re laying down. I liked the chess-move piece of Harold just nominating the slate and having it go through — he gets to look like the hero even though he’s not even on the slate. My whole hesitation with this section, though, including that scene, is that Harold is a teenager.Sarah: Right. Like, you buy Judge Ferris leading them through the scripture discussion. You buy that they would applaud Stu. But Harold — listen, we know Larry followed Harold’s son, but he was probably not the only one. Especially since they left signs in Nebraska where everybody was being drawn to Mother Abagail first. So maybe there’s this idea of people knowing him. Yeah, he’s a teenager, but he has this reputation or perception of a little bit more than that. Laura: And maybe it’s because you and I both have teenage boys in our home and I’m just trying to imagine them leading a group of 800. Sarah: My oldest — he could lead people now. He’s got whatever it takes to speak and have people follow. He’s got a little bit of his father’s competency that people just inherently trust, even at 16. So I buy it a little bit.Sarah: So we go through the meeting, we go outside, Franny and Harold and Stu are talking, he’s staring at her feet again — I’m like, you’re wearing me down with this. Then after the meeting, Larry’s walking back with Lucy. They’re holding hands. Nadine — a lot of words are used to tell us that she doesn’t have any underwear or anything else on underneath her clothes. We have to visit that several times just in case y’all missed it. Nadine’s not wearing any panties. Okay. So she steps out of the shadows, scares both of them, Lucy is like, son of a bitch — I loved Lucy in this scene. She was like, oh, I knew it, fine, and she just runs into the house. He’s left alone with Nadine, who basically breaks down and is like, let’s do this. And you feel this desperation. She says some language like, this is my last chance. He’s kind of caught off guard. He’s freaked out. But, amazingly, says absolutely no. I’m going back in to Lucy. Which I think means our little boy’s growing up.Laura: Well, that didn’t surprise me, actually — that he turns her down. I think we’ve seen this in Larry. He makes the right choice here. He’s been wanting to make the right choice all along. He knows he misstepped with Rita, or he feels like he did. He is in redemption mode. What I was more surprised by is this is where we see Nadine, who has lived her whole adulthood waiting on this dark man to take her virginity. She isn’t totally clear what she’s waiting on until recently — but now she’s pretty clear what it is. She has been holding out, and now she has suddenly decided to throw that away. She is risking her whole twisted view of salvation. She has wavered on the dark man. We’re going to see this from both her and Harold. I feel like you just can’t be that clear on what’s coming unless you’re completely disconnected from reality like Trashcan Man. You can’t be that clear on how scary he is and what this means and not have a moment of wavering.Laura: That’s getting to what I think this whole book is about in some ways. The wavering is natural. But Larry turning her down — which she thought was a sure thing, let’s be clear, she’d completely made this decision to give it all up to Larry — which screws her up. Him turning it down, on his own trajectory and for his own reasons, gets to the heart of what I actually think The Stand is about, which is fate, destiny. You can’t escape your path in some ways. Even if you try to change your mind and redirect and pivot — the world doesn’t let her. Larry doesn’t let her.Sarah: But that’s such a paradoxical situation to illustrate, because it does feel like Larry is choosing a different fate. It would have been easy for him to follow who he had been and just go, okay, cool. Especially — can I just say — after he describes Lucy as having a movie magazine mind. Fucking ouch, man.Laura: I know, right? Sarah: That is such an insult. I think that that goes Laura: — that’s not fate, that’s personality or something. Fate is the choices that you make. Sarah: But that’s what I mean. He didn’t choose the way he used to choose. He’s stepping up and setting a new course for himself. At the same time, Harold and Nadine seem powerless too.Laura: Well, their powerlessness and power goes in and out. All of them, by the way, goes in and out of wavering, staying on their path, trying to pivot and being sort of unable to. Sarah: And it’s really brilliant of Stephen King because — since you’re in LA, I know you’ll love this example — it’s how I feel about Warner Brothers, Paramount, Netflix. I don’t want anybody to head in. You know what I’m saying? Because you’re like, oh, don’t do it, Larry. But you’re like, no, kind of do it, Larry, because then she won’t be a virgin for the dark man. And maybe then — you want what’s best, but there’s no great outcome here.Laura: Right. But I think that is, again, the root of the story — how other people play a part in your fate or don’t. Other people’s decisions, other people on their own path. If you’re asking yourself an existential question of, can I be derailed from my path? Can I sabotage myself? I mean, we all have stories where maybe yes, but then you’re like, I don’t know — maybe that was the plan all along. You didn’t really sabotage yourself. That was the path.Sarah: It does feel like this is not playing out equally on the good and the bad. It does feel like it’s much, much harder for Harold and Nadine to pull themselves out than it is for Stu and Larry and all these people to stay on their path.Nadine’s Ouija BoardLaura: Well, that’s why I think in this section, the character — I read this aloud, so it’s very hard to know how to pronounce his last name, but the character of Charlie Impening, or whatever his name is, who defects in the night. He tries to sort of challenge the slate or whatever. He’s kind of just a little bit of a disruptor or a contrarian. When it doesn’t work in the community meeting, everything’s moving along, clipping along at its path — Charlie defects. He leaves in the night. He doesn’t cause a big drama about it. He’s just like, yeah, I’m not on this path. He goes, ostensibly, toward Vegas. And there’s this one throwaway line — they’re like, we don’t know how many other people have also come to that same conclusion. Maybe they’re in the middle. They’re not instantly drawn to Vegas. They aren’t instantly attracted to the dark man and his dreams.Sarah: They’re independent voters, Laura. They’re swing voters.Laura: They have changed their direction.Sarah: Well, I don’t think it’s a throwaway. But first we have to tackle Nadine’s Ouija board flashback. Oh my gosh. So intense. So the planchette — which I didn’t know was the name for the pointer in the Ouija board — she grabs one and goes out to this amphitheater alone. And you’re like, what the hell are you about to do? But she has this memory from her college days where she walks in on some girls using a Ouija board, puts her hands on it, and it spells out this incredibly terrifying message about how she’s going to be the queen in the house of the dead. All these other girls are like, what the hell? And you understand that she is there to accept messages from Randall Flagg. And wouldn’t you know — right after that she goes and moves in with Harold.Laura: My daughter, who’s a teenage girl, was at a sleepover. Her group of friends went through a phase where they played with a Ouija board, and I was like, absolutely no. I didn’t let her do it. I made her come home. We don’t do that. I do not F with dark magic. I do not.Sarah: You don’t.Laura: I do not. Sarah: Do you do tarot cards?Laura: Nope. I mean, I have. I actually should say — years ago I did a tarot reading, and I’m not anti-tarot necessarily. I’d say I’m neutral on tarot. Ouija boards, I won’t do it.Laura: My daughter’s name is Lucy. I was like, you got to come home. And she knew it. She didn’t even beg. And then they went through this phase, maybe a couple of months, where this was happening at the sleepovers, and my daughter was like, I can’t. Sarah: I have never played with a Ouija board. I have had a tarot reading that was incredibly cool — for a listener who’s a Wiccan and who does tarot readings. I thought it was really cool.Sarah: Have you ever been to New Orleans? New Orleans is full of dark magic.Laura: Yes. And what’s weird is I like New Orleans a lot. I really love it there. I believe it. I don’t hate it. I just don’t tempt it. I don’t play around with it.Sarah: You take it seriously.Laura: And I actually don’t want those messages. So I avoid them for myself, but I also don’t want my teenage daughter messing with them either. Maybe because I have a respect for it or whatever.Sarah: I found this scene really creepy. But it was interesting — again, there’s so much of Nadine that I think is conflicting. The fact that she’s supposed to be queen of the dead this whole time, and she’s picking up random children along the journey and taking care of them, but then once they don’t need her anymore, then she’s got to go move in with Harold. It’s just — it’s so gross.Chapter 54 - The Committee Meeting, Burial Committee, and Harold’s New PathSarah: The morning after this exhausting town meeting, they hold a private secret session where Glenn posits a very controversial idea — at least to Franny — which is that Stu needs to be the sheriff and that basically they need to start detaining people who could be leaving and trying to flee to Vegas and sharing intel. As these people consider themselves founding fathers and mothers of the Free Zone, it reminded me very much of Benjamin Franklin’s quote: Those that will sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither security nor liberty. But they are struggling with this. He says, you know, if we have law enforcement without a court system, that isn’t justice. So they know what they’re talking about. But I think because they’ve already broken the seal — as it was with sending the spies on perhaps a suicide mission — they’re getting more and more comfortable with decisions that involve some really unfortunate trade-offs.Laura: I just think it is so human nature to want to jail people. To contain people, to silence them, to cage them. I’m not saying it’s not justified in some cases — if you had someone who was perpetrating harm upon one another, sure. But their excuse for jailing the Charlie Impenings who were sneaking away — I was like, I don’t know. Are we even there yet? You guys don’t have electricity or water and we’re going to jail people first? It just felt so human nature to me.Sarah: A couple things. One — I think setting the stage here, as we know, two of these sleeper cells are now sleeping together with Harold and Nadine. And you’re like, oh crap. So there could be a place where Harold and Nadine are ready to go off and join the dark man, and the Free Zone people are like, not so fast. We don’t let people leave now. It’s smart knowing what we know, that they do have these sleeper cells in this city. But I think he’s doing a lot here — because the other interesting contrast is you have this group of people in a house making these calls, while some people are just doing the hard, dirty, manual work of burying people. That’s what society is actually built on — people who are ready to just do the work, not create scenarios in which they protect everybody from something hard. They’re actually doing the hard thing. And I thought that was a really smart contrast.And Harold, who was excluded from this committee, is the one out there with the burial committee doing the hard work. Laura: Do you mean Hawk?Sarah: Hawk! Where he gains this new nickname. And he likes the nickname. And again, you see these glimmers of redemption — like, I could just turn away. I could lean in. These people like me. They’re not making fun of me. They need me. Laura: Because you know what will transform a heart? Belonging. And that is what he’s starting to feel — belonging, value. He has a nickname, people are clapping him on the back. He felt like his town meeting chess move was strategic, which it actually was, but he was maybe surprised by people thinking so highly of him. He’s never had that in his whole life. And it is putting him in conflict.Sarah: You know what else will transform a heart? Laura: Sex. Sarah: Apparently a really, really good blowjob, some anal sex thrown in for fun, some kinky play with honey — this is all that Nadine offers, along with the oh but we can’t do the real thing. Who cares, just a little. This is my favorite. And she’s like, it’s just a small thing, what’s the big deal? And he was like, how would you know, you’re a virgin? And she says: I know because sex is life and small, and life is tiresome — time spent in a variety of waiting rooms. You might have your little glories here, Harold, but to what end? On the whole, it will be humdrum, slipping down life, and you’ll always remember me with my shirt off and you’ll always wonder what I would have looked like with everything off.Sarah: What a bleak, nihilistic view of life. Time spent in a waiting room. That is not my experience. I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church. It is an important couple inches, man. It makes all the difference. It’s all pretty empty if you can’t do the real thing. Just saying.Laura: He does seem after — not the main thing, but after they spend a few nights playing around with what they are able to do — he seems conflicted by it. Like he likes it in the moment and then he feels gross about it. Yeah, because this chapter ends with him succumbing to his destiny. I wrote “boo” across the bottom of the page. But in Chapter 55, he wakes up and he’s kind of like — and you’re like, yeah. But again, he wrote this before True Love Waits, but I want to be like, whoever wrote this has lived through True Love Waits. And even Nadine, where she’s like, how pure am I going to be if you’re letting Harold do everything six ways to Sunday for me but this? Laura: She also really does want it, but she can’t. And there is a resistance. She is having to exert a self-control.Sarah: Nadine definitely — over the course of this section, at one point she looks up and feels like she sees Randall Flagg’s face in the window. And Larry Underwood hears boot clicking as she’s walking away after she’s sort of offered herself to him. Laura: That is just straight leave room for the Holy Spirit kind of language. Sarah: And he shows up in the amphitheater and controls the Ouija board with her. Her presence is clearly, to me, the number one antenna — the strongest signal that is connected to the dark man. Well, I don’t know. I say that, but we’re about to get to the hypnosis of Tom Cullen, so maybe I’ve spoken a little too soon.Tom Cullen’s Prophecy and Judge FerrisSarah: Before we get to Tom, in Chapter 55 we sit down with Judge Ferris as he’s about to leave on his adventure. Man, I love him so much.Laura: Me too. He’s literally one of my favorite characters. Sarah: He says: I wonder if we need to reinvent the whole tiresome business of gods and saviors and ever afters before we reinvent the flushing toilet. It’s so good. He knows what Larry’s going to ask before he asks it. He was like, yep, I’m ready. Let’s do this. What a cool guy. This book makes me really think about how not strategic I am in my life. Like everyone’s figured out — oh, so we’re going to have to send spies, right? Laura: That would not have occurred to me. I wouldn’t even be in Boulder. We wouldn’t have to make the call.Laura: I’ve been thinking about that too. I don’t know if I would have gotten to the spies as quickly as they did. But I do, especially as I’ve gotten older, have more of a security mindset. Thinking about where’s the weak point here. Though if I were in the Free Zone, I would only be obsessed about how that baby’s going to get out of Franny.Sarah: See, I wouldn’t think about that. I’d be like, babies come out all the time. They have for thousands of years. It’ll be okay. Laura: But I am thinking so much more about — it’s really bothering me that we’re now approaching a thousand people in the Free Zone, maybe even tipped over a thousand, and they’re trying to tell me there’s not a single doctor there. Sarah: You guys got a doctor in there somewhere. Come on. All you got is a vet? No. Well, here’s what they should have done. They should have maybe asked Tom while he was under hypnosis, because he was full of information. He channeled something other. When they said that line — the voice of the man forever denied — I was like, ooh, Steven, that’s really, really good. They put him under hypnosis using a phrase from previous sessions that drops him into this form. And he’s the Other Tom. He has incredible psychic clarity. He knows that the dark man’s true name is Legion, calls him Legion, King of Nowhere. He’s terrified of him. Confirms that Mother Abagail is still alive, but that she’s not right with God and that she will die on the wrong side of the river. Which is exactly the moment when Ralph is like, I don’t want to hear anymore.Sarah: But he says, I am God’s Tom. And he also says that Randall Flagg, Legion, is afraid of them. He’s afraid of us. He’s afraid of inside. What the hell does that mean?Laura: I wondered — and I’m going to try to say this sensitively — of those among us whose brain works differently, like Tom’s, is closer to God in some way. It’s giving telepathy tapes. Not only these other senses — because we already got from Tom that he was closer to God in some ways — but this is like a sixth sense, seventh sense, eighth sense of something.Sarah: I don’t know, but I would have spent all day there with him. They cut it off pretty quick. I’m like, dude, ask him some more questions. Just ask him what happens. I’m very stressed about this. Laura: I’m back with Franny in the original conversation around this — I am mad that they are sending Tom West. Sarah: I like Nick enough, I’m willing to trust his instincts here. And someone like Stu mentions this perception that people with different mental abilities have a connection. I think you see this a lot in folk art — there are a lot of really famous, prolific folk artists of differing mental abilities and capacities. And I believe in consciousness and shared consciousness to a certain extent. So it doesn’t surprise me at all that somebody who perceives the world so differently would have a different channel of consciousness.So overall, I really like this scene. It is hard to hear them instruct him to kill someone if he comes along a single person. That is — giving him all these instructions to send him out on this really, really dangerous mission. Laura: What gave me a little bit of a squidge is when he becomes God’s Tom and he’s speaking with a totally different voice, speaking completely articulately. Then it almost becomes like possession. Sarah: They have that moment where they’re like, are you the Tom we know? Almost like — you have to tell us if you’re Randall Flagg just taking over his body right now. You got to tell us.Sarah: That didn’t seem to be what it was to me. It did seem like he was tapping something. He just has access to a