The Stand and The Lord of The Rings
I started reading The Stand because I’m a huge Lord of the Rings fan, and I love Stephen King, and I had heard that it was basically his take on LOTR. So that was kind of the lens through which I read the whole book. Took me a while, but I just finished this morning and I wanted to organize my thoughts on where exactly all of that influence shows up, and see if anybody has different interpretations, or stuff I missed. So here we go:
- The most obvious parallel is just the simple good vs evil thing, with Vegas being Mordor, Flagg being Sauron, another Abigail being a little bit of a Gandalf, and all that. He directly alludes to this connection at one point. I don’t think I need to dwell on this one for too long.
- Trash Can Man is the book’s Gollum, but instead of being obsessed with a parallel to the Ring, he’s obsessed with Flagg. The “my life for you” thing is basically his “my precious”, and it is fittingly Trash Can Man’s inability to break free of that obsession that becomes Flagg’s undoing.
- There are bits and pieces of other LOTR characters sprinkled around the Free Zone people. Ralph is clearly the Sam Gamgee of the bunch, and Nick is his Frodo (although Nick >!dying midway through the book!< obviously is a big curveball there). Tom also gets his Sam moment when he carries Stu up the big hill. Meanwhile, Stu is probably the closest thing they’ve got to Aragorn — older, pretty wise, and the natural leader, even when he doesn’t always want to be.
- A major theme of both books is the futility of evil; it can’t create anything new or pure or original — only pervert and/or destroy what already exists. And it always breeds its own self destruction. Sauron and Flagg both seem poised to conquer everything, only to watch their empires basically erode from within. Obviously the Ring plays a huge part too, but even before they destroy it, Sauron’s army is basically eating itself alive.
- Conversely, both books lean heavily into the idea that the smallest acts of kindness, courage, and mercy can change the entire course of history in profound ways. For example, Gollum and Trash are both repeatedly shown mercy/pity by people who, by all means, should just kill them (including Sauron and Flagg), and then both end up accidentally saving the world in the end.
- My biggest takeaway though was the theme of everything happening being part of a much larger, totally indecipherable divine plan. Tolkien gives his world a creation story in The Silmarillion, where Ilúvatar (god) conducts a choir of what essentially amount to his angels to sing the story of the universe before it actually exists. One of them keeps trying to change the tune and do his own thing, but no matter how he changes it, Ilúvatar manages to weave it back into his own overarching song. Then when the song is over he creates the world and the “song” begins to play out for real.
LOTR is full of moments where everything just happens to be in the right place at the right time and it all just works out — even if it initially seems exactly the opposite. Merry and Pippin get captured, but if they don’t, they never meet the ents and Isengard never falls, and the power trio never winds up at helms deep, and the bad guys win.
In The Stand, you have a lot of that too. Tom’s trip west accomplishes very little besides that his being there at all drives Flagg crazy. But if he doesn’t go West, he can never run into Stu on the way home and save his life. Stu’s trip west accomplishes even less besides breaking his leg and putting him in a position to witness the explosion and bring back the news. And without him, Tom never would have been able to make it back to Boulder.
Which brings me to my one big gripe: Nadine Cross is a useless character that accomplishes nothing and leaves no lasting impact on the story that wasn’t already being left more effectively by somebody else. She plants the bomb, but Harold could’ve done that himself if he wanted to. I guess maybe you could argue she’s what keeps Harold on the dark side when he almost goes good. But outside of that, her whole Nosferatu thing with Flagg served no purpose, as far as I can see. And why does Flagg want a son anyway? He’s immortal. He doesn’t need to leave his legacy to anyone. He really wants to be dragging a kid around all the time?
Okay. That’s what I’ve got off the top of my head. I should’ve taken notes as I was reading, but also I don’t think I needed to put more time into this thing than I already did.