Welcome to SLOW READ, where we tackle the books you’ve always wanted to read at a pace you can handle.

Hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Laura Tremaine

We are currently reading The Stand by Stephen King (unabridged version)

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Mentioned in this episode:

* Michael Pollan on the Ezra Klein Show

* Rosemary’s Baby (1968 film)

* The Sopranos

The Announcement Before We Begin

Laura: Hello, I’m Laura Tremaine.

Sarah: And I’m Sarah Stewart Holland.

Laura: This is Slow Read, where we tackle the books you’ve always wanted to read at a pace you can handle. And we are in the final chapters of The Stand by Stephen King.

Sarah: If you have been reading along with us since January, lordy, things are finally happening. And if you are binging and catching up with us, well, welcome.

Laura: There is a lot to discuss, including whether or not Randall Flagg is a bride’s dream come true.

Sarah: He is not.

Laura: Spoiler for the whole episode. He is not.

Sarah: Now, we would love for you to join us for our last couple of book club meetings for The Stand. Our May meeting is next week. And then we’ll have a big final meeting in June to process the end of The Stand and our whole slow reading experience together. You will want to be there for these meetings because they’re going to be very satisfying to discuss this novel after being with these characters for six months — and each other for that matter. And we’ll be revealing what our next Slow Read is going to be. It’s a big one. It’s a big announcement.

Laura: These book club meetings are for our Substack paying members only. And when you join us over there at the Slow Read Substack, you will get not only our book club Zooms with me and Sarah, but you’ll also get a host of other goodies, like all of our Side Quests where we share our personal stories about our dreams, death, parenthood, love triangles. Don’t you want to hear us talk about those things that are tangentially related to The Stand that we have been discussing for the last five, six months? Join us over on slowreadbookclub.com. That’s on Substack.

The Balance of Good and Evil (Before We Even Get to Chapter 65)

Laura: Okay, Sarah. Chapters 65 through 71. Wow.

Sarah: It’s weird because Stephen King has spent the whole book setting up how powerful Randall Flagg is. And then the closer they get, he’s starting to poke holes in that power — which felt like a lot of what this section was. But it hasn’t really lessened my trepidation for our boys as they get closer to Vegas. You know what I mean?

Laura: A lot of things I think are happening. He is poking holes in how all-powerful he is, but it feels like sort of the yin and yang to what he also did with Mother Abagail.

Sarah: Yeah.

Laura: So there’s a real balancing happening in this part of the book, which for me was a little jarring — to go from all of these hundreds of pages spending in the Free Zone with these characters that we love and how they’re setting up their community and all this, and then now to spend the last couple sections in Vegas. I’m like, this is a decidedly different vibe. And I agree with you. It doesn’t make him any less scary.

Sarah: But that’s because we know from life experience — not to mention our own literary tastes — that just because he’s not all-powerful doesn’t make him any less terrifying. It’s almost he’s almost more terrifying now that he’s feeling a little desperate.

Laura: Right, because he’s backed into a corner. People backed into a corner are dangerous, for sure.

Sarah: There’s a lot that happened in this section that sort of brought up so many questions that we have been teetering on the edge of in terms of: what is good and evil? What is all-powerfulness? Who is Mother Abagail and Randall Flagg, like — are they, if they’re not exactly God and the devil, are they angels, demons? And there’s just a lot of questions about those characters, but then also about our community characters in terms of like, nobody is all bad or all good.

Laura: He feels all bad to me, but the bad is complicated. Well, he does. He might be all bad — but I guess I meant the community people as they’re starting to have doubts.

Sarah: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s what opens up the most interesting moments, especially with Lloyd and Nadine and everyone not operating out of a place of pure fear. Because the holes that King pokes in Randall Flagg’s power break the spell just enough that people in Vegas can start to assess their own decision-making. In the same way that Mother Abagail disappearing freed people up to take leadership roles and make some decisions in the Free Zone — it’s a very similar situation, I think.

Laura: Yeah, that’s what I was feeling in the balance of it all. When Mother Abagail goes on her walk to the woods, it’s kind of disappointing, but you still have this human nature thing of like, all right, we’ll buck up, we got to come together and do it in her absence. But when we start to see the failings or the humanness of Randall Flagg — “disappointing” is not a word that covers it. It feels like terrifying. Like, oh no. Because we know men like this who start to lose their grip on power — if it slips even a little bit, they get very erratic and dangerous.

Sarah: Well, and the reasoning of the people around him — they’re like, oh no. I did so many things, I made so many decisions, based on the premise that he is protecting us. These people have made some moral and ethical sacrifices on the premise that he was gonna keep them safe. And he couldn’t even keep them safe from Trashcan Man. But I’m skipping ahead — let’s start with chapter 65.