different radio channel. I think Stephen King’s overall argument with the dreams is that when something changes your life and your ability to move about in the status quo dramatically, all of us — through trauma or whatever you want to call it — can suddenly tap something different and deeper. That’s why our subconscious, through the act of dreaming, is calling up these images and connecting to Mother Abagail and having dreams about the dark man. If you’re someone like Tom Cullen, who lives in a perpetual, much altered state with regards to your perception of reality, of course he has a different capacity to tap into this subconscious other realm.Laura: I like what he’s positing here. I think it’s really interesting. And I also think collective consciousness — which is a lot of what this story is exploring with the dreams and Tom and even Nadine — the collective consciousness that is available to us, that seems to only come out under a world-shattering event. This was something talked about a lot in the 70s, and I feel like it fell out of favor. But now, maybe just my algorithm, as world events are really tenuous right now in 2026 — my algorithm is serving up a lot of collective consciousness content. It is kind of a conversation people are having again.Sarah: Well, even though I found this section tedious in parts, when I went back through it and definitely through the course of our conversation — Stephen King is doing some really interesting work here. Some of the questions he’s posing are fascinating and the pieces he’s laying in place — I can’t say I loved every page of putting them in their place, but I’m excited to see what comes next. It’s about to get real is my intuition right now.Laura: I agree. This might not have been the most enjoyable reading section, but some really important things are building and happened. We’re really building on the layers of these characters that we’re getting to know now in a completely different way, now that they’re at the Free Zone and they’re not in immediate trauma traveling. It’s just been a shift.Sarah: Well, and the best part of all these interesting questions is that we get to talk about them together in two days — Wednesday, April 22nd at 6 p.m. Pacific, 9 p.m. Eastern. We’re going to have our book club meeting. The other ones have been so fun. We have so many interesting things to discuss, particularly after this section. We hope that you will subscribe at slowread.substack.com and join us on Wednesday night for our April book club meeting. No spoilers — we’ll be talking at this meeting through this section, into Chapter 55. Come with your opinions, your thoughts, bring us your Ouija board stories.Laura: Yes! And until then — see you on the other side.Sarah: See you on the other side.Next Up: Book club meeting on Wednesday, April 22nd at 6 p.m. Pacific / 9 p.m. Eastern — covering through Chapter 55. Subscribe at slowread.substack.com to join! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slowread.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to SLOW READ, where we tackle the books you’ve always wanted to read at a pace you can handle.Hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Laura TremaineWe are currently reading The Stand by Stephen King (unabridged version)You can find our full Reading Schedule hereJoin the SLOW READ community on Substack for bonus episodes, book club meetings, and Side Quests with Sarah & Laura_____Mentioned in this episode:Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams Set This House on Fire by William StyronIn His Steps  by Charles Monroe Sheldon This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slowread.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to SLOW READ, where we tackle the books you’ve always wanted to read at a pace you can handle.Hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Laura TremaineWe are currently reading The Stand by Stephen King (unabridged version)You can find our full Reading Schedule hereJoin our SLOW READ community on Substack for bonus episodes, book club meetings, and Side Quests with Sarah & Laura_____ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slowread.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to SLOW READ, where we tackle the books you’ve always wanted to read at a pace you can handle.Hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Laura TremaineWe are currently reading The Stand by Stephen King (unabridged version)You can find our full Reading Schedule hereJoin the SLOW READ community on Substack for bonus episodes, book club meetings, and Side Quests with Sarah & Laura___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:The Shack by William P. YoungTwo Old Women: An Alaska Legend of Betrayal, Courage and Survival by Velma WallisThe Correspondent by Virginia Evans___Sarah: I might cry recording this chapter.Laura: Why?Sarah: Because I loved it so much. I cried reading it. I just loved it.Laura: Well, this is why we dedicated a whole episode to just this chapter.Sarah: That was very wise of us. And by us, I mean you.Seminal Moments and 500 Pages of Lead-upSarah: We separated this chapter out because it is such a seminal moment in The Stand. Oh, my gosh. I love her. Do you?Laura: Yes. She is like a literary icon.Sarah: I am obsessed. I loved every word of this chapter—okay, that’s not true, there were a couple words I didn’t love—but she feels so real. I struggle to say “character” because I just want to say “woman.”Laura: This is the first time in the book where we finally get to know more about her. She’s kind of only showed up in dreams so far. Finally, we’re seeing that the pandemic isn’t the villain, really. Campion isn’t the villain. We’re starting to get what people mean when they say The Stand is a story about the battle of good and evil.Sarah: Let’s start where the chapter starts: Mother Abagail at her house in Nebraska, playing her guitar on the porch. We’re starting to find out her theology. On the first page, she says, “God brought down a harsh judgment on the human race.” What’s so striking is that she has such acceptance and calm about what has happened.Laura: And you found it peaceful as opposed to detached?Sarah: English doesn’t even have the right words for this, because “detachment” has a negative connotation. But it is an acceptance of what you can control and what you cannot. I thought that was just emanating from her.108 Years of PerspectiveLaura: In this round of reading, I did notice a complete lack of grief. She realizes everybody is dead—her grandkids were checking on her, but she hadn’t seen them since February.Sarah: Listen, in my mid-40s, sometimes I don’t have energy for big emotions. When I’m 108? My grandmother is about to turn 90, and I grew up with a bevy of great-grandparents. I have spent time with 100-year-olds, and this rang completely accurate to me. When you get to the point where death would be a relief, it changes everything.Laura: I did think there was a lot of attention paid to her bodily functions. We really talk about her going to the bathroom, her prunes...Sarah: Because you’re so grounded in your body! Think about how visceral labor is, or when you have a cold. It occupies so much of your capacity. By the time you’re 108, are you kidding me? It takes so much of your time just to move your body and manage it.Laura: It makes her very human, whereas Randall Flagg is jumping around in time. We’re not out here talking about Randall Flagg having to go to the bathroom. It makes them unequal.The “Magical Negro” and the Nebraska GrangeLaura: Did you have thoughts about her portrayal of being an old Black woman? There’s the “magical Negro” idea that comes up in any deep dive into King’s work.Sarah: It felt like she’s magical because of her faith and her age, and not her race. Her race was a part of her, but not the “magical component” of her identity to me. Her dad was a pioneer—the first farmer allowed into the Nebraska Grange, which I had to look up.Laura: I looked it up too! It was like a social union that worked to get legislation in favor of farmers.Sarah: Right. So she came from hardy, pioneering leadership roots. My only quibbles: one, the “sexy” talk. I’ve kicked it with centenarians, and I’m not sure that’s language they would have used. Secondly, she would not have been a Republican. Hell no.Laura: That is an interesting choice. I don’t know if that was a way to bridge some divide he was making.Sarah: No Black person—okay, not zero, but the Black populace of America was widely devoted to FDR. The idea that she would have thought he was a communist? Dude, you did not do your history research here. Farmers loved FDR too. Her party identification was completely unnecessary.The Weasels and the EyeSarah: I have to mention the scene where she walks to the neighbor’s and the pack of weasels show up. I don’t like that part. Did you think it was literal?Laura: King does this in several stories—your biggest fears come to you. She was bitten by a weasel as a child, so they showed up in a pack. What I liked was her inner dialogue. She thinks, “I’m gonna have to give them this chicken,” but then she just tries the power of her word. She cries, “Get out!” and they draw back.Sarah: But in that moment where she’s in communication with a higher power, she’s also opened up to Randall Flagg. She sees him as this big red eye watching her.Reluctant Leaders and the “Best Year”Sarah: Then the guests arrive. I thought it would be Nick, but it’s Ralph, and a little girl, and Olivia and June. I said, “Who are these ladies?” I’m a little gun-shy because of old Julie Lawry.Laura: I love that we meet Ralph Brentner. He’s the only one who has decided cars are the way to be! I’ve been waiting for this. He’s driving a tow truck with a good CB radio.Laura: And we see Nick wrestling with why he is the leader. Everyone else can speak; he requires an interpreter.Sarah: But you want a reluctant leader! Reluctance is like giving George Washington. You don’t want someone who’s itching to be in charge. Both Mother Abagail and Nick are reluctant because they know the cost. She says, “We’re not all going to make it.”Laura: She says the Dark Man is the purest evil, but he ain’t Satan. He too answers to God.Sarah: I just love her honesty. She says her only answer to “Why?” is “Where were you when I made the world?” I’m crying again. I love that she’s not Randall Flagg; she doesn’t have a concrete understanding. She just has faith.Foreshadowing and affirmationsLaura: I also hitched on the conversation about sex. She looks at the young girls and their birth control pills and says they’ll never know the thrill of not knowing if you created life.Sarah: I think she’s sending out flares about what life is like on the other side of this as you’re rebuilding without modern conveniences. My favorite line—and I can’t believe a 27-year-old dude wrote this—is:“A warm night like this... it made her remember her girlhood again. With all its strange fits and starts, its heat, its gorgeous vulnerability as it stood on the edge of the mystery. Oh, she had been a girl.”Laura: My favorite is her affirmation: “I’m Abagail Fremantle Trotz. I play well and I sing well. I do not know these things because anyone told me.” I love her so much.Sarah: Next week, we are discussing Chapters 46 through 48. The second half is action-packed.Laura: We’re going to go talk about the “best years of our lives” in the side quest. We’ll see you on the other side.Sarah: See you on the other side. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slowread.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to SLOW READ, where we tackle the books you’ve always wanted to read at a pace you can handle.Hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Laura TremaineWe are currently reading The Stand by Stephen King (unabridged version)You can find our full Reading Schedule hereJoin the SLOW READ community on Substack for bonus episodes, book club meetings, and Side Quests with Sarah & LauraIf 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!___Sarah: We are currently reading Stephen King’s The Stand. Today, we’re diving into Chapters 43 and 44. Society has fully collapsed, new groups are forming, and it’s time to answer the age-old question: What is more dangerous—a tornado or a woman scorned?Laura: I really relished the tornado scene because it happened in Oklahoma—my home state! My tiny little hometown, Ardmore, actually gets a mention when King is rattling off empty towns. Though, to be fair, he says it burned to the ground.Sarah: Before we get to the weather, a quick reminder: our third book club meeting is next week, March 18th. We are at the halfway point! If you want the full experience—the Zooms, my Spotify playlist of every song mentioned in the book, and our rewatch of the 1994 film Outbreak.Chapter 43: Nick, Tom, and the Oklahoma SkySarah: We start with Nick Andros meeting Tom Cullen on the Oklahoma-Kansas border. We think we’re encountering a dead body, but it’s just a very, very drunk Tom passed out in the road.Laura: I wonder how King decides whose backstory you get. With Lucy Swan, he says her pandemic story is like everybody else’s—awful. But we meet Tom right when Nick does. King has said in On Writing that he’s often meeting the characters as we are.Sarah: There’s an urgency now. I underlined this: “Dreams were only dreams, but he did feel an inner urge to hurry... a subconscious command.” Everyone is feeling it. They’re dreaming of Mother Abagail in Nebraska or the Dark Man in the corn.Sarah: I’m struck by how quickly society regresses to a total fear of infection. You cannot have an accident. There’s no one to save you. It’s a vulnerability we don’t usually deal with.Laura: How did you feel about Tom Cullen? In 2026, the repeated use of the “R-word” is shocking and offensive. Nick uses it clinically, but when Julie Lawry says it, Nick slaps her across the face. So much slapping in the 70s!Sarah: Nick has a sixth sense about people; he understands he should look out for Tom. But then King puts them in the pitch black with corpses in a storm shelter!Laura: As an Oklahoman who has lived through tornadoes, they don’t just drop out of the sky like that. But I loved the line about the animal instinct of sensing a radical drop in air pressure.Sarah: They both feel the presence of the Dark Man in that shelter. I think he shows up where there is the most fear. It’s like the monsters in It or a Boggart in Harry Potter—he manifests as your dread.Laura: Then they meet Julie Lawry. She has a “hard, mirthless shine.” She asks Nick for sex almost immediately. I don’t know if it’s because I’m a 40-something mom, but I’m not just going to be on a CVS floor with a stranger! But I buy it more because she was the pursuer. She’s scary—I envision Sydney Sweeney in The White Lotus.Chapter 44: Larry, Nadine, and “The Before”Sarah: We start with Larry. He’s sun-poisoned and dehydrated. In the last section, Stu talked about walking as healing, but for Larry, walking is depleting. He’s having an identity crisis. He lost Rita, and his inner monologue is a constant refrain: “I ain’t no nice guy.”Sarah: He encounters Nadine Cross and Joe. I do not like Joe. I know he’s a child, but he’s creepy. King keeps calling him “Chinese-eyed” and talking about his skin—it hit me as a little weird.Laura: I was picturing him as Mowgli—skinny and in his underwear—but Mowgli is sweet. Joe is feral. He has a butcher knife as a comfort item.Sarah: Larry wakes up and sees their footprints in the dewy grass. King goes out of his way to say Larry isn’t a detective; anyone could see them! But Larry’s senses are heightened because there’s no TV or cell phones. He’s moving away from grief and toward survival.Sarah: I was worried Larry would be drawn to the dark side. When Mother Abagail shows up in his dream and he listens to her, I was so happy! Nadine, on the other hand, screams at Mother Abagail in the dream.Laura: I desperately need to know your thoughts on Nadine. She’s a 37-year-old virgin. I pictured her like a pretty black-haired princess, like Vanessa in The Little Mermaid.Sarah: I was picturing her way more hippie! What interested me was how they keep talking about “before.” It reminds me of when my child was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. You have those hard breaks where you don’t even remember what life was like before.Laura: Larry doesn’t even tell them he was famous! He doesn’t even play “Can You Dig Your Man?” around the campfire. It’s very equalizing.Sarah: Mother Abagail tells them to come to Nebraska so they can get to Colorado. The Rockies are a natural barrier. But Larry gives in to Nadine and they go to Stovington first, where they see Franny and Stu’s message. Everyone is dead. We’re going to Nebraska, and Nadine faints.The Blue and Lonely Section of HellSarah: I have an addendum. I liked King’s use of the word pissant. I just read Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, which defines a pissant as someone who thinks he’s so damn smart he can never keep his mouth shut.Laura: I like that definition. It’s a good word.Sarah: We have to end on this quote from Chapter 44. It’s part of Larry’s story:“No one can tell you what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side or you don’t.”Laura: It’s good. And it’s true. We’ll see you on the other side. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slowread.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to SLOW READ, where we tackle the books you’ve always wanted to read at a pace you can handle.Hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Laura TremaineWe are currently reading The Stand by Stephen King (unabridged version)You can find our full Reading Schedule hereJoin the SLOW READ community on Substack for bonus episodes, book club meetings, and Side Quests with Sarah & Laura___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 TolkeinCarrie by Stephen KingKnives 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 SottileThe Green Mile by Stephen KingShawshank 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 AbagailLaura: 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 YorkLaura: 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 FrannyLaura: 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 SceneLaura: 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 PregnancySarah: 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 NatureLaura: 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 BatemanSarah: 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 EyesSarah: 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 AbagailLaura: 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 EndingSarah: 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 CookiesSarah: 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!Up Next: The Side QuestHead over to the paid subscriber section where we are discussing love triangles. See you on the other side. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slowread.substack.com/subscribe

