The Stand + Serious Business

While this blog is mainly for my own amusement, I do occasionally explore the more ’serious’ side of WordPress. You know what kind of places I’m talking about  – the trenches where the culture war is bitterly fought between people of sane disposition and crackpot Ron Paul supporters*. Being an atheist, the topic that interests me most is probably religion and, to a lesser extent, how it affects politics. I say ‘to a lesser extent’ because I don’t have all that much interest in international cock-waving competitions and because the cock-waving in question is inevitably American.

However, this stuff does have some potential bearing on my life even though I don’t live in that cauldron of insanity, so every now and then I like to chime in on a discussion about evolution or homosexuality or some other topic that always crops up whenever believers and non-believers butt heads. I tend to feel a bit two-faced about this, however, since in those discussions I try to be as down-to-Earth and objective as possible while on this blog I use phrases like ‘cock-waving’. I’m always a bit worried that someone will click on my name and discover that I’m actually a bitter, cynical walking steretype who turned his back on God out of petty malice rather than high-minded philosophical windbaggery. For the record, then, my persona during ’serious’ discussions is far closer to the real thing than this one.

To be honest I’ve become a bit jaded with all of this internet ’serious business’  stuff. The whole global warming debate is a perfect example: it’s become so political that people treat it like some sort of holy war, and with both sides frothing at the mouth and accusing the other of being lying scumbags it’s a bit hard to find anyone to talk to about it who you’d be willing to invite into your house without palming a kitchen knife first. Which is a shame, because it’s an important topic with potentially serious ramifications for all of us regardless of who’s right.

I’m tempted to say that the internet makes people act in ways contrary to their true nature, but I actually think it’s the opposite; the internet lets people act the way they wish they could in real life, but without running the risk of getting maced – which means that people are generally self-righteous, indignant pricks who can’t handle someone disagreeing with them without going into coniptions. Woe is us.

Anyway, that’s enough of that. I mentioned before that I’m reading the ‘director’s cut’ version of The Stand, and I’m still reading it. It’s one long motherfucker, so I’ll probably still be ’still reading it’ for quite a while. Or not – as much as I like King and his stories, and as fun as it is to spot all of the Dark Tower references, the pacing is really starting to get on my nerves. King has the remarkable ability to create a character that we actually care about in just a few paragraphs, but he seems to want to show this off at every oppurtunity. For example, when the superflu is finally starting to wind down after killing almost everyone on Earth (this is around page 400, by the way) we’re told that lots more people are being killed due to the aftermath – children falling down wells and people accidentally electrocuting themselves, that kind of thing. Fair enough, King’s got his eye set on realism. Now, I would have been perfectly content with this being shown by one of the main characters coming across the fresh corpse of a woman who accidentally shot herself, or spotting a starved child lying by the side of the road. Either of those would have demonstrated pretty clearly that the post-flu world is still dangerous to those who aren’t tough enough to survive. Instead, we get eight or nine little  mini-stories about a few random people dying through misadventure, complete with an unecessary amount of backstory and padding. This crap drags on a little bit too much for my liking.

Unfortunately, this is something inherent in King’s style. It’s never enough for him to show us that ‘John is an alcoholic author-insert’ by, say, having him wake up hungover for the tenth time that month. Instead he has to have a twenty-page flashback about how John’s drinking spiralled out of control after he got wasted on a high school field trip and all of his friends left him one by one and he let his mother down and he’s such an asshole and how many ways are there to say ‘this character is me under a different name’? I don’t mind it the first few times, but when it happens in every single book he writes it starts to get a bit irritating.

The Stand also suffers from glacial pacing. Most of the time the writing is good enough that you don’t care (like I said, King’s characters really are incredibly well made) but more than once I’ve found myself wishing there were less groups of characters and that the plot would move along a bit more quickly.

I’m going to stick with The Stand despite these complaints, and because there’s a character who sets giant fuel tanks on fire, but I’m starting to get a bit tired of King’s over-indulgence.

(DISCLAIMER: I know-diddly squat about Ron Paul and was just trying to make a cheap joke at the expense of an acceptable target. Please don’t include me in your conspiracy theories).