Chapter 65: Randall Flagg in the Desert

Laura: Chapter 65 opens with Randall Flagg out in the desert. He’s just cooking a rabbit and thinking. This is, I think, not the first time we’re in Randall Flagg’s head, but it’s the first time this whole section where we’re getting a bit more of a fuller picture of how he thinks. And it is substantially more human than we’ve experienced him.

Sarah: He’s frustrated with himself and his powers. It’s almost like he has also taken his powers for granted. He cannot see who the third spy is. He cannot figure that out. He’s baffled that Harold Lauder attempted to betray him in the end by shooting at Nadine. He’s having trouble levitating, which is this —

Laura: Oh, my God.

Sarah: Well, considering what happens to poor Nadine, I don’t think so.

Laura: He comes through in the end, as the case may be.

Sarah: Oh, my God. I was so freaked out at the beginning of this chapter — how he would look at the wolves and they would fight. We’re going through a lot of the diminishment of his powers, but King is still like, don’t forget this dude is scary. He would just look at the wolves around him and they would start to bite each other and fight each other, and I thought, oh, that’s just such creepy dark imagery. That he is just like violence personified and a mere glance can bring it out in these creatures. I was very freaked out by that.

Laura: Yeah, he’s so creepy in this part. But to me it was giving more demon than devil.

Sarah: Yeah, and I thought it was so interesting how he talked about how he couldn’t remember his life or experiences before the super flu. He was no longer strictly a man if he had ever been one. He was like an onion slowly peeling away one layer at a time — only it was the trappings of humanity that seemed to be peeling away. Organized reflection, memory, possibly even free will, if there ever had been such a thing. He can only remember the events since the super flu. He was losing himself is how it’s described. So to me that’s so interesting. That feels like something that would happen as his power grew — but maybe there was something in his power and connection and ability to control other humans that was really linked to his own human experiences.

Laura: Well, and he also says — this is skipping ahead, but it’s relevant — he says later in this section that there might be other versions of him. What if there was one in China, what if there was one in Russia? He’s kind of assuming there are other versions of him, but that’s something to deal with in ten years is how he thinks about it. But as this whole story has been set up with Mother Abagail representing the good and Randall Flagg representing the bad — now that Mother Abagail has died, it’s interesting that it’s not then just like evil reigns. Because the evil is faltering. The evil is faltering in the face of her death. Characters throughout this entire section are starting to mention: this all changed when she died. When that power — it’s like they keep each other in check. There is a natural order of things, and when there is one to balance the other, that’s what keeps it in check. Now that one has died, instead of evil becoming total dominance, it’s become chaos and confusion.

Sarah: She must have known that. She must have had a sense that that was going to happen. I think there is a theme here, beginning with Nadine and continuing, that this isn’t going to end the way everybody expected it to. Nadine thought she knew what was going to happen when she got to him, that she was going to have this ecstasy. Instead, it was horrific.

Nadine and the Desert

Laura: I underlined the whole thing — because I think it’s one long sentence. He battered into her invader destroyer and the cold blood gushed down her thighs and then he was in her all the way up to her womb and the moon was in her eyes cold and silver — and it just goes. It’s like a paragraph. The sentence just keeps going and going and going describing that. It’s wild.

Sarah: So after he cooks the rabbit and has his philosophical thoughts or whatever, cut to Nadine on her Vespa with her white hair — very visual, very kind of cool image in a way — driving to the desert. The Vespa ends up dying. She’s totally dehydrated and delusional, sort of. And she turns around and he’s sitting there on his car. And she knew he was going to be there. To me, the image of her turning around and him sitting there was like, you know, the hot guy, the cool guy who sits on the hood of the car looking — I don’t know if that’s a 50s image, like from Grease, but it really sort of comes all the way through into present time — the hot cool guy sitting on the hood of their car. And you almost expect her to be grateful to see him. She’s been waiting for him since her own college days.

Laura: She’s walking in the desert. She’s delirious. She’s dehydrated. I also made a note here about the walking. He is known throughout King canon as the Walkin’ Dude. He is the Walkin’ Dude. And yet in this book, people just walk. They have to walk. They walk in ways that annoy me — instead of using easier means of transportation. Remember Trashcan Man walked until he was delirious and dehydrated into Vegas? The four men coming over from the Free Zone, they’re walking, even though there are other ways to do it. There is something about walking in this story. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be an equal playing field, like we all have to walk. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be a reference to pilgrimages or journeys — the Camino de Santiago, things like that. I just am like, we return to walking always. And that is obviously a thing that we’re supposed to pick up on.

Sarah: Well, I was just listening to Michael Pollan on the Ezra Klein Show about his new book about consciousness. He talked about all the brain science around walking and how it makes you more creative. It’s such an embodied experience that it really connects all the different pieces of your consciousness together. That’s definitely my experience walking — it’s where I feel clearest. But I think it’s interesting that in this book there’s not a consistent conclusion about walking. Sometimes people walk and it helps them, and some people walk and it pushes them to the brink and they make a bad alliance — like Trashcan Man, and Nadine here. She walked straight into insanity with this encounter she’s been waiting for for decades.

