Expanding the End of the World

Erin Giannini reviews “The End of the World as We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s ‘The Stand,’” edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene.

By Erin GianniniAugust 23, 2025

• SF

SINCE HIS 1974 DEBUT with Carrie, Stephen King’s work has rarely—if ever—experienced a slump in the public consciousness. His prolific output, combined with the abundance of new outlets for adaptations and the rise of media creators who grew up with his work, has made the 2010s and 2020s rife with adaptations of stories both old and new, including 2020’s The Outsider series on HBO and the 2024 film adaptation of ’Salem’s Lot distributed by Max. Then there are the “reimaginings” of King’s books that borrow from and extend existing works, such as 2021’s limited series Chapelwaite on Epix, based on King’s 1978 short story “Jerusalem’s Lot”; the two-season Hulu series Castle Rock (2018–19), set in King’s fictional town of the same name and weaving together elements from his oeuvre; and HBO’s soon-to-be-released IT: Welcome to Derry (2025).

The End of the World as We Know It, Christopher Golden and Brian Keene’s new edited collection of riffs on King’s The Stand (1978), shares a similar flavor with these recent adaptations and reimaginings. Comprised of 34 stories that total nearly 800 pages in length, it is more robust than any of them—and, with contributions from authors including Paul Tremblay, Chuck Wendig, Alma Katsu, Tananarive Due, Joe R. Lansdale, and Poppy Z. Brite, it’s a real who’s who of 21st-century horror. The King himself even provides an introduction. It also expands the novel’s universe far beyond its original borders, both literally (new locations) and figuratively (focusing on characters and places unexamined in the original).

With one exception that required permission from King himself, the stories are all imaginative takes on people and places not examined in the original texts, and are separated into four sections that correspond to the plot trajectory of King’s novel. The collection’s first section, “Down with the Sickness,” is also its longest; this section tracks The Stand’s first few hundred pages, in which a government-generated flu virus with a 99 percent mortality rate has been unwittingly released, and has wiped out most of the US population (and, it is implied, has spread worldwide). The first part of King’s novel introduces and explores most of the main characters who will be involved in the showdown between good and evil, as they watch events unfold, bury their loved ones, and suffer through strange, seemingly prophetic dreams.

Richard Chizmar’s “Moving Day” provides a useful example of this. Chizmar (who co-wrote the 2017 novella Gwendy’s Button Box with King) sets his short story in Bennington, Vermont, on the Fourth of July, with his protagonist Tommy seeing Larry Underwood, one of the main characters in The Stand, at a distance as Larry enacts a particular scene from the novel. Given the meta bent of Chizmar’s work, it’s not surprising that Tommy is essentially “reading” this scene from inside the world of the novel itself, at first judging Larry for what he does afterward, only to come to some understanding by the end of the story. Rio Youers’s “Keep the Devil Down,” for its part, mentions the unfortunate Heck Drogan, who meets a grisly fate in the novel, and positions him as one of the bad influences that Youers’s protagonist Elise is both literally and figuratively driving away from.

Part two, called “The Long Walk,” roughly corresponds to the middle section of the original text, in which its central characters decide between Boulder, Colorado, where the “good” forces are gathering, and Las Vegas, where antagonist Randall Flagg is gathering his forces. Paul Tremblay’s “The Story I Tell Is the Story of Some of Us” embodies this struggle through the character of Art, who chooses neither side, even as both put increasing pressure on him to pick one or the other. Unlike the more omniscient narrator of The Stand, however, Art’s story is told by an unnamed figure who watches everything unfold; only when he actually speaks to Art, whom he clearly admires, do things go sideways. Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes’s “The Boat Man” examines the hard choices that survival and self-preservation force on even those whose intentions are good. While nearly all of the stories in the first two parts mention Mother Abagail, the central good figure from the world of The Stand, only “Abagail’s Gethsemane,” by Wayne Brady and Maurice Broaddus, positions her as its primary protagonist. Brady and Broaddus’s work offers additional nuance to a character that can too often be read, alongside other King creations like John Coffey (from The Green Mile), as falling into the “magical Negro” trope. This effort is aided by weaving in elements from the novel itself—such as her performance at a Grange talent show, or her spiritual crisis that leads her to leave the new society built around her—with parts of her past not addressed in the novel, including her experience surviving the 1918 flu epidemic (which mirrors their current plague of “Captain Trips”), alongside her interactions with the Black community in her hometown.