One of the best parts of slow reading a book together is talking about it! Each month our SLOW READ community is gathering on zoom for a book club meeting to discuss The Stand.This episode is a preview of our first SLOW READ Book Club meeting from a few weeks ago where we’re discussing The Stand Chapters 1 - 15.No spoilers here! Each discussion will only be covering the chapters we’ve read so far in the book. Sarah and Laura lead the discussion with your fellow Slow Readers and it’s so fun to hear YOUR takes on this epic novel.SLOW READ Book Club meetings are for our paid community! Members get all our Side Quests, bonus material, and our monthly meetings. Each book club meeting is recorded and you can watch or listen to the REPLAY if you aren’t able to attend live.JOIN SLOW READOur next SLOW READ Book Club meeting will be this Thursday, February 19 at 6pm PT / 9pm ET. We’ll be discussing The Stand through Chapter 34.See our full SLOW READ Book Club meeting schedule HEREHope to see you there! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slowread.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to SLOW READ, where we tackle the books you’ve always wanted to read at a pace you can handle.Hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Laura TremaineWe are currently reading The Stand by Stephen King (unabridged version)You can find our full Reading Schedule hereJoin the SLOW READ community on Substack for bonus episodes, book club meetings, and Side Quests with Sarah & Laura____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:The Road by Cormac McCarthyStation Eleven by Emily St. John MandelWater WorldWatership Down by Richard AdamsOne Battle After Another Creation Lake by Rachel KushnerFriday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-BrenyahChain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-BrenyahIn Cold Blood by Truman CapoteMonsters A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer____Sarah: Hello, I am Sarah Stewart-Holland.Laura: And I’m Laura Tremaine. Welcome to Slow Read, where we tackle the books you’ve always wanted to read at a pace you can handle. We are currently reading The Stand by Stephen King, and today we’re going to talk about Chapters 26 through 34.Sarah: Things are getting real gruesome as society fully collapses. We’re going to talk about that and the maggots and the swelling and the “bonbons” of bodies. And hopefully get to all that before we go “tharn.” Did I say that right?Laura: I think you did say that right. Can I just say, first of all, this section has probably one of the worst scenes in the whole book. It’s short, but it’s awful. And as I was reading this section, all I could think was: I’m really worried that I told all the readers that this book isn’t very scary.Sarah: Well, it’s not scary. It’s just gross.Laura: I really thought, damn, we should have given people a warning last week. I don’t want to say this section is inconsequential, but by the time we get to the end of the book, this won’t be what stands out. This is like a bridge section from all the setup.Chapter 26: The Media and the MilitarySarah: Chapter 26 is quite a doozy. It really is like... let’s go around the country and show you the collapse of American society. First shout out to the great state of Kentucky, my home state. There is, in fact, no “University of Kentucky Louisville.” That’s just the University of Louisville. But I was excited either way.Laura: Can I just tell you that I am still reading every word aloud. I was reading this one aloud in bed and Jeff, my husband, came to bed and listened. And he was like, “This is scary.”Sarah: What I found so interesting is we start in Kentucky, we go to Boston, Los Angeles, Missouri, New York City, Des Moines. And there’s a real focus on colleges and media. It’s either protests at college campuses or media defying this military shutdown of information.Laura: He talks about how the Kent State protesters get mowed down. Stephen King being of the age and generation that he is, that is a callback to one of the biggest events of his young adulthood. He almost reenacts it in a way. I actually just got chills because I think that was very purposefully placed.Sarah: I just thought it was so interesting that he was almost hyper-focused on media. Like the Los Angeles Times distributing about 10,000 copies. But actually, as I say this, the flow of information makes sense because we’re on this compressed timeline. We’re not to the part where people are truly out of food. We’re not to the part where the electricity has shut down. The media would fall apart first. So now I’ve talked myself into that this is a brilliant move.Laura: We’re definitely not to people running out of food because almost everybody’s dying. They don’t even have a chance to run out of food.Sarah: I also really liked what Harold tells us later—that Mother Nature doesn’t work this way. The way that everyone’s dying and it’s happening so quickly means that something else is at play here. This isn’t just something that occurred in nature.Laura: Can I just share my naivete right here? I just don’t immediately default to “government conspiracy trying to kill us all.” I don’t.Sarah: Yeah, I don’t either. I absolutely think that people underestimate the power of the federal government to exert its will. But that power comes from size. And size means secret keeping is incredibly difficult. No one can keep a secret. Literally no one.Chapter 27: Larry and the “Rancid Bonbons”Sarah: Chapter 27, Larry Underwood in New York City. Everybody’s dead in New York City, which means there’s just a lot of bodies. This whole section was really... I mean, he’s walking around the city encountering rotten corpses. It’s really, really gross.Laura: Well, and it’s very cinematic. Setting that scene in New York City makes it so we can all picture what the streets would be like completely empty and with dead bodies everywhere.Sarah: This was the “rancid bonbon” chapter with Larry where I was like, I didn’t need that. I could have gone my whole life without hearing a dead body described as a rancid bonbon.Laura: What did you think about when Larry and Rita go to a steakhouse and cook a dinner?Sarah: I mean, we’re saying there’s plenty of food, but is there plenty of food people know how to prepare? I don’t know what else you do. In those initial shocks, it’s so surreal. You do kind of cling to whatever normal, pleasurable experience you can find.Laura: What did you think about Rita as a character?Sarah: I was fascinated. I couldn’t quite... was this Rita’s Yankee Stadium moment? Did she go to Cartier and just go to town?Laura: I picture Rita as a Real Housewife of New York City. Like she’s done a lot to her face. She’s dripping in diamonds. And like the opposite of Stu, she has no skills to survive.Sarah: I’m intrigued by their partnership and where they’re going to go.Franny and HaroldLaura: Let me tell you what partnership I’m much less invested in. And that is Franny and Harold. Harold was weirding me all the way out.Sarah: I’m surprised you’re mentioning them as a partnership. Did you just get that vibe right away?Laura: I just mean like they’re the only ones left there. And Harold was weirding me out. I got some red flags.Sarah: Good instincts. Imagine, because we all have these people at every stage of our life where you’re like, If there’s only two of us left on this planet... For Franny, it’s her friend’s little brother. The worst. If it was these assholes who I’m stuck in Paducah with post-pandemic, I’m going to be mad. I’m just telling you, the survivors are skewing... not great. Not a great cross-section of humanity.Sarah: But do you really think that the survivors would be like the ultimate hero pinnacle of society people?Laura: It does feel like there should be like one or two more “normals.”Sarah: Stu is normal. Franny’s normal. That’s all I’ve got, Laura.Laura: I don’t think Larry is un-normal in the same way. He’s just so selfish. It feels like his weaknesses are going to be very easily exploitable, which is my concern as we get further into this chapter, because there seems to be one person in particular ready and willing to manipulate and exploit.Chapter 28/29: Stu Goes “Tharn”Sarah: Back to our normies. Stu is back in Stovington, Vermont. He’s still at the disease control center. Everybody’s dying. And he’s worried like, they’re either going to kill me or I’m going to get trapped in here and starve to death, which is a truly terrible way to die.Laura: This is where we get “going tharn.” He talks a lot about Watership Down and the rabbits and going tharn. I loved the sentence: “Going tharn, a good word for a bad state of mind.” It’s sort of frozen in the headlines. And he doesn’t freeze.John Phipps: Don’t Panic. Don’t Go Tharn, Either.Sarah: But then, oh my God, he gets stuck in this damn hospital. I felt like he ran around that hospital for 25 pages. I was like, Just get out of here. And then as he’s finally in the stairwell, someone grabs his ankle.Laura: This is an imagery tie-in to It. Even if you haven’t read it, you know the clown coming out of the sewer. My dog has an irrational fear of storm drains. She will pull your ass all the way across the other side of the street not to walk in front of a storm drain. So this is just cellular.Sarah: And he has to kill Dr. Elder to get him out of his way. Here’s what’s interesting to me: this idea that people’s dying pursuit would be violence. That in these final moments of a human life, someone would try to take some people out with them. That is not my experience of humanity.Laura: But I think Dr. Elder, for example, that wasn’t his primitive source coming out. He was under orders to kill Stu. But he’s dying. He’s literally delirious.Sarah: I think the closest equivalent is like a natural disaster. And people’s instinct in a natural disaster is to help people. I’ve seen it.Laura: Okay, but what if it’s not about violence? What if it’s about a denial of what’s actually happening? It’s a clinging to the status quo. If I can follow my role as a military member, then that will protect me in a way. I definitely buy that.Sarah: So Stu gets away. He gets out. He doesn’t go tharn.Chapter 30: ArnettLaura: We go back to Arnett, Texas. This is a very short chapter. But because there’s nothing there, it’s dead. The town is silent and dead.Chapter 31: Randall Flagg and the NetworkSarah: Okay, buckle up. Now we’re to Chapter 31 with the dark man, the walking man, the faceless man, Randall Flagg. We start this chapter with a minor character named Christopher Bradenton.Laura: Bradenton appeared in Chapter 23. He was a conductor on one of the underground railway systems by which fugitives moved. Randall Flagg exploits this network.Sarah: This was giving One Battle After Another the new film.Laura: The premise is that there is this network out there that continues to exist where people are in this secret communication with each other. I thought that was really interesting to place Randall Flagg within that. It’s not ideologically driven. It’s just exploiting the secretness of these networks.Sarah: Bradenton is delirious. So Randall Flagg—or Richard Fry—shows up. He’s sitting on his chest trying to get the keys to a car. And I’m like, dude, I thought the last chapter we established you could fly. Why do you need a car? And why do you give a shit if you have the papers? Everybody’s dead.Laura: We are going to play with throughout the story of: Is Randall Flagg man or monster? Is Randall Flagg man or devil? When he is acting as a man, I don’t know that Randall Flagg totally knows. He’s going to do some things like need the car that are very human. And then he’s going to do other things where you’re like, That’s not human.Chapter 32: Lloyd in PrisonLaura: Here’s what we do know. Poor Lloyd is about to starve to death in prison. Oh, poor Lloyd and his hamburger fingers.Sarah: I was like, did you have a plan? You thought, I’m going to hamburger my fingers to get this bedpost.And then he got the bedpost and he had no plan at all.Laura: No, he just uses it to bang on the bars. Well, he’s smart enough to sock away a dead rat to eat later. He did save some food.Sarah: I used to think the worst way to die would be to be crushed by a crowd. But this might be a close second. I’ve watched a single documentary about a crowd crush experience at a sporting event, and it haunts me. But being stuck in a prison with rotting bodies and no food... pretty close second.Chapter 33: Nick and the BullyLaura: Then we go back to Arkansas with Nick. Back to my concerns about would a dying bully stumble out of the woods, delirious and sick, and be like, You know what I’m going to do with my last dying 10% of energy? I’m going to beat the shit out of Nick Andros. I don’t know, man.Sarah: It felt very bookie. Like, of course the villain is going to stumble back. It was giving zombie.Laura: I also quibble with the idea that Nick Andros, who cannot hear, doesn’t feel when someone enters a room behind him. Every person with hearing problems that I’ve ever known, their senses are very differently abled. So the fact that Nick doesn’t hear him bust in... unrealistic.Sarah: I thought you were going to say you quibble with the fact that Nick Andros is sitting around reading Jane Eyre.Laura: My answer to the side quest of what would you do when everyone’s dead is not sit around and read the classics. Because guys, it’s going to get to a point where shit’s going to fall apart. You’re going to have nothing but books left. Save it for then, friends. Be watching your DVDs before the electricity plants go down.Chapter 34: Trash Can ManLaura: Final chapter, Trash Can Man. Donald Merwin Elbert. First of all, with a name like that, why wouldn’t you be burning shit down?Sarah: Baby Donald had a rough start. This is a sad story. His father kills his siblings. His mother escapes. The father is killed by the sheriff... who his mother then marries. I literally wrote “Oh my God” beside that part.Laura: And the poor sheriff, I had a lot of sympathy for him. He was like, This boy is not right. We need to get him some help.Sarah: He burned a church. He burned some lady’s pension check. And he gets electroshock therapy treatment. I really liked the way he articulated how tenuously he was gripping onto normality. He’s like, I had it. I had a grasp on it and I just couldn’t quite hold it.Laura: It’s obviously setting us up to see what’s going to happen with Trash Can Man next. He is also enacting our theme of the side quest: What would you do if you were alone and could do anything? He has been dying his whole life to go blow up those big gas silos. And so he’s like, I’m going to go do it. Here’s my chance. Chance of a lifetime.Sarah: I thought this was so powerful. He sees a bug stuck in gasoline and he says: “It was a world that deserved to burn.” And then a little bit later, he said: “There was a whole country ripe for burning under the summer sun.”The TV StationLaura: We didn’t talk about the scene that I find to be one of the scariest in the whole entire book.Sarah: The one in the local TV station where the men have lined up the other men and are shooting them on camera?Laura: Yes. It was so disturbing. The scene itself is awful. And then we get to see it through Franny’s eyes when she turns on the TV. There were so many things happening—race stuff, history stuff, tribal stuff. It was purposely being televised.Sarah: I think there’s something about the televised aspect and the complete detachment from any law and order. It was very much giving “inmates running the asylum.” It felt like a horror short story. It felt like Friday Black or Chain Gang All-Stars. I was really disturbed by that scene.Why Read Horror?Laura: I think now might be a good time for a little pep talk about why we read horror.Sarah: I need a pep talk.Laura: We read horror because it lets your mind and imagination play out some things that sort of already always linger back there. Some part of us, we’re all scared of the monster under our bed. And horror gives us a playground for that.Sarah: I think true crime is scarier than horror. In Cold Blood really shook me.Laura: I think true crime is playing around with the presence of violence, whereas I feel like horror is playing around with the presence of death. And to me, that’s different. Facing the reality that we will all turn to ashes and dust can be freeing in a way.Sarah: Well, and to just pep talk anyone on The Stand in particular... I do want to say without any spoilers that the book is about to get a lot more relational. No more rancid bonbons.Laura: Please tell me there’s no more rancid bonbons.Sarah: I’m not going to promise that to you! But we’re about to move to: Okay, everyone’s dead. Now what happens? And what happens is going to be pretty relational.Next Week:We are reading Chapters 35 through 42. It is 96 pages. We can do it!Up Next: The Side QuestHead over to the paid subscriber section where we are discussing what we would do if the city was suddenly empty. See you on the other side. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slowread.substack.com/subscribe