Sarah: Yeah, I don’t know what it is. But maybe that’s the point. When all else fails, in a post-pandemic world, when all else falls away — it’s walking. We revert to walking. That’s our most primal thing. Before agriculture, we were wandering tribesmen. That is fundamental to who we are for sure. Anyway — she turns around, sees him at the car, and it should be this grand — reunion isn’t the right word — grand meeting. And it just isn’t. It’s gross. She’s repulsed. She calls him an ageless pimple.

Sarah: So gross. An ageless pimple finally brought to a head and about to spew for some noisome — How do you say that word?

Lauren: You know what, I was reading this out loud and I got to that word and I was like, what is that word?

Sarah: We can leave this in the edit. Nobody knows how to say it. Noisome fluid. Some sweetness long since curdled.That’s disgusting.

Laura: When I was making some notes about this scene, the first thing I wrote was that he rapes her. And then I was rethinking — this is just me thinking out loud, nobody come for me — I was like, this was always the plan. This has been her plan since pre-pandemic. They were going to come together and have a union in this way. She has saved herself for this person. So at first I was like, is that rape? And then I reread the scene and I was like, oh no, this is rape. She is screaming. She’s trying to get away.

Sarah: It doesn’t matter. It is weird though — she had so many points to turn around. At so many points she understood consciously that he was dangerous, that this was a place from which she could never return. Nadine — of all the characters — Lloyd makes a certain amount of sense to me, Trashcan Man makes a certain amount of sense to me, even Harold. But Nadine, I’m like, I don’t get it. You didn’t want anybody to die. And then you turn all the way. You had Joe/Leo. Except for that moment with Larry when she’s like, please, please, please help me — there are just so many moments where I’m like, you knew how bad this was going to get. Your subconscious bubbled up into your conscious thought many times, like: no, abort, this is a bad idea.

Laura: I don’t know if she’s meant to be like a sacrificial lamb, or if she’s meant to be, as he calls it, an incubator.

Sarah: The implication to me is like his child could not be conceived willingly. She had to be taken this way and sort of put into the land of insanity for his child to be born or whatever. That to me was the subtle implication of the whole thing.

Laura: Well, she is one of the most complicated characters in that there are glimpses of her being good throughout the whole novel. So why is she saving herself for this sort of ultimate evil? And then she doubts herself right up until she meets him. We also have these unusual ideas about what she was doing with Harold — not completely consummating, but doing everything but. And I got the impression she didn’t hate that. Maybe she was just doing that to manipulate Harold, but you kind of get the implication that she likes it. There’s that whole scene where she sort of wants them to go all the way and she has to stop herself. So she’s enjoying these sexual acts with Harold, but then when it comes to this act she’s been waiting for all this time, it’s just so horrible and violent and so —Rosemary’s Baby.

Laura: Yes! Which by the way came out in 1968. That had to have been in his mind.

Sarah: Well, what also happens in the midst of this is that Randall Flagg feels somebody pass by. He also understands that the men from the Free Zone are coming for him. So he hasn’t lost the eye completely — he gets these senses that somebody’s passing by. It’s a full moon, so we’re all putting together the pieces of who that somebody might be. That’ll be confirmed in the next chapter — chapter 66. But he’s still, the holes are showing. I loved when he got back to Vegas with Nadine — he saw the questioning in everybody’s eyes. So he knows everybody knows things aren’t working out the way he planned. But there’s still a lot of power here.

Laura: And I think he’s trying to hide the slippage. Like, he’s trying to act like he’s still all-knowing. He definitely does not want people to know that he is, quote-unquote, losing himself.

Sarah: But that’s what’s so interesting about this chapter — you’re in his head, so you know what he knows, including that somebody passed by. It’s complicated.

Laura: Also — how relevant is this to our current world? Just desperate to cover up lapses in brain functioning?

Sarah: Whatever could you be referencing, Laura?

Sarah: Well, also, people backed in a corner are dangerous. That’s hyper relevant on many, many, many stages.

Laura: Look, I feel like I could say this about our past two presidents — our current president and our past president — that there is a misstep and then a desperation to show that there was not an age-related mishap. When there’s a slip and then they double down. Yeah.

Chapter 66: Lloyd Shows Up

Sarah: And I think in chapter 66, we start spending a lot of time with Lloyd. That’s where I thought Lloyd was one of the most interesting characters in this whole chapter — the way he was kind of processing Randall Flagg’s slips and processing his own choices to begin with. I thought that was one of the most interesting themes through this section. Lloyd really showed up. He showed up and he showed out in this section, and I kind of dug it.