The book’s final two sections focus on the future or alternate realities. The third section, “Life Was Such a Wheel,” uses the novel’s original ending as a jumping-off point, in which Frannie Goldsmith, having survived the superflu and its aftermath, cannot answer Stu Redman’s question about what comes next; she simply says, “I don’t know.” King has expressed his frustration with this ending, and the stories in this section offer various answers that grapple with the consequences of things such as the nuclear explosion in Las Vegas (“Hunted to Extinction” by Premee Mohamed), food shortages (“Came the Last Night of Sadness” by Catherynne M. Valente), and reading/interpreting the historical record of the events in a distant future (“He’s a Righteous Man” by Ronald Malfi and “Grand Junction” by Chuck Wendig). Indeed, stories such as Wendig’s not only build on the hard choices of the previous section but also obliquely reference the “new” ending added to the expanded and revised edition of The Stand that was released in 1990, which revealed Flagg to still be alive and recruiting, concluding not with a question but with an assertion of life itself being a wheel, from which this section takes its name. Sarah Langan’s “The Devil’s Children” documents how little Captain Trips actually changed human behavior, as some survivors prey on an Indigenous tribe (suggested rather than stated explicitly) when the superflu strikes again decades later. Unlike many of the stories in this section, Langan’s ends with a glimmer of hope—and karma—as the members of the tribe are revealed to be immune, while their potential colonizers and abusers are not; the story concludes with the narrator declaring, “We will remake the world into a thing that works.”

The final section, “Other Worlds Than These,” is the shortest, and most metatextual, part. Its two stories essentially comment on the events of the novel as a novel; King even appears (briefly) in one of the stories as author/character. The penultimate story, “The Unfortunate Convalescence of the SuperLawyer,” by Nat Cassidy, offers a metatextual take on, of all things, the beat-up car that Stu Redman finds in Utah as he and Tom Cullen attempt to get back to Boulder, as its original driver finds himself in the world of The Stand only to be edited out eventually. Cassidy envisions a godlike author creating and editing worlds with little regard for its characters, the ultimate inhuman act. David J. Schow’s “Walk on Gilded Splinters” suggests The Stand as a biblical text to be interpreted by various “monks” and its events as sigils and signs, not unlike the monks in Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959).

What makes this collection a particularly fascinating read, however, is not its fidelity to the original but rather the ways in which it expands the novel’s universe. By opening the world of The Stand to other authors, Golden and Keene have introduced new perspectives and characters, particularly in the stories set outside the contiguous United States and the Christian eschatology that informs King’s narrative. “The Mosque at the End of the World” by Usman T. Malik is an excellent example: Islam and the story’s setting of Pakistan inform its characters’ reactions to the superflu in ways that parallel those seen in the novel itself (it was an accident; it was a political act; it was an act of God/Allah). The story even features dreams and a battle, elements adapted to the characters’ cultural context and belief system that resonate with, rather than mirror, King’s novel. Emerging out of writing retirement to pen “Till Human Voices Wake Us, and We Drown,” Poppy Z. Brite contributes something similar by featuring Seth, a young, HIV-positive gay man at a time when that was still a death sentence, and for whom the end of the world means the end of treatment, despite not catching the superflu. While Seth’s dreams connect him to the original novel, the meat of the story is a magical creature that could potentially cure him, but only at the cost of its own survival. Seth elects to set the creature free, despite what it might mean for him, and the story is ambiguous about Seth’s ultimate fate. At its heart, however, it’s easy to read this as a story about empathy from a perspective King’s early works certainly struggled to offer its (few) LGBTQI+ characters, such as Herman Pynchot in Firestarter (1980) or Adrian Mellon in IT (1986).

Golden and Keene have thus curated an excellent corpus of work that expands the world of The Stand in multiple directions: geographically, thematically, ethnically, and socially. Combining writers from a multiplicity of genres (horror, thriller, mystery, suspense) creates a tapestry of work that frequently transcends a single genre to make a deeper point about humanity and its tendency toward inhumanity, both in the present day of the book, in the past, and in many potential futures. In his nonfiction book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000), King indicates that The Stand was in part inspired by the world of the 1970s: post-Vietnam, pre-Reagan, and seemingly lost and struggling. This last element hadn’t changed much with the novel’s expansion and rerelease in 1990, nor with its subsequent adaptations (1994 and 2020). King likens the events of The Stand to solving the world’s problems by cutting the Gordian knot (an image that appears in the text itself), and then facing the new challenges generated by such a brutal solution. Each of the stories included in this collection shares the novel’s thread of hard choices and harder consequences. It is in that respect, rather than through individual correspondences or differences from the original, that each new story honors the source material.