Movies & Shows Mentioned in This Episode* The Net (1995) - Sandra Bullock vs. the Internet.* Tin Cup (1996) - Rene Russo and Kevin Costner rom-com.* Jerry Maguire (1996) - Cuba Gooding Jr.’s breakout role.* Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) - The movie with Donald Sutherland as the Watcher.* American Beauty (1999) - Kevin Spacey.* The Usual Suspects (1995) - Kevin Spacey.* House of Cards (2013–2018) - Kevin Spacey (TV Series).* Ocean’s Eleven (2001) - George Clooney.* Up in the Air (2009) - George Clooney firing people.* The NeverEnding Story (1984) - Directed by Wolfgang Petersen.* Air Force One (1997) - Directed by Wolfgang Petersen.* The Perfect Storm (2000) - Directed by Wolfgang Petersen.* Troy (2004) - Directed by Wolfgang Petersen.* In the Line of Fire (1993) - Directed by Wolfgang Petersen.* Jurassic Park (1993) - Referenced for the “hot scientist” vibe.* Contagion (2011) - The more realistic pandemic movie (up next!).* Station Eleven (2021) - The TV series adaptation (and book).Sarah: Hello, this is Sarah Stewart-Holland.Laura: I’m Laura Tremaine. Welcome to Slow Read, where we tackle the books you’ve always wanted to read at a pace you can handle.Sarah: Today is a little bonus episode. When we started, the movie Outbreak came up because I was sort of obsessed with it at the time. And we said we’re going to rewatch Outbreak and talk about it. So that’s what we’re going to do today.Laura: I mean, I have lots to say. I would like you to know that my first note is: Kevin Spacey. Ew. That’s the first thing I wrote.Sarah: My first note is: That type of monkey is not actually from Africa.Laura: Well, listen, we’re playing real fast and loose because my second thing was the witch doctor. We start in Africa several years ago and we’re rolling with some real deep stereotypes here.Sarah: Yeah, I just don’t feel like this kind of movie would get made today. Not the overall plot of a pandemic, but the African stuff was way “other.” There were overly wise Africans, overly uncivilized Africans. It was just a total racial component that was not a flattering portrayal. Even the fact that we’re just saying “Africa.” They’re in Zaire, but it just was not great.Laura: It was the 90s. It was a different time.The Insane 90s CastSarah: Should we back up and explain that Outbreak, first of all, has an insane cast? This was, I mean, I was obsessed with this movie.Laura: I loved it at the time. I also liked The Net. Remember that one with Sandra Bullock where the Internet’s coming for her? I think there was something about movies that were speaking to this interplay of politics and culture and government and things that could happen through the lens of that.Sarah: But yeah, it has a superstar cast. Dustin Hoffman is the lead. Rene Russo. I loved Rene Russo back in the day.Laura: She’s stunningly gorgeous. You didn’t watch Tin Cup with her and Kevin Costner? You must go back and watch it. They are so good together. She had a real moment in the 90s.Sarah: But, you know, what happens with every era... you go back in the 80s and the men are still existing and making movies like Harrison Ford. But could you name a single woman who was the lead in any of the Indiana Jones movies? No, because none of them have careers anymore. Especially if they were beautiful. If you are beautiful, it’s really hard for people to stay on board with you when that part of you goes.Laura: So you have Rene Russo, Morgan Freeman, Donald Sutherland, a little baby Patrick Dempsey.Sarah: He’s so young. And listen, Cuba Gooding Jr. This was the year before Jerry Maguire.Laura: That tracks for me. He’s good in this. Jerry Maguire was his breakout, but he’s a pretty major part of Outbreak.Sarah: Why is Donald Sutherland always the bad guy? Why don’t they ever let this poor man be the good guy?Laura: It’s his face. His face is scary. And also he has a gravelly voice. Now, he is the good guy in another one of my 1990s favorites that I recently showed to my children: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the movie with Kristy Swanson.Sarah: But he is excellent. Dustin Hoffman is excellent. But do you buy Dustin Hoffman in this particular role? I do not buy that you would ever be in the military, Dustin Hoffman.Laura: Well, I did see that they had originally tried to cast Harrison Ford and a bunch of more traditional leading men. But the director ended up really liking casting Dustin Hoffman because he thought it gave it complexity. It sort of had a Jurassic Park feel of like, they were supposed to be nerdy scientists who just happened to be hot.Sarah: Except for then again, Kevin Spacey shows up. My husband Jeff and I watched it together, and we both came to the conclusion of: Problematic, awful, terrible, no justification. Kevin Spacey is a brilliant actor, but he kind of overacts a little bit in this. He chews up some of that dialogue. Like, why is he such a smartass?Laura: It’s such a bummer that someone so brilliant is a bad person. Think of all of the problematic, brilliant artists. This comes up all the time. Can you support the art and not the artist?Sarah: See, this is why when they’re not bad people and they’re also talented, my devotion knows no end. Like George Clooney. Or Julia Roberts. By all accounts, Tom Hanks is a nice guy. I just think there is a delineation between being very, very good and genius level. I know you’re not going to sit here and tell me that Kevin Spacey is a genius and George Clooney isn’t.Laura: No, George Clooney is looks and marketability. That’s not genius.Sarah: Oh, I disagree. We are getting far afield. Back to the virus with 100% mortality, Laura.The Virus & The DirectorLaura: 100% mortality. I think this is really important to mention because the director of Outbreak is Wolfgang Petersen. Before we started it, my husband asked if this was Steven Spielberg. I looked it up—Wolfgang Petersen directed The NeverEnding Story, Air Force One, The Perfect Storm, Troy, In the Line of Fire. These are good 90s mid-range action movies.Sarah: I liked it when it was real-world action. It didn’t have to be intergalactic action in order to get made.Laura: Okay, we have 100% mortality. This virus would never spread, even through a monkey—especially a monkey that’s not actually from Africa. It really bothered my animal-loving family. They literally could do nothing but focus on the fact that these monkeys are Central American monkeys.Sarah: Even in the 90s, that was a pretty gross error. Now that we’re all amateur virologists because of COVID, we know that. Although there is a moment where Morgan Freeman says, “If the mortality is that high, anybody will die before they spread it.” So there was an acknowledgement of that. But there was also the part where the monkey was carrying both an airborne version and not an airborne version.Laura: Speaking of weird choices, I thought it was very weird to leave the President of the United States out of it entirely. We don’t even see his face. We only see a cabinet meeting. Why no actual President?Sarah: Maybe they spent all their money on the generals. I felt like you could have made Donald Sutherland the President and have the exact same role.The Scary Scenes vs. RealityLaura: The scenes I definitely remember from being obsessed with it in the 90s... I remember the aquarium scene where the guy in the pet shop gets it and falls over onto the bank of aquariums.Sarah: Was that upsetting for your husband?Laura: No, because we read on IMDb ahead of time that they used fake plastic fish. And then I definitely remember the scene where he looks in the camera and says: “They all got it in a movie theater.” I remember being in the theater and everybody being like, Oh my God.Sarah: Well, to tie it closer to The Stand, the scene where it’s being spread... in both The Stand and in our lived experience in 2020, that scene probably didn’t give me the shivers in the 90s. I would have been like, Oh, this is anthropologically interesting. But now you’re like, Oh no, they’re all coughing on each other. Don’t do it.Laura: Before I pressed play, I had mixed it up slightly with the movie Contagion. In the early scenes of Contagion, them all being in bars and hanging out and spreading it without knowing... that is scarier to me than the portrayal of them all getting it in Outbreak.Sarah: I did like the scene where the little boy is about to take his cookie and the mom says no. Listen to your mothers about their germs!Laura: Did you think about how funny it is that they have these giant windshield headpieces where you can see their entire faces the whole time? Clearly someone was like, “We’re going to have to design movie-worthy protective gear so we can see the famous faces we paid for.”Sarah: I thought the scene where the mom has to leave her family was really sad. When she says, “You can’t hug me,” I’m like, It’s too late. They already have it.Laura: I thought it was kind of a commentary on scientists being dum-dums. One scientist chops his fingers off in the centrifuge. Dustin Hoffman doesn’t notice there’s a rip in his suit. Kevin Spacey snags his suit. Morgan Freeman has the cure and keeps it to himself.Sarah: The anti-Fauci crowd would have lots to work with in Outbreak.Laura: Also, when Donald Sutherland says, “Be compassionate, but be compassionate globally,” I was like, oof. That’s a real trolley problem. Can you kill just the child to save the world?The Ending & What’s NextLaura: Let’s talk about the ending because it’s truly crazy. It’s such an anticlimactic ending. They save the town, he comes to Rene Russo’s bedside, they make a little joke, and then the movie’s over.Sarah: She gets better. They’ve made her look healthier. But then it’s just like... okay. It’s just everything’s okay.Laura: Also, why do all the bombs have parachutes? I don’t think bombs have parachutes in real life.Sarah: Let me tell you how much I do not know about bombs. A universe. But mainly it just made me think... I really want to watch Contagion again.Laura: Contagion came out in 2011. No wonder that’s what most of us pictured in 2020. I think we should watch that one next.Sarah: I’m into it. All right. We’re watching Contagion next. Except honestly, I do have to say after I watched Outbreak, I genuinely thought it was decent from a plot storytelling perspective. But there’s nothing interesting about watching a virus spread anymore. It’s just... all of it feels different now.Laura: I think Station Eleven, the TV show, is better than the book. You think the scary part is the virus spreading, but it really is all that happens after that that’s so interesting.Sarah: True of The Stand, true of Contagion, certainly true of Station Eleven. That’s where the interesting stuff starts to happen. And Outbreak is so focused on preventing that, that you miss some of the most interesting interpersonal, societal stuff.Laura: In Outbreak, I did not feel a creative vibe. I felt like, This is a bummer. Because now we know.Sarah: So we saved you guys. Don’t rewatch it. Just listen to this conversation. Or if you rewatched it, we would like to hear if you think our takes are hot or not.Laura: Thanks for joining us for another bonus episode of Slow Read. We will be back in your ears next week with Chapters 26 through 34. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slowread.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to SLOW READ, where we tackle the books you’ve always wanted to read at a pace you can handle.Hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Laura TremaineWe are currently reading The Stand by Stephen King (unabridged version)You can find our full Reading Schedule hereJoin the SLOW READ community on Substack for bonus episodes, book club meetings, and Side Quests with Sarah & Laura____Mentioned in this episode:The WireThe SopranosAmerican Revolution by Ken BurnsThe City We Became by MK JamisonStephen King books mentioned:Mr MercedesBilly SummersIf 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!____Laura: Today we’re talking about Chapters 16 through 25, where the Captain Tripp’s super flu pandemic rages on. Two gangsters have a shootout in a gas station in Arizona, and our deaf-mute character, Nick Andros, basically becomes the sheriff in Arkansas.Sarah: The sheriff of nobody.Laura: And Larry Underwood takes care of his sick mom in New York City. And then we finally get a little more backstory to the origins and architects of this virus and of Project Blue.Sarah: Shit’s getting dark. I don’t know how to say it any other way.Laura: Do you think so? Because I felt like this section, with the exception of one chapter which is one of my favorites, felt a little slow to me.Sarah: What are you talking about? We got so many villains! We got some real murderous, scary people showing up. It feels like things are starting to fall apart. This is going to be fertile ground for dark people, dark energy, dark acts. I was kind of ready for people to start dying in bigger numbers... and now that it’s started, I’m like: Oh, no.Chapter 16: Poke, Lloyd, and the Crime SpreeLaura: Chapter 16.Sarah: This section comes in hot.Laura: We meet Poke and Lloyd. These are two criminals.Sarah: I need to say this first off: In my head, I pronounced it “Poke” like a poke bowl the whole time.Laura: I know. It’s because I’m from Oklahoma, so I was like, yeah. To poke around, to be a poke... that’s definitely a rural nickname.Sarah: No, a poke is like a cowboy. Like “Go Pokes.” See, look at these regional differences. Meanwhile, I’m pronouncing it like I live in California and eat poke bowls all the time. Anyway, they kill a bunch of people really fast. They killed six people in the last six days.Laura: He calls it “pokerizing,” meaning he’s killing them, which is pretty intense. Not as bad as “gobble,” but it’s up there.Sarah: These dudes have gotten out of prison. I understand that they need money, but the immediate killing left and right... I’m like, how did you think this was going to go? The part with Gorgeous George... that is a real common situation in crime fiction. You get a lower level guy who’s protecting the kitty or whatever. But then the prolific killing? I’m like, you people want to go to jail.Laura: I don’t know how realistic it is, but it felt like glimmers into kind of what Stephen King has always wanted to write about. He’s known for his horror, but as you can tell, there has been very little supernatural elements so far. What has been scary about this story is the violence. In the last decade plus, he has taken a real turn to crime fiction.Sarah: I don’t mind the violence—The Sopranos is one of my favorite shows of all time—but I want the portraits of the criminals to be complex. And this felt a little one-note.Laura: To me, it felt like every other storyline has had a touch of the flu in it. And other than maybe the arresting cop having the sniffles, this has nothing to do with anything else we have read thus far. So you’re kind of asking yourself: What does this have to do with anything?Sarah: It’s kind of a weird wash to listen to this and be like, well, yeah, that’s a violent, terrible way to die... but you might have just drowned in your own snot like everybody else is right now.Laura: You’re kind of zooming out. Like, well, they don’t know it, but we know it.Chapter 17: Starkey, Project Blue, and the “Miserable Worm”Laura: Chapter 17. We are back to Starkey, the head of Project Blue. And we finally sort of get a little bit of the backstory to not just the origins of Project Blue, but maybe the decades-long corruption that might be happening here.Sarah: That there are these figures so deep underneath the public’s knowledge that are actually controlling everything. Starkey has known the man that’s now the president since college.Sarah: Here’s my first question: I don’t understand the centrifuge. I thought a centrifuge is just a really big fan thing. Are they running out of air?Laura: Starkey is in an admin building watching the monitors. But then he goes into the cafeteria and cleans the guy’s face off. He had to kind of bust through the gates to get back in there and everybody’s dead.Laura: I’m skipping ahead because right now all we get is that he calls the command “Troy,” which basically means: Don’t let the story get out. That also doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. At this point, I’m like: You guys know it’s out and everybody’s going to die. What exactly do you think you’re containing here?Sarah: Do you think they’re just trying to keep public panic at bay? They just need everybody to die without panic on the airwaves? Here is also a funny thing that I did reading this chapter. When he says: “And one of their number, a man who could now dial directly to the miserable worm who had been masquerading as a chief executive...”I read “Worm” as “Woman”. I thought the president was a woman! I thought that was going to be such an interesting choice. But no, the president is a man.Laura: Starkey is thinking back on this quote: “If you find your mother raped or your father beaten and robbed before you call the police... you cover their nakedness because you love them.” He’s justifying to himself telling them to murder the journalists. Because what we’re learning about Starkey is that he would cover himself and the government and the country above all else.Sarah: That is how people justify things like murdering journalists and quarantining whole towns. Because it’s not about the people anymore. It’s about the institution.Laura: But when you see it framed as love... that is such dark nationalist territory to me. That in 2025, when you’re just like “country above all else”... it gives me a pit in my stomach. Because the institution is going to be left when everyone’s dead. What are you worried about? People are not stupid. They are starting to figure it out.Chapter 18: Nick Andros, The Sheriff of ShoyoLaura: Chapter 18. We’re with poor Nick in Arkansas. And everybody’s dead but him.Sarah: Including the soldiers trying to block the road.Laura: Nick basically becomes the sheriff because Sheriff Baker is so sick. And Nick decides to write down and fill in some of the holes of his backstory. We learn that he becomes an orphan early and is sent to a foster care system where the state provides a deaf-mute man, Rudy, to teach this kid how to read and write.Sarah: I really like that part. But before we get there, I have to call out a hilarious moment. Nick is with the Bakers and he says: “Nick, watching them, wondered how two people of such radically different size got along in bed.” I was like, oh goody, it’s not just me.Laura: I have definitely thought that about people. Just have some logistical questions.Sarah: I really liked the backstory with Rudy because we’re in the age of positive parenting, and Rudy... well, he slapped Nick. It was a very physical learning. I just thought that was a very accurate portrayal of how a man taught him. He slapped him across the face to get his attention, but he was very kind and taught him everything he needed.Laura: I got spanked growing up. I’m not traumatized. But getting slapped across the face... it is a humiliation. But it didn’t feel that way with Rudy. It was different than with Carla and Franny.Sarah: I think what was impactful to me is that Nick was checked out. He was cynical and didn’t trust anybody. And when Rudy shows up and uses that physicality to pull him back... to say, “Oh, come back here with me.”Laura: I also underlined this part: “It’s going to be a great day for the deaf mutes of the world when the telephone view screens the science fiction novels were always predicting finally came into general use.” Oh my God. Now we’re reading it and being like: Yep, we FaceTime each other every day.Sarah: We also learn in this chapter that Nick is starting to have vivid dreams. He is dreaming about endless rows of green corn looking for something and terribly afraid of something else that seemed to be behind him.Laura: Also in Chapter 18, Sheriff Baker actually dies. And one of the prisoners dies. So things are progressing.Sarah: The most important part to me is when Dr. Soames gives Nick a little speech. He says: “I repeat, someone made a mistake and now they’re trying to cover it up.” He is right. But he also alludes to like... educated people are not supposed to believe these stupid theories, and we get to the end of our life and we’re like, Oh shoot, maybe all of that paranoia was the right thing.Laura: It’s the paradox of conspiracy theories. There is often something there that doesn’t make sense. But people want to turn it into something organized with a central villain.Sarah: I think it’s interesting that Nick is such a young character amidst all these old people who are praising him or trusting him. They see something in him. He’s sort of like an old soul.Laura: He doesn’t have loyalty to anything. He’s been failed in a lot of ways. Born with a birth defect. Parents died. Never adopted. Out on his own since 16. He has no loyalty to anything... which is interesting as the story is going to go on.Chapter 19: Larry UnderwoodSarah: Nick is in such sharp contrast to Larry, who we go back to in the next chapter. Larry’s mom, Alice, is sick as a dog in New York City. And he’s like, Hey, I’m going to go walk around Times Square.Sarah: I underlined this: “Her idea of nutrition was vague, but all encompassing.” Same. That’s 