Laura: Listen, I have much to say about Lloyd. Except to say — how far has Lloyd come from his shootout with Polk?

Sarah: He even says that. That’s one of my favorite parts of the chapter: he got better. It’s like, it’s giving Larry. It’s giving Stu. There were people on both sides of this battle who, being chosen and stepping up and finding some leadership, really changed them. And I think Lloyd’s one of those people. So we get to chapter 66. Lloyd’s back in Vegas and he’s gotten word that Trashcan Man — apparently not always the easiest of allies or tools to keep in your control. Go figure. Who would have guessed?

Laura: I mean, Lloyd isn’t just that he’s been chosen — he’s become a leader. Are we all on our own path? I’ve said this throughout the whole book, because I think a huge theme of this book is your path is your path. I think that’s what we’re exploring a little bit with Nadine also. Even though she doesn’t want to fulfill this thing she’s been on a path to fulfill the whole time, I don’t know how much choice she has in the matter by the time she meets Flagg in the desert. But we’re all on our own dedicated path. We have our roles, like it or not.

Sarah: That’s why I don’t think “your path is your path” fits this quite so well — because I think there are so many people in this book who the path changed. Lloyd is different now. He was in a place of desperation and he threw in with Flagg, but that has changed him. And I think he could be a very different kind of henchman than Stephen King portrays. If you’re a Sopranos fan — it’s the difference between like Paulie and Silvio. There’s a kind of blind adherence, like you just follow the boss. And then there’s a more conciliatory approach. He even says, like, who would have become a diplomat — who would use that word to describe old Lloyd when he was hanging out with Poke? So it’s kind of changed him. His assessment — so first he learns that Trashcan Man has booby-trapped a truck. Spoiler alert: it gets worse from there. Then Julie Lowry comes and tells him about Nick Andros and Tom Cullen. And so he’s starting to put some pieces together. And watching him put these pieces together and decide what it means for him, what it means for the community, what it means for Randall Flagg — it’s not a level of complex decision-making or analysis that I would have predicted Lloyd able to do.

Laura: Well, no. That’s why I’m sort of asking what exactly is going on here, because at the end of this chapter, Tom Cullen realizes it’s the full moon. It’s time for him to hit the road. And he is also thinking more clearly. His time in Vegas has changed his brain. And so this is what I’m trying to ask about both Lloyd and anyone in Vegas — what King’s commentary is here. It’s not just that they have been entrusted with a leadership role, or that they’re in a place of belonging, or any of those philosophical things. It seems that there is something in this orbit, in this community, that is making them think more clearly. It’s literally making them — I don’t want to say smarter, that’s a weird word — but Tom Cullen has actual disabilities and he is without a doubt thinking more clearly as he sets off to go back to the Free Zone than he was in any previous iteration of his life. And so I was thinking, what is King saying here? Because you would think the narrative would be: if you’ve chosen evil, you’re cloudy, you’re muddy, you’re brainwashed or something. But he seems to be saying that these people are having more clarity than even the Free Zone people.

Sarah: I don’t think Tom Cullen is thinking more clearly because of his time in Vegas. I think he is thinking within the framework of the hypnosis. To my mind, the hypnosis is like an on-off switch and it’s still on. It fundamentally changes his brain. The hypnosis puts him in a future-oriented place that he doesn’t usually exist in — he’s very present-oriented. And so with the hypnosis and the mission in front of him, it changes the way he’s processing events because he has a goal. I love how he says that the people in Vegas were nice folks, not much different from Boulder folks as far as he could tell — but they had that smell about them. It was as if these people were wearing happy folk faces, but their real faces, their underneath faces, were monster faces.

Sarah: Their underneath faces — so good. And I think that’s what King is getting at. He’s not making the argument that people are fundamentally good or bad individually. He seems to be saying: people make all kinds of choices, and he’s walking us through how people get to these places where they’re facing this battle between good and evil. It’s not like Stu, or in particular Larry, woke up and were like, I’m a good guy and now I’m going to make all the good right choices. I thought it was really interesting in chapter 66 when Lloyd is talking to Julie Lowry and she says, nice fucking guy — which is such a throwback to Larry. Because I don’t know how you read this section and don’t see that Lloyd is trying to make good choices that, if not protect the people of Vegas, at least live up to his responsibility towards them. And even — I know this sounds crazy — even when he kind of says, like, I’ve made this choice, this is who I have pledged my loyalty to and I’m gonna stick to it — I wouldn’t call it honorable, but I would at least call it consistent. And I think he’s really pushing this idea that people can change. The circumstances change you. And there’s no neat and tidy way to unpack how you get to even a very black-and-white battle between good and evil.

