Notes from Maine - 2021/03/14

I finally finished the new miniseries of The Stand. I thought it was pretty good, but not great. It was definitely better than some adaptations. It made me think about adaptations in general. With The Stand, I don’t blame the people who tried to turn the novel into a teleplay. I think the issues with trying to adapt that work are what made it so good in the first place. 

To me, it’s a great picture of several regular people rooted in their regular lives before a giant transformation. You grow to love most of these people in the early chapters. You know their secrets and their trauma. And you know one thing about them that you also know about yourself—you wanted the transformation.

Stu was a dead-end guy in a dead-end town. He never got his scholarship. He had to take care of his brothers after his mother got sick and died, and then he took a job that he didn’t want. The plague was his chance to finally do something with his life.

Frannie is dealing with a secret pregnancy. Harold is a loser. Glen is bored. Larry is an addict. All of these characters are set free from their problems and presented with an enormous challenge.

The TV show set up some of those stories, but it didn’t give you the sense of relief that the book did. In the show it felt like they were slogging through tragedy to try to regain some sense of normalcy. In the book, it felt like they were freed from mundanity and given the chance to become legendary. 

It’s the difference between normal people suffering and normal people conquering.

Then (again, just my opinion!) SK punted the ending. He ended with heroism that was unconnected to triumph. It was unclear that the actions of the people who went over the mountain were responsible for bringing down Flagg. They just happened to be there. Sure, their presence cast doubt amongst the true believers, but I believe it would have been more satisfying if we could draw a direct line between their mission and the collapse of Flagg. 

Also, I believe that it was a mistake to pare down the redemption narrative to just a few (the ones who went on the mission) instead of making it a challenge for everyone. But whatever—still a great book.

Why am I spending so much time thinking about a story written more than 40 years ago?

Well, it’s a funny thing. As I watched, and remembered a book that I haven’t read in maybe 20 years, I realized how many elements of that story that I unintentionally duplicated when I wrote Extinct. In my book, the evil isn’t really evil. It just appears that way because it doesn’t place any value on human life. In Extinct I don’t assume that anyone who has technical knowledge is automatically on the side of evil. 

That was one thing that bothered me about The Stand. All the engineers, scientists, technologist, and people good at making money were automatically on the side of evil. The good side contained all the artists and philosophers. Funny.