100% me. Also, why do we think this is the first one we get a picture of? There’s a random illustration.Laura: Here’s the part where I thought the contrast between Larry and Nick was intense. He’s thinking: “Why did it have to happen after I got the good news? And most despicable of all, how bad is this going to screw up my plans?”Sarah: That was relatable to me. Am I a narcissist?Laura: No. I think there’s always that voice.Sarah: When my child was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, the first thing I thought about was our upcoming vacation. I’m not even playing. I was like, Oh my God, are we still going to go? How bad is that? But I think everybody has that.Sarah: I also wonder if as Enneagram Ones, the way that our brains work is like: This is the way. And when a wrench has been thrown to the way, we’re like: Wait. That is not what I had planned.Chapter 20: Franny, Maine, and The PieLaura: Chapter 20. We check in on Franny in Maine. She has decamped to a hotel. She is trying to write a letter to a childhood friend.Sarah: This chapter felt a little filler to me. But her trying to write a cheery letter without revealing her pregnancy... it was giving Instagram captions 2025.Laura: I underlined where she says she felt like “that bug” that swelled up when it felt threatened. “The gestalt was maybe even a better word.” That’s the second time he’s used gestalt. I had an old school therapist in his 70s who was really into gestalt. It’s just another little flicker of the 70s.Sarah: We’ve been signing off our episodes with “See You on the Other Side,” but do we need to change it to her sign-off: “Believe in me and I’ll believe in you”?Laura: I thought that was such a funny way to end a letter. Why would you write that to a friend? I don’t know if I’ve ever said anything like that in my whole life.Sarah: At the end of the chapter, she gets a call from her daddy that Carla is sick as a dog. And she thinks: “Responsibility is a pie... You’re only kidding if you think you’re not going to have a cut a big, juicy, bitter piece for yourself and eat every bite.”Laura: Did not love that metaphor.Sarah: This kind of gets at what we were talking about... Franny’s trying to figure it out. If you take the whole super flu away from it, she is at a real crossroads in her life.Chapter 21: Stu Redman was FrightenedLaura: Chapter 21 starts out with: “Stu Redman was frightened.” And he’s like a tough guy. So if he’s scared, we shall be scared, too.Sarah: My quibble with this chapter is they have moved him from the Atlanta CDC to a facility in Vermont. And I have questions. How did that happen logistically? Everybody’s sick. What’s going on?Chapter 22: The Face in the SoupLaura: Chapter 22. You guys, Chapter 22 is one of my favorites.Sarah: This is the one that’s your favorite? Why do you like every time the dude with the face in the soup shows up?Laura: Because that imagery is strong. When the whole thing is over, I’m still going to remember the guy who died in the cafeteria with his face in the soup.Sarah: Starkey has been fired by the president. And he goes back into the facility. He’s quoting Yeats—but he calls him “Yeet.”Laura: I thought that was such a funny little detail. He’s trying to be intellectual and philosophical and he’s just butchering it a little bit.Sarah: And then he watches Frank D. Bruce’s soup head on the monitor. “The soup congealing in Frank D. Bruce’s eyebrows worried him more, much more.”Laura: Everything before he sits down on the floor and puts the gun in his mouth is fascinating to me. Because you’re getting the smallest glimpse of these people who work in this facility who absolutely know what’s coming. Two of them decide to copulate right there. A group of them run for the elevator. There’s the man who has time to make a sign to put around his neck: Now you know it works. Any questions?Sarah: That’s stark. A last gasp of sort of protest or defiance.Laura: I love this scene because it tells you so much about human nature. It reminds me of the 9/11 documentaries... the people who choose to shoot themselves or the people who choose to sit and eat their soup until it gets them.Chapter 23: Randall FlaggLaura: Chapter 23. We meet Randall Flagg. I underlined so many things in this chapter. He is one of literature’s greatest all-time villains. I actually will probably do a bonus thing just about Randall Flagg.Sarah: Is he just the devil? It feels like he’s just the devil.Sarah: “There was a dark hilarity in his face... It was the face of a hateful, happy man... a face to make small children crash their trikes into board fences and then run wailing to their mommies with steak-shaped splinters sticking out of their knees.” Yee! So scary!Laura: I felt very scared reading this chapter. But in the iteration of Randall Flagg as we’re meeting him now, he is a man. He doesn’t have much memory before his current iteration. But he also levitates off the ground.Sarah: It’s awkward to make parallels to Jesus because it’s the opposite... but evil made man is the opposite of good made man.Laura: I also find it fascinating that Randall Flagg is a big reader. “Flagg was an equal opportunity reader.”He read all the pamphlets.Chapter 24: Lloyd’s LawyerSarah: Chapter 24. Lloyd has a very long talk with his lawyer. And everybody don’t panic. This is where I will dust off my legal degree and say: This is not a thing. Lawyers do not tell their clients what to say like that. That is so illegal and a massive ethical violation.Laura: You don’t think that happens?Sarah: No. Of course, I think it happens sometimes. But this is pretty overt. Lawyers usually want just enough doubt. They’re not going to layer on the doubt to where point it becomes unbelievable.Chapter 25: The End of ShoyoSarah: Chapter 25. Listen. I like Nick, but this chapter was entirely too long.Laura: We’re getting a lot of detail on what happens when everybody’s dead. How are you going to feed yourself? What happens next? Nick is 22 years old and no one has any context for what is happening. This is so bizarre.Sarah: There were elements of this chapter that bubbled up for me some of the trauma of those early days of COVID-19. Like: It is so surreal that this is actually happening. Nick is in that same sort of denial.Laura: He watches the TV and notices the newscasters are giving skewed information. No weather report. No sports reporting. I loved that part.Sarah: I want to know what everybody else thinks. Is it scarier if Randall Flagg shows up after everybody’s dead or in your everyday life?Laura: I feel like when everybody’s dead... who gives a fuck?Sarah: No, because when everything is upside down... if he showed up in everyday life, there are more tools available to you. There’s more people to help you. I’m better in a group. The idea that this monstrous presence shows up and you’re by yourself... that’s rough.Next Week:We are covering Chapters 26 through 34. It is 94 pages. We can do hard things.See you on the other side. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slowread.substack.com/subscribe

In this solo episode, Laura puts on her SuperFan hat to share the broad strokes of Stephen King’s life and career, including the stories and trajectories that affect how we read The Stand.Far from a complete biography, this is an overview with some ideas, thoughts, and themes between the artist and the art. We’ll talk about his success at crossing genres, his addiction years, those wild conspiracy stories, and much more.JOIN US ON SUBSTACKCold Open Reminders:Our first SLOW READ Book Club meeting is Thursday, January 22See our entire Reading Schedule for The StandFurther reading/exploring after listening to this episode:On Writing by Stephen KingDanse Macabre by Stephen KingMonsters by Claire DedererLord of the Flies by William GoldingAll Secret Stuff Stephen King Summer Book Club REPLAYSRemastered: Devil at the Crossroads (documentary on Netflix about Robert Johnson)How Every Stephen King Movie Is In the Same Universe (YouTube video with slight spoilers for some films - no spoilers in it for The Stand) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slowread.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to SLOW READ, where we tackle the books you’ve always wanted to read at a pace you can handle.Hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Laura TremaineWe are currently reading The Stand by Stephen King (unabridged version)You can find our full Reading Schedule hereJoin the SLOW READ community on Substack for bonus episodes, book club meetings, and Side Quests with Sarah & LauraIf 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!____Sarah: All right. Where are we overall? We’re in it now. Like 100-plus pages.Laura: We are reading this thing. I’m kind of obsessed.Sarah: Like more obsessed? You feel like you are experiencing it in a new way? You’re noticing things?Laura: Yes. So this is my third or fourth read of The Stand. And I feel like maybe it’s because I’m reading with an eye on having to discuss it like this. I’m doing no skimming because I’m reading it out loud to myself. And I am just really noticing... you know what I’m noticing the most in this read is it’s funny.Sarah: Yeah, it is funny.Laura: There are funny parts that I feel like maybe I gave a little chuckle or a wink to in the past, but I was maybe more focused on the plot. And this read, I’m like, I’m so enjoying this. This is not my favorite Stephen King book of all time, but maybe it will be by June.Sarah: What if it rises in the rankings? Rereading reminds me of rewatching The Sopranos. I was just so in it the first time that when I rewatched it, I would laugh out loud. I think the first time through you miss something. So much of the humor or the absurdity—in the reread, you really do get it.Laura: Well, and clearly when you reread something and you already know what’s going to happen, you’re catching the red herrings or you’re catching the foreshadowing in an entirely different way. Especially in a book like The Stand where there’s 40 bajillion characters.Chapter 5 - Larry Underwood & The 70sSarah: Chapter 5. We’re starting with Larry Underwood.Laura: This is our introduction to Larry.Sarah: We’re finding out Larry is a one-hit wonder. Spoiler alert. Well, I guess he’s not going to get a chance to do any more hits now that I think about it. So we’re with Larry, and we’re understanding the backstory of what happened to him in L.A. I underlined in this chapter every time drugs were mentioned. And let me tell you something: It’s a lot. Larry’s doing a lot of drugs. It was the 70s.Laura: It didn’t even bother me.Sarah: It didn’t even bother me, it’s just... oh, there’s a lot. He’s with “hop heads.” He is taking uppers. He’s also doing dope. He’s taking cocaine. There’s an eight ball. There’s “Reds.” An amphetamine hangover. I’m telling you, there was pot and there was coke.Laura: Am I just going to be the jaded Los Angeles person? I didn’t even bat an eye. Not because I live in a drug den—although, weird spoiler, I actually do live in a former celebrity drug den house.Sarah: I love it.Laura: But I felt like that part describing Larry’s life in L.A. was a little cliche—music industry hangers-on, Malibu—until he goes on the walk on the beach with his friend. Or colleague.Sarah: Who is a trust fund baby so he doesn’t get “gobbled” up. Oh no, I said gobbled. Oh God. Now it’s infecting my own language.Laura: That part was interesting to me because the guy ran a bunch of numbers. He was sort of talking about how much he’d spent on the drugs, how much he’d put down on the car, how much the rent on the Malibu house was. It was like a behind-the-scenes. You don’t really see the lived reality of sudden fame and the toxicity of that. It’s not enough money to maintain what people expect of you. It runs out really, really fast.Sarah: We get a lot of Larry’s backstory before we get to Larry getting to New York. King has this line about New York had “all the charm of a dead whore.” I thought that was a real impactful sentence.Laura: Stephen King loves a dead whore. They’ll show up in every book at some point. But there was one throwaway line about how when he throws everybody out of the house, they’re going to act like “you’ve gotten too big for your britches.” And I have seen this. Someone getting healthier or rising to meet their success moment makes other people feel left behind.Sarah: There is a line from an Oprah Winfrey Show episode that has lived rent-free in my brain for 30 years. A woman had lost a dramatic amount of weight and she said, “All of my friends were supportive until I got thinner than them.” That feels really true and reflective of human behavior. If you are the friend that’s a mess, I want you to clean up to a certain point. And then after that, you’re not fulfilling the role in my life that I had for you.Laura: Since we know this is a pandemic book, we can kind of see what’s about to happen to the world. Larry getting his success like weeks before... what a bummer.Sarah: Yeah. What a bummer. You’re going to make it—like winning lotto tickets right before Captain Trips kills everybody. That sucks.Laura: What I really like about this chapter is Stephen King quickly shows you that he’s not going home because it’s some soft place to land. He’s not going back to his mother because she is some super nurturer. Alice is a tough cookie.Sarah: I did underline at the very end of the chapter: “He was the only one allowed inside his heart, but she loved him.” It’s really... as I was reading all these chapters, one moment I’m rolling my eyes at a dated reference, and then the next minute, he will just land something that you’re like: Whew. That is true. He will just sucker punch you with something that feels so true.Chapter 6 - Franny, Peter, and The WorkshopLaura: Chapter 6. We’re back in Maine with Franny and her father, Peter, and she is telling him that she is pregnant.Sarah: Lots of parenting. I don’t know if you picked this conglomeration of chapters because there’s so much parenting going on here, but wow.Laura: You have Larry and Alice. We know almost nothing about Larry’s father. But everything with Peter and Franny is through the lens of Peter’s relationship with Franny’s mother, Carla. I didn’t feel like at any point Stephen King was making an argument about good parenting or bad parenting. I think he was just saying: Here’s a bunch of parenting types. Here’s a bunch of marriages. And it felt so true to me.Sarah: When she says she loved it when her dad talked this way... “It wasn’t a way he talked often because the woman that was his wife and her mother would and had all but cut the tongue out of his head with the acid which could flow so quickly and freely from her own.” That is some true-ass shit. I have seen that. Have I maybe cut my own fair path of acid with my own tongue? Perhaps. I admit nothing.Laura: Peter is great. I love the line: “64 has a way of forgetting what 21 was like.” That makes me cry. And I thought the way he spoke about abortion... he just was like, look, do you know how much healthier our national abortion debate would be if everybody stated how they felt about abortion with their own experiences?Sarah: I underlined the whole passage of him talking about abortion because, even if I would come to a different conclusion than Peter does, you kind of can’t fault where he’s coming from. It was such a good example as opposed to Carla, which I also underlined: “She slapped three coats of lacquer and one of quick dry cement on her way of looking in things and called it good.” God, Carla.Laura: Poor hateful Carla. We’re going to get to that. We’re not to the parlor yet. We’re still in the workshop with beautiful, grace-filled Peter.Sarah: I do wonder why we’re not really given an explanation for why Franny has come to the conclusion that abortion is not what she chooses. She just says, “I have my own reasons.”Laura: I honestly think that’s pretty realistic. I think a lot of people will say, “This is what I want to do, and I really can’t explain why.” Especially for someone as young as Franny.Chapter 7 - The Spread & The FearSarah: Chapter 7. Vic Palfrey dies. Vic, I hardly knew ye. I’d love to be sad, but I forgot which one you were.Laura: This is where we start to sort of understand the pandemic part.Sarah: It is affecting and frightening to read. It reminds me of The Lovely Bones. You’re so busy being afraid of it in an avoidant way, but then when somebody writes it first person... I didn’t think about how horrifying it must be to live it. To know you’re going to die and feel like that’s coming for you. Just to think: I’m here, I’m drowning in mucus. I’m going to die.Laura: It’s just scary. I would rather sit with a monster or the rat eating the cat’s body in New York than I would with that scene of knowing that it’s coming. These are the scenes we’re scared of. These real-life human people scenes are so much scarier. It’s not the extraterrestrial. It’s the humanity, the vulnerability of humanity that’s so scary.Sarah: Also in this chapter, we spend some time with Stu, who is starting to put the pieces together because he is, in fact, not drowning in phlegm.Laura: A couple of things about Stu. He is likely smarter than his other gas station counterparts. He is bringing his past life experience to this hospital table. And thirdly, for me, this is the first hint that we get that Stu Redman might be attractive.Sarah: Oh yeah. I very much hung up on the description of his tan.Laura: Well, also, he just has a confidence that is attractive. He’s not easily bullshitted. Is that a verb? I just made it one.Sarah: He feels like a cowboy. I am reading some Westerns alongside this, and he definitely has that vibe. He has a certain type of quiet swagger. Don’t you love a quiet swagger? I’m looking at you, Tim Riggins.Sarah: I would like to point out that he used the word “pissant” again in this chapter, which I think we should bring back. And another phrase I think we should bring back is “doesn’t know shit from Shinola.”Sarah: Motion to return “doesn’t know shit from Shinola” to the vernacular. Motion carries.Laura: Sarah, we blew past my merch idea.Sarah: What’s your merch idea?Laura: The entire Larry Underwood chapter... all I could think of every time I read that the name of his hit was “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” I put it on the Spotify playlist.Sarah: I just feel like this is so 70s. People were not using “dig.” I don’t want to bring that one back. That one can stay dead. No, I cannot and I will not “dig my man.”Laura: I’m going to do it, you guys. I’m going to work on that sweatshirt design. Just because it is so funny and so specific.Chapter 8 - Everybody Gets ItLaura: Chapter 8. This one is just pandemic specifics. This is just the logistics of the very lethal chain letter that is Captain Trips.Laura: This chapter, I’m making notes. This is the sole sentence that I wrote for Chapter 8: Everybody gets it. Everybody gets it. Everybody.Sarah: It doesn’t matter how obscure the contact is. The virus hits and attaches. The part I underlined is where the family is driving and the dad says: “Fuck Jesse James, Ed grumped. Ed, Trish cried. Sorry, he said. Not