I have not forgotten my duties. In fact I am still reading, perhaps more voraciously than ever before. I just made it through the unabridged version of The Stand, all 1,152 pages in a little less than 3 weeks. Although 5 hours on a plane affords one a lot of reading time. So now I am left with the question of whether or not to go back in time and blog about the books that I have read. I may do that for some, like The Tommyknockers, or Misery, or Skeleton Crew. While others will fall away, like The Talisman - a great story, but one that grows foggy in my memory almost immediately. In fact, the one thing that stuck out so strongly in my mind about The Talisman was something from the last 10 pages of the book. In my mind "Run Through the Jungle" (from CCR) played an important role in the book - but not so much.
The Stand
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| Beloved and well-read |
Including the abridged version, I have read this story 5 times. [Given my capacity for rereading books that I love, it is a bit of a wonder that I have read anything other than Stephen King and Tolkein]. In the process of reading, I lost the front cover and the back cover, taped them both on and lost the back cover again because I got sand in the tape, I got chocolate on a couple of the pages and a grease stain in the middle of the book. Poor thing has been through the wringer.
I would love to give you impressions, but I feel that they would be fairly similar to my other posts on the abridged version: post 1, post 2, and post 3. The big question that I posed to myself was whether or not I would be able to notice the discrepancies. The answer is yes, all 500 pages of them. Characters were left out, intense scenes were left out, there are many more allusions to Lord of the Rings (many of them outright references to Mordor and the Eye of Sauron), but the thing that sticks out the most is how much more cohesive the story is. I cannot imagine that his publishers thought the edited version was better. Sometimes there is just no accounting for taste.
If you read Danse Macabre, King's thesis is that the works of fiction published represent the collective fears of the country/world. You can look to current works of fiction to know what it is that we are all terrified of. Generalizing of course: in the 1950's it was big bugs and nuclear war; in the 80's we were faced with rape (vampires) and aliens; in the 90's it was technology taking over (Terminator) and society breaking down (The Stand). Right now, we are faced with fears of viruses that will turn us into zombies and cause our society to break down. The Stand is a great study of society breaking down and rebuilding itself - as well as the classic struggle between good and evil.
Part of me is a little sad that I will not be reading this book again during the project. But, not to worry, the Dark Man comes back in The Dark Tower series. But 763 pages of 4 Past Midnight stand between me and Randall Flagg.
For those keeping track, I have now read 12,370 pages!
I think it goes without saying, but I enjoy fiction. There is something about getting lost in the story, falling in love with characters, and living in another world where some of the conventions of this world do not apply. I could be living in a world with hobbits, elves, dragons, telekinesis, magic, levitation, zombies, vampires, you name it. Whatever the case, I just get lost. My eyes fly over the page and I have been known to stay awake until 4am without getting tired or even know that it is 4am.
I love non-fiction. In fact, I spend more time reading non-fiction than fiction. In reading Danse Macabre, I realized that I labor over every word of non-fiction and that it takes forever. The layout of every sentence is important to the ideas presented in a work of non-fiction. Whereas, in a fiction novel, an author could write in comfortable run-ons and fragments and you could still follow the story.
Danse Macabre, was both wonderful and painstaking at the same time - around 10,000 minutes of reading. This is King's overview of the horror genre, written in 1980, although I read the 2010 revision.
I am also a person that loves to know what makes people tick. Stories are nice, but I prefer to know why a person decides to hack someone to bits, or turn to drugs, or alienate the people around them. In essence, this study is an ode to what makes the horror genre tick. If you are not a person that enjoys horror and you wonder why someone who spends most of their time practicing yoga and helping others to heal, then I think King answers that question.
"We take refuge in make-believe terrors so the real ones don't overwhelm us, freezing us in place an making it impossible for us to function in our day-to-day lives. We go into the darkness of a movie theater hoping to dream badly, because the world of our normal lives looks ever so much better when the bad dream ends...Perhaps we go to the forbidden door or window willingly because we understand that a time comes when we must go whether we want to or not...and not just to look, but to be pushed through. Forever."
And this works as an explanation for me. It is not that my life is horrible but in comparison to Rick from "The Walking Dead" my life is a walk down easy street.
The horror genre also provides an escape for the over active imagination. The mind that can dream up zombies, haunted houses, or as was the case last night, ghostly beings that take over the bodies of friends at night as we live in a home in the middle of nowhere, can find freedom in the terror on a page or movie screen where the main character lives and the "bad guy" dies. Knowing that Stephen King is an adult who sometimes turns the light on at night and snuggles up to his wife because he has woken up from a nightmare and is still afraid of the dark, makes me feel a certain kinship to him. It also dissolves the shame I once had for doing the same thing. In the overactive imagination wonderful art is produced, but there is always something lurking in the shadows.
