Stephen King has written another new ending to The Stand – but do we need it?
Stephen King fans, gather ye here: our lord and master has written a new ending to The Stand, his story of a post-apocalyptic world decimated by a superflu that he has called a “long tale of dark Christianity”.
King wrote the “new coda that won’t be found in the book” for the forthcoming TV adaptation starring James Marsden and Amber Heard; CBS’s Julie McNamara told Deadline that “for fans of the book who have wondered what became of the survivors of The Stand, this episode will contain a story that takes us beyond the book to answer those questions.”
King himself has tweeted that his script for the final episode is already written, and that it “has been in my mind for 30 years”.
But The Stand, in which the scant American survivors of the superflu are drawn towards the saintly Mother Abagail if they’re good, and towards the evil Randall Flagg if they’re bad, already has two endings. The first appeared in the original, 800-page version published in 1978. Set in the 1980s, that version ends as two survivors, Stu and Fran, contemplate the future of humanity.
It is bleak, but honest. King says in On Writing: “I searched my mind and heart for something else Stu could say, some clarifying statement. I wanted to find it because at that moment, if at no other, Stu was speaking for me. In the end, however, Stu simply repeats what he has already said: I don’t know. It was the best I could do. Sometimes the book gives you answers, but not always, and I didn’t want to leave the readers who had followed me through hundreds of pages with nothing but some empty platitude I didn’t believe myself.”
But that version of the novel was missing 400-odd pages, cut because King’s publisher at the time couldn’t physically print such a large manuscript. By 1991, King was with another publisher who could, so an uncut, 1,200-page version set in the 1990s was released, with a new and more ominous coda. This time, Flagg has survived the “hand of God”/nuclear explosion, and been transported to an island peopled by a “primitive; simple; unlettered” people. He starts again.
I’ll be honest – I’m wary of whatever happens here. I watched but didn’t love the 1994 mini-series of The Stand, and while I still count King as one of my favourite writers, I haven’t genuinely loved anything he’s written since 2008’s Duma Key. And I wonder how much will change in the journey from book to television. Five years ago, a draft script reportedly had Stu and Flagg engage in a magical, “Akira-like battle on the Las Vegas Strip”. Please Mother Abagail, no.
In his introduction to the 1991 version of The Stand, King wrote that “it’s perhaps best for Stu, Larry, Glen, Frannie, Ralph, Tom Cullen, Lloyd and that dark fellow to belong to the reader, who will visualise them through the lens of imagination in a vivid and constantly changing way no camera can duplicate. Films, even the best of them, freeze fiction. That is not necessarily bad … but it is limiting.”
For this third new ending, perhaps King has now found the answers he was looking for 30 years ago when won
dering what Stu might say. Or maybe CBS will simply spool out the stories of Stu and Fran into the future, revealing whether humanity has one after all – I’d watch that for sure, particularly if Mr MO-O-N makes an appearance.
In the meantime, a reread of The Stand is definitely in order, before this novel – a masterpiece, in my opinion – is frozen, in King’s words, by its adaptation. Who’s with me?