feeling sorry in the least.” That sounds like something Leanne Morgan would describe about Chuck Morgan.Laura: I love this kind of chapter because I feel like you’re getting these tiny slices of humanity—the bridge club friends, the poker night. It seems like Stephen King is literally enjoying himself writing these tiny little snippets. And I think this is probably my COVID lens more than anything, but I feel like there’s an aspect of this that is just... people got it because viruses spread among human behavior. Not because anybody was doing it right or doing it wrong or being selfish. Viruses like to spread. That’s what they do.Sarah: I’ve also chosen to pick up John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis while I’m reading The Stand.Laura: Why would you do that?Sarah: I don’t know. Why not? Lean in. It’s actually a great accompaniment because he talks about viruses going to virus, but also the reality that history matters. This virus was created in a lab. So it was just spreading through normal human behavior, but it didn’t get out there through normal human behavior.Chapter 9 - Nick Andros & The BulliesLaura: Chapter 9. Poor Nick Andros. Here comes Nick. He got the shit beaten out of him. And for what?Sarah: I think it really bothered them that he was mute.Laura: Another thing about Stephen King—he has some really strong themes throughout all of his work, and one of them is bullies like this. Like Biff from Back to the Future. That type of bully who is literally low IQ, maybe comes from a wealthy family, but is just violent for violence’s sake.Sarah: I think it’s really good though, because coming off Peter, it would be easy to get in a place of “people are good and they’re doing their best.” And I feel like he shows up and is like, “Yes, some people are. Some people, however, are bad, cruel people.”Laura: Poor Nick ran up against four of them in the dark. And it’s so true to small town life that the guy would be the sheriff’s brother-in-law. I know I probably should have felt the most sympathy for poor Nick, but when the sheriff was like, “that’s my wife’s brother,” I was like: Oh buddy, I’m so sorry, Sheriff John Baker.Chapter 10 - The GobblingLaura: Chapter 10. Gobble, gobble, Sarah.Sarah: No, no. Guys, it’s so bad.Laura: So Larry wakes up from a hangover. And he says: “He vaguely remembered being gobbled like a Purdue drumstick.”Sarah: That is bad enough. I wrote “Oh my God” in the side of my book. He says gobble like three more times.Laura: He talks about it so many times! I was like, if you don’t stop with the gobbling, I’m going to throw a spatula at your forehead.Sarah: This is what I underlined: “The girl’s name was Maria, and she had said she was what? Oral hygienist? Larry didn’t know how much she knew about hygiene, but she was great on oral.” Then he says the line about gobbling. Stephen King, stop it.Laura: She’s making him breakfast topless.Sarah: Always how I fry bacon. In a half slip. That’s always how I cook hot, greasy foods. Is in a half slip with my tits out. Makes perfect sense to me as a woman.Laura: But I do like the refrain of “I thought you were a nice guy.” In some ways, she’s his conscience. We’re getting the sense that, dadgummit, Larry is trying to be a nice guy. It is not in his nature, actually. He has that “it factor.” He has that thing. But how that plays out in real life is hard.Chapter 11 - Alice Underwood & The “Taker”Laura: In Chapter 11, he’s trying to get to his mother. He gets there and she says: “Sometimes I think you’d cross the street to step in dog shit.”Sarah: I must steal that. Because I absolutely know people like that.Laura: And then she says: “I think you’re a taker. You’ve always been one. It’s like God left some part of you out when he built you inside of me.” The taker part really got to me. It made me think of Scott Galloway talking about being a “net surplus” to society versus a net negative. Larry, you’re a net negative. You’ve got to be a net surplus.Laura: Are we going to get to see what would have been if the virus didn’t wreck everything? Because what if his music would have been the net surplus? How many times do we hear about great artists—like the Steve Jobs or whatever—who are really selfish in real life, and yet their contribution to the world is an outsized benefit?Sarah: I do want to take a hard turn and say... Should we chalk our child’s first bad word on their forehead and make them walk around the block?Laura: Wait, was that brilliant?Sarah: I think it was. Alice Underwood did that to Larry. I don’t know if you’re picking up on what I’m laying down here, but I’m not really a proponent of gentle parenting. So I think it’s a great idea..Chapter 12: Carla in the ParlorLaura: How are we not going to applaud Alice when the next chapter we get Carla in the parlor?Sarah: God, okay. The parlor is scary. I don’t ever want to go to the parlor.Laura: Did you have compassion for Carla, given she’d lost her baby boy?Sarah: 100%. I know people who have hardened in the face of hardship, exactly as Peter describes her. When Peter gets onto Carla... he says to her: “If she decides to keep this baby, you are going to give her the best baby shower.”Laura: Listen, small town life. I have witnessed the withholding of a baby shower from someone who got pregnant out of wedlock. It is cruel. That just knifed my heart a little bit.Sarah: Carla is mean. She tells Franny she’s a “bad girl.” I just love the “bad girl.” That’s kind of like a joke I tell my children. I’ll be like, “You’re a bad baby.” And one time I said it to Felix when he was pretty little, and he went: “No, I amn’t.”Laura: The most interesting part was when Peter comes in and he takes responsibility. He says: “I let you harden... I was not the sandpaper that should have showed up... so I hold responsibility for this, too.” That’s a really complex portrait of parenting. We cannot control each other, but we can influence each other.Laura: Did you feel a difference between Carla slapping Franny and Peter slapping Carla?Sarah: I just felt like there was a lot of slapping in the 70s, honestly. Just a lot of face slapping. I’ve never been slapped in the face.Laura: Well, I have. And let me tell you, it is humiliating. It is degrading. To me, when Carla slaps Franny, it is meant to be degrading.Sarah: When Peter slaps Carla... at least the vibe I felt like Stephen King was trying to put across is it was disruptive. It was to snap her out of it. Like Cher in Moonstruck. “Snap out of it!”Laura: I hear you, except then he says “you’ve been needing that for a long time.”Sarah: He could have left that out.Laura: Also, when Franny came in covered in blood... Carla’s immediate reaction was about the rug. But then she switched.Sarah: Who as a mother hasn’t said something they didn’t mean to say out their mouth? I have had a child bleed all over my house who then wept because he thought I was going to make him sleep outside because I had threatened them if they got my new paint job dirty. Bonus: Blood actually comes out of paint real easy.Laura: But then Peter ruined it a bit for me when he called Carla “it.” He kept calling her “dry,” like a dry age.Sarah: I did like the imagery of how he would retreat to the workshop to heal his heart, and she would retreat to the parlor where she could have a mask on of perfection.Chapter 13 - The CDC and “The Man With No Face”Laura: Chapter 13. We’re back with Stu at the CDC facility in Atlanta. His standoff, refusing to get his blood pressure taken, has worked. And Dick Deetz, another military man, comes in.Sarah: I do not understand the thing he is wearing to block his nasal passage and why that would matter if your mouth isn’t covered. He says it looks like a two-pronged silver fork. What the hell? Was he breathing in something else? Can’t it just be a mask, Stephen? You’re overthinking this, buddy.Laura: So Deetz comes in and he’s basically like... I’m not all the way up the chain of command, I can’t tell you everything. But, fun fact: Everyone from Arnett that came in with you is dead. You are not. We do not know why. And I loved this line when Stu asks the question everyone asks: “Whose fault is this?”.Sarah: Deetz says: “Nobody... On this one, the responsibility spreads in so many directions that it’s invisible.” I thought, oh man, that is so good. That is so true in so many circumstances. People hate to hear that. They want to blame somebody. They want justice.Laura: “It was an accident.” Do you believe him?Sarah: Yes. Even if this is a military-created virus, even in something as big as the United States military, it’s not going to be one person who says, “This is my idea... and I authorize it”. It’s never going to work like that. There’s going to be a million people who allowed it to advance. It’s just too big of a bureaucracy.Sarah: And this is also where Stu has a very vivid dream.Laura: Yes. This is big.Sarah: A vivid dream of cornfields and crows. Something dark is in the corn. “He sees two burning red eyes far back in the shadows... Those eyes filled him with the paralyzed, hopeless horror that the hen feels for the weasel. Him, he thought, the man with no face. Oh, dear God. No.” What does it mean, Laura?Laura: This is the first time that he has been referenced in The Stand. The man with no face.Sarah: Stephen King loves dreams. He likes mind control and dreams.Laura: So pay attention when there are dreams. Also, if you don’t know, a very scary story that Stephen King wrote is The Children of the Corn. He loves to put some scary evil in the cornfields.Sarah: What’s he got against corn? Well, and Stu says it must have been Iowa or Nebraska... but he had never been in any of those places in his life.Chapter 14 - A Gary Cooper ExteriorSarah: So Chapter 14, Deetz is recording his official report. This is where we learn that he has a “Gary Cooper exterior,” Stu Redman.Laura: Yes. Okay.Sarah: And that he dreams a great deal.Chapter 15 - A New Day?Laura: Then the last chapter, Chapter 15, we get a little visit from Patty Greer, the nurse.Sarah: I thought this was really good, too. Again, I think this is my post-COVID lens, but he talks about how she sneezes and... she didn’t even catch it. She didn’t even catch it even though there’d been signs everywhere saying “report any cold symptoms no matter how minor”. She didn’t even think about it.Laura: It makes me think about how people get frustrated telling people the same thing over and over again. Or like the famous Disney World example where people will ask “What time is the five o’clock parade?”.Sarah: It’s so easy to roll your eyes at people asking stupid questions or doing what we think is stupid. But I thought it was very empathetic and great how he wrote about it. She wasn’t doing anything wrong. She didn’t even think about it. She didn’t even clock her sneezes as a minor symptom. But guess what? That’s so human to me. And this chapter ends with: “A new day had begun.”Sarah: I don’t think a new day begun. I think all the days are coming to an end. We’re sunsetting a little. It’s a closing.Next Week:We will be reading Chapters 16-25 for next week’s episode, but if you want extra credit, check out John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis or watch out for our Outbreak rewatch episode.Up Next: The Side QuestHead over to the paid subscriber section where we are discussing Motherhood. See you on the other side! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slowread.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to SLOW READ, where we tackle the books you’ve always wanted to read at a pace you can handle.Hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Laura TremaineWe are currently reading The Stand by Stephen King (unabridged version)You can find our full Reading Schedule hereJoin the SLOW READ community on Substack for bonus episodes, book club meetings, and Side Quests with Sarah & LauraThis is the second episode of Slow Read The Stand. The Circle is open!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!Laura: Okay, here we go. Page one. Page one of 1,200. We got six months. We got plenty of time. Sarah, the circle has opened.Sarah: I don’t even know what that means yet. I don’t even know what “the circle opens” means yet.Laura: Well, I don’t think you’re supposed to. That’s the whole point. But what we’re discussing today is—he doesn’t call it a prologue, but it is. It’s like a few pages of prologue and then the first four chapters. But before we even do that, he kicks off The Stand with these quotes, these four quotes.Sarah: Music lyrics.Laura: Yeah. Well, okay, the first one... if he’d just done the Bruce Springsteen quote, I think I’d have been with him. I underlined “and try to make an honest stand.” Okay. Why did he keep going?Sarah: I mean, he couldn’t have known that Blue Öyster Cult was going to turn into a Saturday Night Live skit, in his defense. In 1978, he didn’t know that this song was going to become such a joke. So I have a little sympathy for the second one.Laura: Well, I think that he is really wanting you to “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”Sarah: But all I hear is cowbell, Laura. I also feel like... starting a book off with four quotes is a little bit amateur hour. My snobbery is going to show so early in this conversation, and for the next six months y’all just know it.Laura: Yeah, it’s like he couldn’t pick. Don’t you have an editor? But I wonder, do we know if the first edition in 1978 had all three? That’s a question I would like to know the answer to. Maybe he was like, “You know what? They made me cut the Bruce Springsteen lyric and I’m putting it back in in 1990.”Sarah: It’s just a little excessive. Was Bruce Springsteen a big deal in the 70s?Laura: Well, I think he was already, like, to the cool kids. He wasn’t mass popularity. I don’t know. My Bruce Springsteen education is lacking.Sarah: I did watch the entire Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary documentary about “Don’t Fear the Reaper” and how the song came to be and how it became a part of the sketch. I can tell you more than I really should know about this song. But I don’t understand the third one. “What’s that spell? What’s that spell? What’s that spell?” That’s not even a good lyric. What’s he doing? I don’t get it.SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night, More CowbellLaura: Okay, well, that third quote... I wasn’t even sure that that was a real band. I had to look it up. Country Joe and the Fish was an American psychedelic rock band formed in Berkeley, California in 1965. Maybe the idea is that you listen to it—or hear the song in your head. Maybe it’s really more referential to the vibe of the music than the lyrics. But I’m squinting here. I’m really trying to give it the maximum amount of credit for these three, a little bit superfluous, lyric quotes.Sarah: Well, here’s what you need to know about Stephen King. This is true in every book I’ve ever read of his. He is a real music lover. He will put music quotes or references—like how he always has characters listening to very specific songs when they’re driving the car. He never makes it generic. It is always very specific. He is a music person.Laura: The first three are music lyrics. And then on the next page where it says “The Circle Opens,” which is the beginning of our story, there’s yet another quote. But this one is from a poet who I was unfamiliar with—Edward Dorn.Sarah: Yeah, I’ve never heard of Edward Dorn.Laura: His most famous work is Gunslinger, which came out in 1968.Sarah: The poet reckoned? Yeah, what are you doing? It’s very Stephen King to me.Laura: Yeah, it’s so literal. To me, quotes like this should really add to or create a sense of energy or vibe. This feels a little literal. But he’s such a writer for the masses, you shouldn’t need some sort of esoteric background on Edward Dorn for this to make sense to you. I’m leaning on you here. I’m just thinking, “Oh, I bet the more I read, the more these will make sense to me.”Sarah: I don’t find the quotes in any of his books or the lyrics to matter that much. I’m sure they matter to him. And Edward Dorn, this poet, his most famous poem like I said is called Gunslinger. That is also the name of Stephen King’s first novel in his Dark Tower series. Oh no, he named that after Dorn? Like he was a Dorn fan?Laura: And what’s also going to matter a little bit—it still isn’t that deep to me—but a pretty main character in The Stand is a big part of the Dark Tower series.Sarah: Oh. I didn’t know there was connective tissue like that.Laura: Oh, King’s work is very connected. He is the original Taylor Swift Easter egg. He loves to bury some of his characters as just random side characters in one story and then flesh them out in a whole other novel later.Sarah: I love that. Like Elizabeth Strout—when she started putting Olive Kitteridge and all the people together. I’m really into that approach.Laura: So I love Elizabeth Strout, too. It’s not quite like that because with King, they’re not all living in the same universe, really. No, because you got multiverse. Time travel. So like in 11/22/63, for example, which is one of my very favorite King books—and for those who don’t like the horror stuff, it’s so excellent because it’s time travel—in one of the portions where the character goes back to the 50s, he runs into the kids from It. Just a tiny scene. You could read it and never know. But if you know, you know.Sarah: Well, who are we going to run into in this book? Because everybody looks like they’re going to die.The Prologue: Charlie and SallyLaura: So let’s start then. That’s kind of the prologue where we start with this man who is waking his wife out of a dead sleep. Turns out he should have been on the night shift, and he has her get up, get dressed, get their three-year-old baby LaVon.Sarah: Why do they call her “Baby LaVon”? And also, another very 70s thing—because I know he wrote this in 1978 and then updates it in 1990—but the 70s is peeking through. She was sleeping in a baby doll nightie.Laura: As we all do. Anyway, the woman gets up. Sally is her name. Which, listen, we’re going to take so many tangents here, but I have to tell you that “Sally” is my Starbucks name. Sarah: That’s what you put on all your orders?Laura: Every time. Jamba Juice, wherever. If you have to give your name, I always give “Sally” my whole life. Because my favorite story as a little kid was Judy Blume’s book starring Sally J. Friedman as herself.Sarah: Amazing.Laura: So Sally references always perk my ear up. Anyway, back to our people. He’s woken her up in the middle of the night. She’s so disoriented. And in the chaos, we learn that they’re on some sort of a military base where he works as a security guard in one of the towers. And when he was on shift, in the night shift, he happened to notice... right when some sort of alarm went off, the lights in his space turned from green to red. Then he looked at the security monitors where he can see inside this building that he’s guarding. And everyone inside is dead.Sarah: Oh, my gosh. So there’s supposed to be some sort of immediate lockdown mechanism there that’s triggered when this alarm goes off. But he manages