Individual vs. Collective

Laura: The more we’re talking through it, the more I think this might be a little bit of a commentary on individuality versus collective. The people in Vegas are very individualized in their decision-making — even with Trashcan Man, Lloyd — my allegiance is to Flagg, or I am making this choice. And maybe that brings some kind of clarity, or just a sole, s-o-l-e, soul mission — or s-o-u-l, a soul mission — that is a lot more defined. Whereas when you are trying to make decisions for the collective, or for a greater good, as they’re doing in the Free Zone with their community meetings and all of these things, that brings sometimes more of a muddiness when you’re trying to choose for others. I’m not saying one is good or bad. Obviously I’m all for the collective good. But I am just wondering if the people in Vegas, although they are doing things that ultimately benefit the community, are making decisions on an individual level.

Sarah: Yeah, but that’s in real contrast to like Lloyd in chapter 67, where he figures out — when he’s trying to trace down the Nick Andros/Tom Cullen connection — he calls the guy who tracks people. I thought that was also one of the creepiest parts of this book. The sort of secret police that Randall Flagg had. Talk about current applicability. A version of real surveillance and tracking of people. It was like he had a Facebook algorithm file on people before there were social media algorithm files. So Lloyd learns that there’s this red list of people that Flagg has been keeping from him. And that really disrupts his understanding of Flagg — because ultimately that was a mistake. If Lloyd had known from the beginning about this connection, maybe he could have acted and caught Tom Cullen before he left town. And here’s the thing: Randall Flagg can’t even articulate why he kept the red list from Lloyd. So this other information comes in and it disrupts Lloyd’s understanding of not only his relationship with Flagg, but what Flagg is doing for the collective — and therefore what Lloyd is doing on behalf of Flagg for the collective.

Laura: But it still reads as individuality to me. They’re doing it for their own benefit, even if they don’t understand it. They’re not doing it to protect others or for a greater good. Those that are starting to defect never had any real loyalty to Flagg in the same way that those who might have had a loyalty to Mother Abagail. It’s a version of loyalty — but it’s an individual loyalty. It’s a loyalty to Flagg. It’s not a loyalty to the people of Vegas.

Sarah: Well, I think everyone’s loyalty — even if it was individual decision-making — was based on this assumption that Flagg was all-powerful and would protect them. And the more and more that gets disrupted, the more they’re questioning. That’s why people start to leave. There was a sense of like, I’m not saying to keep myself safe — I’m saying because he’s so powerful that if I step one millimeter out of line he’ll kill me. But the more people that he cannot control — well, then people start thinking, maybe he can’t control me either, and maybe I’ll bounce.

Laura: But again, their assumption that he can protect them is individual. They’re not worried about who he can protect for others. There is no us here. This is a political idea.

Sarah: Well, it’s so interesting though, because even the people who defect from Vegas — they have relationships with each other and they leave together. It might not be everybody in Vegas, but King does poke a lot of holes in the every-man-for-himself reading. There are relationships in Vegas. There are people who have aligned together.

Chapter 67 and the Red List

Laura: The first major hole we see — with the red list thing and everybody understanding that maybe Randall Flagg is not Satan himself — is Lloyd gets on to him. He tells him about the Tom situation and basically says, if you had told me about the red list, I could have stopped this. This is your fault. I couldn’t believe it. And he says this with Nadine in the background, catatonic.

Sarah: So weird. And she really — she turns it on a dime. So they get into this fight, Flagg screwed up, Lloyd sees that — sees an opening to say this is your fault, not mine — which is a huge shift in people’s understanding. And then all of a sudden Nadine is not catatonic and really is back to the old Nadine. I found that turn kind of hard.

Laura: Well, listen — you can’t skim this section, because you will miss a really pivotal part of the book. I actually kind of feel like King didn’t totally give this its due for what is about to happen. We have read a thousand pages leading up to Flagg’s consummation and impregnation of Nadine, for her to just flip a switch in two paragraphs or whatever. I was like, wait — I mean, I knew this was coming, of course, but I did not remember as I was reading it aloud how quickly this turns.

Sarah: Well, I wonder if it makes more sense when you put together this slow drip of the holes in his power — Harold, Dana, Tom Cullen escaping, then the first Trashcan Man blowing up the trucks, then the pilots — the dominoes are falling pretty fast at this point. And so you kind of wonder, like, was Nadine there the whole time? Was her ultimate purpose to get there and get impregnated as she thought? Or did she, as these dominoes start to fall, did something awaken in her to realize: no, my ultimate purpose is to tell him that the four from the Free Zone are coming, that he’s screwing everything up, and to basically bait him into throwing her over the parapet at the MGM Grand to her death? When I think about it, it feels sudden — but then I’m like, no. Maybe back to the path. This was ultimately Nadine’s path. Maybe that’s why we needed someone who felt like they were questioning the whole time. So that when her moment came — maybe what I’m arguing is that Nadine was the ultimate Free Zone spy.

