The Stand was not the first Stephen King novel I’d ever read – that honor goes to Thinner, written under his pen name of Richard Bachman – but it was the one that got me hooked on King. This book has stayed with me in the two decades since I first read it, and my two favorite sections are when he shows the spread of the superflu and the government response around the U.S., and then the immediate aftermath of the superflu, where he goes into the “second epidemic” of deaths that claimed some of the survivors; heart attacks, infections, suicides, and other such maladies. Depressing? Yes. Incredibly written? Also yes. It was so interesting to me to see how the rest of the world outside our main characters reacted to Captain Tripps, and those small vignettes just stuck with me. So, when I heard that there was going to be an anthology of short stories set in the same universe as The Stand I preordered that thing faster than you can spell M-O-O-N.
The End of the World As We Know It is divided into sections that cover the pandemic, its aftermath, the choosing of sides, and then finally a speculative look into the future. Some stories are stronger than others, some stories are weirder than others. Some authors subsume their own style in order to write like King, while some authors are unapologetically themselves. (For real, read S.A. Cosby’s or Cat Valente’s stories and tell me that there’s any way they could be mistake for anyone other than themselves.) There are hopeful stories and horrifying ones, and a few that are told from animal perspectives. But every single story is an obvious reflection of the love these authors feel for The Stand and for Stephen King’s Dark Tower universe.
My personal favorites were The African Painted Dog, by Catriona Ward; Kovach’s Last Case, by Michael Koryta; The Legion of Swine, by S.A. Cosby; and Came the Last Night of Sadness, by Catherynne M. Valente.
This is not a quick read – 36 authors contributed to this anthology, and the whole book clocks in at over 700 pages. But it is a collection that will draw you in, that will make you think about humanity and morality and grief. If you liked The Stand I would highly recommend giving this one a read.