to get out in those 30 seconds.Laura: Well, because he sees the clock turn red. He sees the clock. He’s like, “I got whatever this countdown is to get the hell out, I guess.”Sarah: Didn’t think at all. If they’re all dead and there’s a countdown... perhaps I should not flee and expose people to other dangers?Laura: Look, in Charlie’s defense, wouldn’t you say if he’s working in a security tower, he thinks that he’s away enough?Sarah: No, because if you’re running, you’re in danger. That’s why you fled. If you’re in danger, then you’re in danger of other people in this scenario.Laura: I mean, he knows there’s enough danger that he checks the direction of the wind.Sarah: This is what I’m saying. And then it goes, “You know what I think I’m going to do? I’m going to go run right to the two people I love most in the world.” I’m going to check the direction of the wind and then run right to my baby and my wife.Laura: They get in the car and that’s all we know. That’s the prologue. Now, I do want to say, again to the 70s of it all, I really liked it when he called her “Sugar Babe.”Sarah: Listen, one of my first books clubs over at By Plane or By Page , we did Danielle Steel’s breakthrough novel, Passion’s Promise. In the 70s, nicknames... lots of mama, so much mama, “hey mama,” “mama this,” “Sugar Babe.” They were something. They were a real indication of their time, the terms of endearment in the 70s.Laura: I think we should keep a running list of things that would make good merch. Sugar Babe is a good one.Sarah: Sugar Babe is such a good one. Okay. I’m noting that.Laura: I do not want the 70s Terms of Endearment to come back. They should die with whatever this is that’s spreading thanks to Charlie and Sally and baby LaVon’s road trip.Sarah: Poor baby LaVon.Laura: Not her fault. Check the wind and then go straight to my three-year-old. Good call, dude.Chapter 1: Arnett, TexasLaura: Chapter One. More quotes.Sarah: Oh, God. I know. What’s he doing? Two more. I don’t even know what these are. These songs? “Baby, can you dig your man? He’s a righteous man.” These are not the lyrics I connect with. The ones that just repeat the same thing over and over again.Laura: Okay, so The Silvers that are quoted there, they were a real band. They were an R&B band. So he’s just changing genres. Okay, branching out a little bit. I respect it. Their hit singles are called “Fool’s Paradise,” “Boogie Fever,” and “Hotline.” So, okay, that does seem relevant. He’s given us some hints. Now, the Larry Underwood song lyric, I want y’all to just put that in your pocket. I want you to just hold on to it.Sarah: Okay. I’m putting it in my pocket. I’m going to put it in the pocket of my “suntans,” which is a clothing item I had to Google when I encountered it with Charlie. I was like, what the hell is that?Laura: It’s just pants?Sarah: Yeah, they’re just pants. Just a word for pants nobody uses anymore. Why this didn’t make the cut in 1990, I do not know.Laura: Chapter One. This is one of the more memorable scenes for me in this whole story. The entire book, after Sally and Charlie, opens at a gas station in Texas, just outside of Arnett. A bunch of men are sitting around shooting the shit like they do in Texas. And one of the men, Stu Redman—this is our first introduction to Stu—he looks out the window and he sees this Chevy coming down the road, weaving all over. It slowly runs into the gas pumps.How old are you guessing Stu Redman is?Sarah: Oh, that’s a good question. I mean, in my head, he’s kind of younger, maybe like late 30s. Because he says he has a wife that... this was quite the sentence: “The womb of his young wife had born a single dark and malignant child.” So I thought, okay, well, so he’s been married, but he seems kind of gristled a little bit. So I was guessing late 30s, early 40s.Laura: I’d say that too, maybe. But the other guys seem older. I felt like Bill Hapscomb, the station’s owner, and a couple other of them seemed older than Stu.Sarah: You know what felt timeless about this scene? Being in a small town, growing up in a small town, is men sitting around talking about the same things they always talk about. Inflation. Memories about a past football quarterback star that made it out of the town. Stu was no quarterback. They’re just arguing about money and politics and one of them is dumb as dirt and one of them is maybe a little smarter than the rest of the room. He nailed the group dynamic.Laura: I totally agree. I really like the stuff about Stu—like he kind of knew he could leave, he should leave, but he couldn’t and he couldn’t really tell you why. Did it make you feel sad for him that he had to work, his baby brother got out, his other brother died, he’s stuck in the town? Or did it make you feel like he was a quiet sort of hero?Sarah: It just made me feel like I knew him a little bit better because there’s a lot of men in this scene and it’s kind of hard to keep them all straight. And I just felt like I understood and got to know Stu in a way that I kind of like, “OK, this is the guy I’m going to pay attention to.”Laura: You know, here’s the other thing about Stephen King that people who are new to him—it really does take a minute. If you read him a lot, you know he has so many characters. Like each scene has 10 people and he gives them all first and last names. And you’re like, well, how am I supposed to keep up from Vic, from Bill? And it’s like, these are not distinctive names. Bill, Stu, Eddie. You have to sort of trust him that you’ll learn which ones to hang on to and which ones he’s just using as an illustration. So don’t try to memorize all the people all the time. Don’t try to even draw a character map.Sarah: That makes me feel better. Anyway, so this car crashes into their pumps. The driver is alive, but barely. He falls out of the driver’s seat. And in a car with a dead lady and a dead three-year-old. Boy, I wonder who it could be. Not only are they dead, they’re like grotesquely dead. Swollen, purple, black eyes.Sarah: And I have so many questions about Charlie. Why was he still driving?Laura: He says, “Are they still alive?” But from what he describes, I guess he was just in the fog of his own illness that he couldn’t see that they were very clearly dead.Sarah: Oh, when he talks about when Charlie crashes in, and the worst part is he says something about... like, his spittle flew.Laura: And you’re like, oh, no. Not spittle.Sarah: No, you guys are all good and truly fucked if spittle is flying. But you also got to figure, they don’t really spell this out. And maybe we’re just hyper-aware of this because we just came through a pandemic. But you have to imagine if they have driven from California to Texas, how many places they’ve stopped. Restaurants, other gas stations, bathrooms, snacks. It’s gonna be bad. I feel like as I’m reading this, as opposed to when people read it in 1978 or 1990, post-pandemic I just feel a little bit like the gristled fisherman in Jaws where I’m like: It’s over for all y’all. I’m not even scared. I’m not even anxious for him. I’m so calloused about this. I’m just like, oh well, you’re gonna need a bigger boat.Laura: I know, but you know, the first time I read this pre-pandemic, it’s not that my logical brain couldn’t have connected the dots of how diseases spread, but I don’t think it would have been so top of mind. I would have been more sort of willing to let it unfold a little as a reader, whereas now we immediately go to spittle.Sarah: Yeah. And there are a lot of bodily fluids in these first couple of chapters. People have snot. People are coughing. There’s spittle. People’s bodies are swollen, full of fluids. But doesn’t that feel to you like when we all watched the opening scenes of Contagion or Outbreak?Laura: I loved Outbreak. I love that movie.Sarah: Where it’s showing how something spreads quickly and how often you’re just in contact with people casually and this thing is jumping around. This is like the earliest version of that.Laura: My favorite line in that whole section, when the men are baffled and trying to figure out what is happening, is when one of the men says: “Maybe they got a poison hamburger.” It happens.Sarah: You know what? He’s right, Laura. Considering the current state of our FDA, more right than in other times in American history. Just saying.Laura: If you saw dead people completely swollen, would your thought be, “Well, they could have gotten a poison hamburger”?Sarah: Definitely a poison hamburger. No. Anyway, they kind of reassure Charlie as he’s on the floor that his wife and baby are okay. We know they are not. And he dies in the ambulance. After exposing more people with his spittle. And we learn in that moment that patient zero is Charlie Campion.Chapter TwoLaura: Chapter Two opens in Maine. Stephen King’s favorite place, right?Sarah: That’s his place. His fictional town of Derry, Maine, is pretty infamous in horror world land. But he sets everything in Maine.Laura: Well, it was so interesting. We get to this chapter. We get these two new people, Jess and Franny. And I’m like, well, I thought maybe you were introducing us to everybody who survives, but I definitely know all those dudes aren’t surviving. So I’m trying to figure out why are we meeting all these people as we’re going through these first chapters. I’m trying to guard my heart here.Sarah: Franny is in this parking lot in Maine. She’s staring out at her boyfriend who’s sitting on the pier. She’s about to go tell him she’s pregnant. God, I loved this whole thing about Franny trying to figure out if she even loves this guy or not. She’s pushing on him. She really has a lot of disdain for him. But also, you know, she appears to have gotten pregnant after their very first time. I think that happened a lot in the 70s.Laura: And she really is like, talking about the pill, and maybe she forgot to take the pill. I’m like, Franny, girl, you forgot to take it. It was kind of a funny inner dialogue. I actually think that this is when you start to see how funny King can be. I thought his inner monologue of Franny’s thoughts were actually hilarious. My favorite was: “He struck a light, and for just a moment, as cigarette smoke rafted up, she clearly saw a man and a boy fighting for control of the same face.”Sarah: Listen, I live with a bunch of teenage boys. When I tell you that line hits...Laura: I live with a teenage boy, too. And I underlined that line as well. That’s so good.Sarah: And you can kind of see that Jess, the boy, he is sort of a doofus pants. Like, he does seem pretentious in the way that Franny is describing him. And yet you also sort of feel sorry for him. He’s trying. He’s blindsided by this news.Laura: And she’s being pretty mean to him in a way. She tells him she doesn’t want to marry him. She kind of makes fun of his intellect. Well, and then he slaps her.Sarah: This was giving 70s too. This was giving “sometimes you need a little slap.” Again, he had a chance to update this damn book. So I’m like, you left that in? In 1990?Laura: No, but I think it definitely happens. I just think it’s less socially acceptable than it was in 1978. Because she’s not like, “Pull over right now.” She’s just like, “Well, it’s okay, you were mad.”Sarah: It is kind of wild. But I did notice that the tone of this scene, like being with Franny and Jess, is pretty different from being in Texas with the gas station men. It was disorienting almost in a way. Because you’re like, why am I involved in this very intimate relationship conflict when I know I have this 1,200 page epic about a global apocalypse?Laura: We don’t know what they’re going to have to do with the story, but we’re really getting sort of a scene of what’s happening in another part of the country while these other things are moving east.Chapter ThreeSarah: Well, and I thought it was particularly interesting because it’s in such direct conflict with Chapter 3. We go back to Texas. And I felt like all this was just one paragraph after the other of: They’ve all got it. Everybody’s got it. They’re going to cough. They’ve got snot.Laura: Well, the thing about showing up with Norm in Chapter 3, who is one of the gas station guys, is you’re getting a bit of a different peek into this sort of Texas small town. Suddenly we realize Norm is maybe younger than I thought. He’s poor. He doesn’t have food in the fridge. His wife has gone to babysit for a dollar. What was that about? Again, 1990. We didn’t want to update that?Sarah: Also, we got the N-word. That’s a biggie.Laura: I was like, whoa, Stephen, 1990, you left that in?Sarah: Well, here’s the question, though. Is a character being horrendous—in this case racist—a reflection of Stephen King, or does he want you to know something about this character? If you want to know something about this character, it’s as true in 1978 as it is in 1990 as it is in 2025. We got a real insight into Norm real fast. That he is what my grandmother would call “low class.”Laura: And just kind of... you know, also made me laugh because I think he uses the word “pissant” again. Miserable little pissant.Sarah: That actually is a word I’m OK with bringing back. Not Sugar Babe. Pissant, though, is pretty descriptive. Maybe we should start using it again.Laura: Well, I just wonder if in 2025, we’re not reading this book like it was written in 2025. We’re reading it in the context in which it was written. Would you show that a character was racist in a different way? These days, it feels like you just take the N-word off the table as a white author. But if he’s trying to convey something, he got it across.Sarah: So all the gas station men are coughing. They have headaches. They have phlegm. And then Hapscomb, the owner of the gas station, is at work. He’s back at work the next day. And his cousin, who works for the state patrol, stops by to tell him that the health department is on their way. Because, turns out, what Charlie Campion had and what his family died from is contagious. And he just wants his cousin to know. In fact, it was not a poisoned hamburger. And another one of the brain trusts says, “Looks like it wasn’t a cold.” Maybe it ain’t a cold. I’m like, guys, does a cold make you swell up purple like an inner tube?Laura: Well, and then they sort of bring up that the Atlanta Plague Center is also going to come visit. I had not heard of the Atlanta, like, CDC or whatever until COVID-19.Sarah: Really? I feel like Ebola was always like the scary one before COVID.Laura: Remember monkeypox? Isn’t that what Outbreak is about?Sarah: No, that’s just monkeys. It wasn’t a monkey pox. I love Outbreak. Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo. Put it in my veins. I loved it so much.Laura: Maybe we should do a watch along. I feel confident it does not age well. But you know, it’s funny that we’re talking about this six years post-COVID. Are we now to a point where we can... I don’t know. I don’t want to say like laugh about it, because there’s been humorous healing all along. But what do you feel about the distance between where we are now versus like, you know, the year in 2021 where you could not read a book like this?Sarah: Well, I mean, that’s what I’m saying. I feel good enough about it that we’re hosting this. I feel good enough about it that we’re doing a six month read along with The Stand. But I mean, like I read Station Eleven last year. There’s like a game called “Pandemic” that my husband had and I was like, get this the hell out of here. I ain’t never playing that. So maybe there were some things I was not ready for, but I feel way past the idea of: I don’t want to talk about pandemics. I think it kind of helps you process it in a weird way.Laura: I do, too. I feel the same way, except that any trauma that I would have suffered from the COVID-19 pandemic was almost all emotional and within myself. I wasn’t working in a hospital. I didn’t lose an immediate loved one. And that’s a different experience than so many other people had.Sarah: You know, it would be foolish to say that we’re done processing it. When COVID started, we had an epidemiologist researcher on, and she was like, “we’re still studying the 1918 pandemic.” Like, we’re still studying the data. So can you imagine how long we’ll be talking about and thinking about and writing big old fiction books about pandemics?Laura: But or and... I don’t know, there’s been so many other things happening trauma-wise to process in the last five years on top of the pandemic. It feels like the hits have kept coming.Sarah: Yeah. I got a bad feeling about “the hits keep coming” for our friends here in Texas.Chapter FourSarah: We are at the beginning of this journey. This circle has barely opened everybody. It does feel like Chapter 3 is all just... “Oh, by the way, everybody has it.” And then Chapter 4. This is when we start to get, finally, a little bit of some explanation of what’s really going on here. Although, as we already discussed, our minds have very easily filled in these blanks a lot easier than a reader who read this before 2020. They might need to be spoon fed a little bit differently.Laura: Yeah. And they’re talking about communicability. And I’m like, oh, people would have no idea what that means. Stephen King’s “99.4% communicability.” I’m like, oh, I’m there with you, buddy. I was already there. I don’t need Mr. Starkey back at the base to explain to me why this is bad.Sarah: Well, and you aren’t sure when we meet Starkey, who gives us insight into Project Blue, whatever they were studying or working on... they finally give it a name: “A-Prime Flu.” But when we meet Starkey, we aren’t sure, is he a bad guy? Is he a scientist? Is he a good guy?Laura: I mean, are there bad guys or is there just a prime flu? In my mind, even though you told me this is about the battle of good and evil... until I guess I get a little bit further in chapter four and I’m like: Is this a fucking lab leak? Are you kidding me? I had not put that together from old Charlie. But this was a lab leak?Sarah: Yeah. Well, I think in a lab leak scenario, you still have to ask if there are good guys or bad guys here. Like, did we create this virus or were we containing this virus and it leaked or both? Was this a weapon of warfare or was this science or both? I felt there was a good and bad guy question when we meet Starkey.Laura: Yeah, especially when he’s describing the cafeteria, which I found very confusing.Sarah: Oh, wait, I love this part. This is one of the biggest imagery for me of the whole book. Why are people dropping dead in their soup? Is that just how fast it kills you?Laura: It appears that this thing is very, very, very airborne. So as soon as it was out in the building, the lab... and they shut down. But I mean, it killed them before Charlie left the tower. So we’re talking about within seconds.Sarah: I mean, I don’t know how—like this isn’t real microbiology realistic. Viruses wouldn’t kill you this quickly because they couldn’t spread. They want to spread. They want to live.Laura: So I guess his sort of theory of the case is that in the lab, first of all, it’s more concentrated, maybe. And that’s why it’s killing these people so much more quickly. He also mentions that it mutates so