Laura: Oh, that’s interesting. But she also gained some knowledge that I’m not sure where it came from. When she and Harold leave the Free Zone, as far as they know, they’ve blown up the whole committee. Until she gets to the MGM, pregnant, traumatized. I guess she’s starting to realize she’s given her whole life over to someone she thought was going to be a god. And then when she gets there, he’s a devil. She either overhears all the ways in which he’s failing, or maybe that catatonic state was some sort of — like the hypnosis — maybe when she’s in that catatonic state. But suddenly she knows that the guys are coming from the Free Zone to get him.

Sarah: She has that knowledge. Maybe she sees it in her catatonic state.

Laura: Then where does that knowledge come from? Is it bestowed? Does it come in dreams — because dreams are such a big thing?

Sarah: Stephen King has been making the argument that moments of trauma and disruption open up levels of consciousness not usually available to us. That has been pretty consistent. So you can see why the moment in the desert could have perhaps unlocked some things for Nadine — because it’s pretty freaking traumatic. My favorite thing she says to him, though, when she baits him into throwing her over the edge: Everything you made here is falling apart. And why not? The effective half-life of evil is always relatively short.

Sarah: I love that line. I thought that was so good.

Laura: With Nadine, you also can’t overlook the mother instinct. She doesn’t want to be pregnant with his baby. She doesn’t want this to continue on. She doesn’t want to carry this demon to term. She wants to rid herself of all of this. And she’s obviously wildly manipulated Harold, attempted to manipulate Larry. It’s not that the ultimate manipulation — making him so mad he throws her over the edge — was out of character. It just felt like a lot of buildup, and we kind of think maybe we’re going to get to see the next gen of this. It really severs an enormous storyline of Flagg’s.

Sarah: Yeah, but people are dropping like flies around here right now. You know what I mean? The closer we get to the end, it doesn’t matter how long you’ve spent with this person — everybody’s on the chopping block.

Chapter 66 Continued: Tom Cullen and Love

Sarah: What I think is so interesting about this chapter too is that he doesn’t end it with Flagg’s failure to levitate. A quarter of an inch; they would go no higher. We end it with Tom, and Tom saying that the biggest difference in Vegas was simply love: There were nice enough people and all, but there wasn’t much love in them because they were too busy being afraid. Love didn’t grow well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn’t grow very well in a place where it was always dark.

Laura: I underlined that section too.

Sarah: And he’s talking to Nick in his dreams. Nick is keeping him safe. But it’s really sad because he talks about waiting to see Nick again, but for some reason he could never understand — Nick had turned away. He doesn’t know yet.

Laura: It’s also interesting that in dreams, Nick can talk and hear — and in Nick’s own dreams he could hear.

Sarah: Well, he had to do something — because what’s he going to do, write a note Tom can’t read in his dreams?

Laura: I’m telling you — the fact that Randall Flagg can’t get up is an obvious wink that he can’t get it up. I mean, he can, but he can’t. It’s an impotent kind of —

Sarah: Okay, but look — isn’t that back to our theory? It’s easy and almost intuitive to think if somebody is all-powerful, they’re all-powerful forever. And Stephen King is like, no. Our choices, their impacts, the consequences, the energetic exchange are all connected and nothing’s written in stone. Something can change at any moment, including with the Walkin’ Dude and his ability to levitate.

Laura: Well, I think there are so many doubts. When everything was going his way and everything was falling into place exactly how it was supposed to — he carries himself with the confidence of a man that everything’s going their way. And then when everything starts to fall apart — because the pilots blowing up are his fault — when Flagg finds out that Tom Cullen is the spy and is now on the move, he’s told that by Lloyd. He was not able to know that himself. And when Lloyd tells him, he sends the pilots after Tom for no reason. He even thinks in his mind — how bad would it be if Tom Cullen got back to the Free Zone? It wouldn’t be that big a deal. What’s he going to tell them? We’ve got the electricity going over here. He doesn’t have much to report back. I could just let him go. But no — his ego makes him send the pilots after Tom. And because Trashcan Man had rigged those helicopters, which might have sat there for weeks — instead, Flagg sends all the pilots after Tom Cullen, blowing them all up. So again, that’s all his fault. It’s all his misstep. Everyone in the room, Lloyd and Nadine, is seeing: oh, this guy — there’s no plan. He is losing his power. It’s getting sloppy.

Sarah: Listen, what’d you expect bringing on somebody like Trashcan Man?

Chapter 68: Trashcan Man’s Story, Told Twice

Sarah: So we get a whisper of this, but we get in chapter 68, from Trashcan Man’s perspective — some of the pilots cracked a joke at his expense and he lost it and blew everything up. Then he kind of realizes — I love this line at the beginning: he was walking proof that a man finally takes on the look of what he is, because his skin had burned, peeled, burned, peeled again, and finally had not tanned but blackened. So creepy.