quickly that you can’t create a vaccine for it.Sarah: He also is just downing downers the whole time. Just swallowing them dry. One downer after the other. Again, very 70s coded. They love downers in the 70s. And there’s like... I don’t know. This is what also sort of made me think of like, is this a good guy, bad guy scenario versus like a neutral government program? That his son-in-law dies by suicide. The second this thing gets out, he’s like—and his son-in-law is the head of Project Blue. And Starkey is obviously some sort of high up government official. You’re also getting the hints that it was secretive because Charlie Campion, our escaped security guard, doesn’t have any proof of where he lives. He mentions that he’s been collecting hazard pay. There’s obviously a lot of secretiveness around this.Laura: My favorite line in this chapter was: “Somewhere along the line, you have to stop guarding the guardians or everyone in the world would be a goddamn turnkey.”Sarah: A goddamn turnkey.Laura: Wait, I like turkey, man.Sarah: Oh, let’s keep turkey. It’s turnkey. But that is true, kind of. You have to quit guarding the guardians at some point.Laura: But I have to mention, we cannot move past this chapter without mentioning this image that sticks so much in my mind about this whole thing that Starkey is also obsessed with. He keeps watching the monitors of the building where everyone’s dead because he can still see the cameras working. And he’s looking at the cafeteria where people are dead by the Twinkie section. And the one guy is face down in his soup. You will spend eternity with your face in a bowl of soup. In italics.Sarah: Suppose someone walked up to you and said you will spend eternity with your face in a bowl of soup. It’s like the old pie in the face routine. It stops being funny when it starts being you.Laura: I mean, couldn’t that be the whole thing with The Stand? It starts being scary when it starts being you.Sarah: Merch alert.Laura: Okay, so that’s sort of what happened in the first four chapters. Wait, wait, we can’t move on from chapter four until we note that Arnett is under quarantine, and all the guys at the gas station are being tested, but Stu keeps testing negative.Sarah: It’s true. Stu.Laura: But does that mean anything? Because Charlie Campion tested negative for 50 hours.Sarah: I think it does. I think it does. I’ve decided it does.Laura: Only time will tell. Only pages will tell.Homework & Next StepsReading Assignment:For next week, we are tackling Chapters 5 through 15. It’s about 84 pages. We can do it!Bonus Content:The Side Quest: One of the bonus offerings for paid subscribers on Substack is a section called “Side Quest.” This week we’re going to talk about the logistics of carrying around a 1,200-page book that you’re reading for six months. Become a paid subscriber so you don’t miss the full discussion!Slow Read: The Stand is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slowread.substack.com/subscribe

SLOW READ: The Stand reading scheduleWelcome to Welcome to Slow Read The Stand. We are your hosts Sarah Stewart Holland and Laura Tremaine This is the inaugural episode of Slow Read The Stand. For this first episode, we just wanted y’all to read the Author’s Note and the Preface in Two Parts. But also, today we wanted to share a little bit about this whole project: why we’re doing a slow read, why we’re doing The Stand, all of it.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!Sarah: We’re going to deep dive to set us on the right track for reading together for six months. I’m so excited. Have you ever done a slow read before, Laura?Laura: No. I mean, certainly not like this. In fact, this kind of way of doing a slow read—you introduced it to me. I didn’t even know people were doing it like this. It’s new.Sarah: Listen, it’s a new thing the Internet has invented. It is a great thing the Internet has invented. I was doing slow reads, I just didn’t know they were called that. Probably four or five years ago, I decided I was going to tackle some classic text over the course of the year. It’s too intimidating to sit down with The Brothers Karamazov and chip away over a month. It’ll just take up all your reading time. And I often read more than one book at a time. So I decided to pick one book and just chip away at it over the course of the year.I did The Brothers Karamazov, I did Don Quixote, I did Lonesome Dove—though I don’t think that took me a year. But I really wanted to get bigger, longer texts. I believe in a juicy book, a big book.Want to read more? Choose an extremely long bookLaura: Can I just say that I like that you took on that project? One of the things that has really spun me out a little bit about “Bookstagram” or “BookTok” right now is that it is like a race in quantity. How many books can you read a year or a month or a week?Sarah: Mm-hmm. It’s not that I don’t understand how we got here, and I’m all for people reading a lot of books. But there is something that really appeals to me in an analog way of slowing down and sitting with one work for a long time.Laura: Exactly. I’m an Enneagram One. I can definitely get in that “let me see how many I can check off my list” mode.Sarah: Me too. Did you know that I’m an Enneagram One too?Laura: I did not know that! Whoa. Wait, is this a good thing?Sarah: I think it is. You told me this book is about good and evil, and Enneagram Ones are all about black and white and seeing the world. So I think it’ll be superpowered.Laura: But we will not be offering a wider perspective because we’ll be like, “Good and Evil.” If we pick clearly who the good and bad characters are and you don’t agree with us, we’re so sorry. Two against one!So, I can get in that mindset really easily—let me just get through to the end. Let me complete it. I will gulp down a book. I will read a book and then two years later ask, “Did I read that book?” because I read it so quickly. So I really wanted to work on that aspect of myself with the slow reads.Sarah: But here’s the thing. I read Brothers Karamazov, I read Don Quixote. Did I get as much out of them as I possibly could just sitting down and reading them by myself? No. Because last year I did Footnotes and Tangents , a really lovely Substack run by Simon Haisell . He does a slow read of War and Peace and a slow read of the Cromwell Trilogy by Hilary Mantel. He advises you not to do both at the same time. Did I take his advice? I did not.So I did both of them last year. I did War and Peace, which I’d always wanted to read. War and Peace lends itself to this beautifully. You just read a chapter a night and he would do these great histories and accompaniment that really enriched my reading. I felt like I got so much more out of the book.But I kind of wore myself out on the classics set a long time ago. I’ve been on a run of those and I’m tired. I thought, “Okay, who do I want to read more of who has some long-ass books?” And a little light bulb went off and I went, “Wait, I know Stephen King.” And then I went, “Wait, nobody’s doing this yet. And I know exactly who to ask.” Laura: Because I am a Stephen King evangelist.Sarah: I know you are. And I love that about you.Laura: One of the most popular writers of all time, and I have taken him on like I’m his PR hype person. Like he needs me. He doesn’t need me for book sales, but truly what my mission is around Stephen King is that I want more women to read him. I want more midlife women specifically to read him—the kind of reader who would immediately say “no” when they just hear that it’s a Stephen King book. Because they don’t want to be scared, or they’re intimidated by the length. They think horror novels are going to make them scared to sleep at night. I love that. I really feel strongly about it because I do think that women reading horror in general—and Stephen King is such a good entry point—is important. Everybody knows him. He’s an incredible storyteller. But the reason I want women to read horror is because I think a lot of people are missing out on a whole genre that they think they’re scared of. It is actually so culturally relevant, so creative, and so fulfilling.Sarah: I could not agree more. This is a genre I don’t have a lot of experience with. The only Stephen King book I’ve ever read is Carrie. But I did read it when you kept recommending him, and it held up so well. It’s so impressive how well that book holds up for a man writing a teenage girl 40 years ago.Part of the reason I engage with literature is because I so enjoy the craft of writing. And if you know anything about writing, you know that he is one of the best. He is an expert at his craft. I really don’t understand why people, particularly women, say they are scared. If you’ve read Harry Potter, you’ll be OK. I was scared out of my mind at the end of the fourth Harry Potter book. I survived it. People read dark stuff; it’s just not under the genre of “horror,” so they think that’s a totally different thing.Laura: Well, horror as a genre is sort of akin to saying “romance.” There are a ton of different types. Horror is the same. People think it’s going to be graphically bloody or real “monstery,” and that’s just not true. There is monster horror, body gore horror, psychological horror. Stephen King himself is not the worst of that at all.Sarah: Right. You think of Jack Nicholson in The Shining. That is just not what the books are, actually.Sarah: Interesting. Well, fun fact about me—and let’s get this out of the way now while we’re tackling horror and imagery. I am not a visual reader. I do not picture anything in my head almost ever while I’m reading. When people say, “Oh, that’s not how I picture the character,” I don’t picture the character. So that part is not intimidating to me. It’s almost like I have an audiobook in my head when I’m reading.Laura: Wait, what do you mean? You don’t see anything? How do you understand what’s happening?Sarah: It’s like I’m listening to it. If it’s describing a woman standing in the kitchen, I’m not picturing a woman standing in the kitchen.Laura: Not me. That is kind of weird.Sarah: It is, but it also makes horror super easy for me. I’m not going to be sticking with anything graphic. Horror is my playground. I’m not scared. I’m ready.Laura: Well, The Stand isn’t horror in the way that word makes you think. The Stand is apocalyptic. There are definitely supernatural elements, but it’s not monsters under the bed. So, I came to you and said I want to do this slow read project with Stephen King, and I bowed to your expertise. You picked The Stand.I picked The Stand for a few reasons. Now, this is actually not my favorite Stephen King book. I am not a Stephen King expert; I am a Stephen King super fan. I love him, but I haven’t read every single thing. He’s written in several genres in the last 15 years, like crime/cop genres that I skip. But since I was in fourth grade reading the dirty parts of my neighbor’s mom’s books, I’ve loved him.Since then, I’ve said we are going to study him like we do Edgar Allan Poe or Dickens. Writers that were maybe poo-pooed in their time and then became the classics that they are. That has since come true; people do study Stephen King in college now.Back to why I chose The Stand for this project. It is my favorite for the record, though I’ll share my other favorites with Slow Read members. I’ve been running a Stephen King summer book club since 2021, and we did The Stand in 2023. I wanted to return to it because it is so relevant in so many ways that are kind of a bummer, but will make for excellent conversation.Sarah: So you’re not going to get graphic gore, but you might get bummed out about the state of the world?Laura: Well, its whole premise is a flu-like pandemic that wipes everybody out except for a select few. That’s a tough hang, even six years later.Sarah: I read Station Eleven recently, and I did okay.Laura: Station Eleven, I think, borrows heavily from The Stand. That’ll be a whole episode. There are a lot of novelists and pop culture—even songs like Metallica and Anthrax—that have drawn upon The Stand since it came out in 1978.Sarah: Was it really sort of a definitive apocalyptic text in the 20th century?Laura: I can’t think of another one that would have been more high profile. But King is very generous in saying where he gets ideas from. He originally wanted to write a big epic tale inspired by The Lord of the Rings. And he was also, weirdly, inspired by the Patty Hearst kidnapping. He tried to write a Patty Hearst type book and it wasn’t working. Then he read an article about chemical warfare and what would happen if it took out the population. He abandoned the Patty Hearst project and put together what became The Stand.The Story of Patty HearstI thought his “Preface in Two Parts” was fascinating. I just think he’s such a funny guy. You can feel him creeping right up to saying, “They made me cut it,” but he’s humble about it.Sarah: I agree. He’s also kind of corny. He makes dad jokes.Laura: Yeah, he’s not “cool.” He still comes off as kind of a sci-fi nerd. I thought it was interesting that he says, “It’s not my favorite book, but it’s all of y’all’s favorite book.”Sarah: He actually has really bad taste in his own work. He hates the movie The Shining. It was really interesting reading the section about the film adaptations. He’s taking us through his casting notes, which feels like something they should have cut!Laura: So, the Preface in Two Parts came out when the uncut version—the one we are reading—came out in 1990 with 400 pages added back in. When The Stand originally came out in 1978, it was literally too long to be printed with the binding technology of the time. I do have concerns about my spine holding up. I can’t believe you’re doing the paperback.Sarah: Well, I wanted to take it with me when I travel. But anyway, the 1990 version has some modifications. He updated the timeline and pop culture references, rearranged chapters, and added back about 150,000 words.Laura: I think he’s right that it makes these characters richer. This is a plot-driven book, but adding back those words makes for a richer experience. There have been miniseries adaptations—one in 1994 with Molly Ringwald, and one in December 2020 during a pandemic, which was such bad luck.Laura: This book has sold four and a half million copies. Of course it spawned miniseries. It’s currently in development to be a movie. And in August of 2025, a book came out called The End of the World as We Know It, which is basically an anthology of stories set in The Stand universe written by famous horror writers like Paul Tremblay and S.A. Cosby.We hope over the course of this project to maybe do a watch-along of the miniseries or explore this new book. That is what is beautiful about a slow read—you’re not in a hurry. You can go on “side quests.”Sarah: We plan on picking up those threads. A book this big has lots of tentacles. We’re going to let them all flow through.Laura: Let me say one other reason why I chose this when you came to me. I knew that you, Sarah, would be a great person to have a conversation around this story because it’s pretty political.Sarah: Oh, I’m so excited. I love a political novel. My work at Pantsuit Politics is all about how politics is deep and wide. Often, a piece of fiction is the best way to unpack this stuff because the stakes are low. It’s politics on a micro level—the politics of human nature.Laura: If 97% of people are gone, nobody is using their Congress card to vote. It’s the politics of how we live in community together.Sarah: Exactly. Sounds like there’s going to be lots of that in The Stand.Laura: Should we go through the logistics?Sarah: Okay. We will be reading The Stand by Stephen King from now, January 2026, to the end of June. Six months. We’ve broken down a reader’s guide for you so you know what we’re going to talk about on every episode. A deadline really helps with a book this long.Laura: I’ve never done a slow read where you almost have to abstain. You get so into it you want to keep going. But there’s something nice about forcing yourself to stop, let it sink in, and participate in the conversation.Sarah: We are going to have a subscriber community on Substack where we will have once-a-month Zooms. If you are really into chatting about this in a group setting, that will be available. No matter what, subscribe on Substack to get the reading schedule.Laura: We want members who are reading it with us to participate. It’s really fun hearing perspectives I hadn’t thought about. If you think an online book club isn’t as satisfying as a real-life book club, let me tell you: yes, it is. The Zoom puts up a nice framework where you can actually talk about the book.Sarah: Can I tell you what my favorite quote is from The Stand? Can I read it to you?Laura: Absolutely.Sarah: “No one can tell what goes on between the person you were and the person you become. You just come out the other side. Or you don’t.”Laura: Is that our send-off? See you on the other side? It’s a little ominous, the “or you don’t” part.Sarah: Let’s just assume we will see you on the other side, everyone.Laura: See you on the other side.Shoutout to Simon Haisell of Footnotes and Tangents and Laura’s Stephen King Summer Book ClubFind Sarah Stewart Holland at Pantsuit Politics and By Plane or By Page Find Laura Tremaine at Secret Stuff by Laura Tremaine Slow Read: The Stand is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slowread.substack.com/subscribe

Sarah sat down with Simon Haisell of Footnotes and Tangents to talk about how a slow read can add richness to your reading life, why every slow read doesn’t have to be long, and the unexpected downside of reading the world’s greatest authors!Slow Read: The Stand is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slowread.substack.com/subscribe

We are so excited to tell you about our new project SLOW READ. This is a podcast and Substack community dedicated to reading the books you want at a pace you can handle. And we’re starting with a modern classic: The Stand by Stephen KingEvery other week we’ll have a conversation dissecting this 1,200 page tale, chapter by chapter. The goal is to dive into epic novels with a community of readers who want to go deeper. We’ll kick off reading The Stand together on January 1, 2026 and we’ll close the circle by June 16th. Six months with one story! It’s the opposite of what the world’s current chaos is screaming, and it’s just what we need. Stay tuned for our complete reading schedule, more thoughts on the current literary landscape, background on Stephen King and The Stand, and more. What else you need to know:* We will be reading the complete and uncut version of The Stand (so make sure you don’t accidentally grab the abridged 1978 version)* On Substack, members will have access to bonus material including regular book club meetings hosted by Sarah & LauraEnjoy this short teaser explaining a little bit more about our vision for SLOW READ and why we chose to read a novel about good & evil in 2026Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss a thing!Sarah & Laura This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slowread.substack.com/subscribe