Sarah: And you would think — okay, he’s blown everybody up. All is lost. The Trashcan Man is the burning man. We’re done here. Except now his ass is out here looking for a nuclear bomb.

Laura: Well, I think this is all about trauma. They made a joke about fire starters or bedwetters or whatever silly thing they said. It brought up all of his trauma of being bullied, and he just goes to a place of destruction. What I thought was interesting from a storytelling point of view is that we hear this story twice. We hear it when the guy comes and tells it to Lloyd — this is what happened, the guy made a joke, here’s the exact joke he made, Trashcan Man loses it. And then we get to hear that exact same story with the exact same line, but from Trashcan Man’s point of view. And Stephen King — my buddy Steve — doesn’t do this over and over again throughout. This is one of the times that is interestingly repetitive. He does it purposely. It’s a storytelling choice to hear this story twice from two different angles. And you even hear that Trashcan Man almost realizes, like, oops, I might have overreacted.

Sarah: But that’s back to the theme I’m pushing — that these pivotal moments, instead of just being this march down fate’s predetermined journey, there are these pivotal moments that might not mean anything to you. The pilots weren’t trying to be mean. It was a throwaway line. Randall Flagg’s decision to keep the red list to himself — he couldn’t even explain it to you. Doesn’t even know why he did it. But to Trashcan Man, this moment was wildly impactful. Because everybody is their own sort of bomb waiting to go off, right? Everybody has this one particular combination that could unlock good or bad, creativity or disaster, whatever. With somebody like Trashcan Man — it just feels like we could have all seen this coming. It’s another sort of Flagg hubris. You thought you were going to be able to control somebody who could find weapons and can’t even explain to you why or how.

Laura: It just feels like a nod to history too. If you look throughout so many wars — if this hadn’t happened, this might have happened. In this case, if Trashcan Man hadn’t blown up the pilots — it’s a sliding doors moment. If he hadn’t been triggered by some offhand remark, if he hadn’t blown up the pilots and the helicopters, would the Vegas contingent have completely annihilated the Free Zone? Maybe.

Sarah: Trashcan Man was a liability always. Even if they’d taken out the Free Zone, Trashcan Man was gonna stay a liability.

Laura: But without Trashcan Man, they wouldn’t have had their weaponry. So you have those people that are both a liability and an asset depending on the day.

Sarah: And you realize — everything Flagg is putting together is so fragile. Yeah, he has a Trashcan Man, but he has so few pilots. That’s it. There are no other pilots. And yes, he can draw Nadine to him — but when you draw someone that way and make them so fragile, they might throw themselves off a roof. I just think Randall Flagg’s fundamental weakness is that he sees everybody as pawns. And what Stephen King is sort of saying, particularly in this section, is: these are not pawns. These are people. And people are inherently messy, complicating.

Chapters 70-71: Defection and the Final Balance

Sarah: So we get Chief Whitney and Horgan coming and saying, we’re out, we’re leaving — which is not something you would have predicted hundreds of pages ago when they were crucifying this dude in front of everybody.

Laura: I was mad that the chef came and told Lloyd he was going to bounce. Why would you do that? You know Lloyd is loyal to Flagg. Why would he keep your secret? I guess he’s giving him an opportunity to come with them, or giving him the respect of not just leaving in the night — but I just was like, why would you ever trust Lloyd?

Laura: I liked it because I thought it was showing that they have built real relationships here. There is trust between the members in Vegas. And I think it was also meant to show us how far the understanding that Flagg has weakened has gone — not just that they’re willing to bounce, but that they’re willing to tell Lloyd about it. One of these lieutenants is like, he ain’t the same. He’s slipping.

Laura: What did you think — and I’m asking you this because a lot of our Slow Read community has discussed this in the comments on Substack, y’all — you’ve got to get into the comments on Substack. We have the best Slow Read community. People say the smartest, most interesting things. They pick up stuff Sarah and I miss. You could be one of them. Go participate on Substack. But what did you think about Dana and Nadine dying in such similar ways, out the windows of the MGM?

Sarah: Is this lazy storytelling? Is this purposefully a parallel? Is it a Shakespeare allusion? I meant to look that up and I forgot.

Sarah: Usually the safe bet is yes. Bible or Shakespeare, you’re probably pretty safe if you cover both those bases. I think it is a metaphor for his power. He’s at the top floor. He’s in this penthouse. He is at the pinnacle of his reach and vision — you can see from far up there. It’s supposed to represent that he’s at the top. And then that is ultimately twisted and used against him. It’s a metaphor for the inherent vulnerability of that much power.

Laura: But both of the women who are betraying him dying in this way — it was a smidge unsatisfying for me.

Sarah: Oh, I don’t know how else they could have gotten away from him. They’re not going to fire a gun. She tried to pull her knife, he turned into a banana. What else are they going to do? These are their options. I think it was a really smart way for them to use the bare minimum of what they had at their disposal to get out of there.

Laura: And in this chapter — the women angle has been discussed so much on Substack — in general, this is a very male-dominated section. It is all men. Yeah, we have Trashcan Man out there looking for the bomb, we have Randall Flagg, they’re looking for the Free Zone guys coming this way, and we spend a lot of time with Tom Cullen.

Sarah: There’s just a lot of journeying. Tom is journeying. The Free Zone guys are coming. Randall Flagg starts out in the desert. There’s just a lot of traveling going on.

Laura: Yeah. Chapters 70 and 71 are both short little looks at what’s happening, including — Trashcan Man is in the desert. And he has, by his own ways of divination, found a bunker that has what we can only assume is a nuclear warhead.

Sarah: This is wildly unbelievable to me. You don’t think it just feeds into all the conspiracy theories of this is where America hides our bombs, in the desert outside of Vegas? Yeah, but they hide them really good.

Laura: Do they though?

Sarah: I feel like there have to be so many security protocols — if it loses power, if something like this happens — I’m not saying you couldn’t get to them, but you couldn’t get to them as like one random guy, and you sure as hell aren’t bringing out one on a cart. That’s not how nuclear weapons work.

Laura: Listen, when I first read this, as a teenager and in subsequent readings, I’ve always been kind of confused by this section. Not by the logistics — he’s obviously found a bomb and trying to bring it above ground — but it’s like, suddenly in this section things got weirdly technical. I’m just going to skim this part because I don’t understand all these things.

Laura: Yeah, I don’t love where this story is going, logistically speaking.

Sarah: I do buy that Randall Flagg still has this vision. And I certainly buy that Kojak understands that he’s there and looking at them. I want to say that for sure.

Laura: Also — we have been given a nugget hundreds and hundreds of pages back that Kojak is going to live for like eighteen more years. I hold on to that like the hope that it is.

Sarah: Because it is. I was disquieted by this moment at the very end of chapter 71. When Randall Flagg is spying on them — peeking at them through his eye — and Kojak can see him: What he had forgotten was so staggeringly simple that it was humbling. They were having their problems too. They were frightened too. And as a result, they were making a colossal mistake. I thought that was such a powerful turn. He’s not all-powerful — but look, neither are they.

Laura: Yeah. And they’re without their — I don’t know, spiritual leader. I’m not sure what you would even call Mother Abagail at this point, but as far as we know, they’re working in human realm only.

Sarah: They’ve lost their leader. In Vegas, it’s the opposite — he’s lost his people.

Laura: Oh, so smart.

Laura: It’s true. And it feels like — obviously with all the things we’ve parsed through that are storytelling or silly or supernatural — what you just said is the part that feels the most human about this story. Leadership and warring factions making mistakes, making assumptions, but also having some similar parallel problems.

Getting Close to the End

Sarah: Laura, we’re getting so close to the end.

Laura: I know.

Laura: What do you think? Are you excited for the end? We only have 100 pages left — less, maybe.

Sarah: I don’t even know. I’ve just been hanging out with these people for so long. I’m stressed about who’s going to die because I know some people are. I’m feeling a lot of stress about that. And I feel like I’m gonna get to the end and be like, okay, but so now let’s go back to the Free Zone — you tell me what happens for the next hundred years in the Free Zone. Which I know I’m not gonna get. But I mean — I’m excited. I’m ready for them. Let’s have it out. Let’s do this. I’m not scared. It’s go time, Laura. It’s go time.

LauraThe Stand is coming. And hopefully we’ll see all of you on the other side.

Sarah: But I don’t think we’re going to see all these characters on the other side.

Laura: I hope you come and tell us at our book club meeting — our May book club meeting next week — what y’all think as we enter these last hundred pages. I also just want us to think about — because this is my first Slow Read and we’ll dissect all of this when we get to the end — the difference that it makes in your reading life to have spent six months with these characters. It’s really changed me. Both the Slow Read aspect of it with a book I’ve read multiple times before, and the reading aloud — which I know I’m the only one doing it that way. There’s going to be a lot to say as a Slow Read community that I want us to talk about in terms of just the experience. It’s a little bit separate from the book itself. Because you know — it’s never too late for an old dog to learn new tricks in terms of shaking up your reading life a little bit. This has been really, really good.

Sarah: I bet Kojak’s going to learn some new tricks over the next eighteen years.

Laura: Come on now. Yeah, I bet he is.

Sarah: All right. Well, we look forward to seeing all of you at our book club meeting next week. We will be back covering chapters 72 through 73. And until then — see you on the other side.

Laura: See you on the other side.

Next Up: Chapters 72–73

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