CW: Quoted racial bigotry.

Let me first note that I love Stephen King. I’ve read everything he’s written with a couple exceptions that are too close to home, like Cell, or too bleak, like Revival, or attempt to make me give a damn about baseball, which, sorry, maybe if you introduced an entire eldritch abomination but otherwise no. (YKIOK but YK is so very NMK where the sportsball is concerned.) He’s great, and God knows he’s more successful than I am, so this is mostly just using The Stand to point out some human failings because the release and then re-release but “set in 1990” makes a good object lesson.

(The original inspiration for this post was watching the Inspector Lynley Mysteries–a 2001-2008 show–with my folks, side-eyeing the amount of angst over past abortions slash number of irrational decisions to keep an unplanned pregnancy by 20-somethings in the UK in what works out to the nineties, and then realizing that the books were written and set in 1988-1992, and also that the author’s American. But I’m much more familiar with The Stand.)

‘Hokay. So. The original Stand was released in 1978, and theoretically set in 1980 but still basically in 1978. (King’s early books do this a bit–Carrie was 74 set in 79–and I’m not sure if it was a writing convention of the time, if he didn’t want to get sued for giving Fictional Jimmy Carter the superflu, or what.) The uncut version was released and set in 1990. So we’re talking about a twelve-year difference…except that we’re not, really, because King finished writing the original in 1975, and it’s a million pages long. I think he sets a specific-ish timeline in Danse Macabre, but I can’t find it right now, so let’s say it really started coming together in ‘73 or ‘74, and he submitted it during one of the last years where anyone gave a shit about Patty Hearst.

(I wish the woman well and everything, but really, the amount of attention the 1970s gave that case is just bizarre.)

For the 1990s re-release, he updated it…except not really. That is to say, he changed some dates and threw in a reference to rap music and so forth, but fifteen-odd years needs a lot more than that. 

Example 1: Rock Star Larry Underwood and his Disapproving Mom. This is largely a thing Feral Robots over on Mastodon pointed out, but first of all, the CA music “scene” in the book is entirely a thing of the 1970s, and second…Alice freaking Underwood.

Okay. Larry’s mom is, in the grand tradition of 1970s Stephen King Moms, provincial as fuck on her best day–and we will be exploring that general subject more later–in a way that’s vaguely believable for backwoods Maine or whatever but a little weird when the lady’s supposedly from Brooklyn…which is not to say that people in cities can’t be racist, but her particular brand of it reads very Jason Aldean.

More to the point, she has two places in the revised version and one in the original where she does not approve of this racial music the kids are listening to these days. Circa 1990, she makes some comment about how rap is “just screaming,” which actually does ring true to her character in an eyerolly OK Boomer kind of way.

But then, in both versions, she disapprovingly notes that Larry “sounds Black” in his song, which reads like it’s supposed to be very Top 40. Obviously, the bigotry is not okay–and makes the scene where she dies way less tragic–but also it’s completely out of place for a middle-aged-ish woman in Brooklyn in 1990. In 1978? Okay: if we posit that Larry’s in his thirties and that Alice had him when she was in her thirties, that’d put her in her sixties and it might make sense that she still thinks of Frank Sinatra as the pinnacle of musical genius or whatever. 1990s Alice is like…lady, at the most generous reading, you had the kid quite a while after Elvis’s hips had ceased being scandalous, so complaining about what race he sounds like is less Thoughtlessly Bigoted Parent and more Has Stormfront Literature In Your Bathroom.

Example 2: Don’t Mention the War!

As Feral Robots noted, it was weird to begin with that Vietnam got so little mention in the 1978 edition, given that it was an amazingly central issue in the culture and quite probably informed the whole Evil Military-Industrial Complex thing to begin with. (And a scene where the Army shoots a bunch of college protesters at Kent State, for that matter.) 

The presence/absence of Vietnam, and sixties counterculture, in King’s pre-1980s novels could be an essay in itself, now that I think about it. The war doesn’t come up in Carrie, which is theoretically in the future, it gets a vague mention or three in Salem’s Lot, is passingly mentioned as killing off one of Jack’s brothers in the Shining…and otherwise nothing, despite the fact that both the war and the hippies informed both US society for ten-ish years and, very clearly, King’s worldview in a number of ways. (Including a few, like the Dark Tower magic-vs-science backstory and the Rationality Is Bad News thing in the Stand, that I find vaguely insufferable). Was this a choice on King’s part? Was it the same social climate that meant MASH had to disguise itself as About The Korean War, No Seriously Guys, for eleven years? I couldn’t say, but it’s interesting.

Anyhow! Stu having gone to Vietnam and come back in Hypothetical 1980 would put him at…let’s say he was eighteen and spent a year there during the very last part of the war? Somewhere around 25. That’s a little older than his eventual wife, but by no means weird, especially given the apocalypse. In 1990? He’s 33 at least, and Frannie is 21, and I’m not one of those people who view any age gap as exploitative but it does make me question their relationship. Especially because Frannie is…not the most mature person in the post-apocalyptic hellscape.

Example 3: Ugh, Fran

So I think I’m on record as not, generally speaking, loving the way King writes adult women in his books from before the Gerald’s Game/Dolores Claiborne era. (For whatever it says about me, the preteen orgy in IT bugs me way less than the fact that Adult!Bev has her moment of badassery involving her own relationship and then spends all her time screaming or providing moral inspiration once the Pennywise fight begins, and let’s not even discuss Eddie’s death except YES LET’S because how awesome would it have been if Richie, his actual best friend, had stayed with him while Bev had gone to rip the heart out of an Eldritch Abomination? SO AWESOME. Fuck you, 1980s gender roles!) The Stand is not an exception–oh, hello, a book where the only female character who enjoys and initiates casual sex is not only evil but too stupid to be anything but minor evil, barf–and Frannie Goldsmith slash Redman…

…well. 

She’s not necessarily more likeable in 1978. Fair For Its Time only goes so far. Post-Boulder Frannie exists to Be Pregnant, Be Pregnant and Therefore Weepily Irrational in Town Meetings, and be one of two (both female) voices of objection to the spy/assassination stuff–which I am totally here for people objecting to, but when both of them are the lone chicks on the committee, please see my above comment re: barf–and I want to slap her a whole bunch. Pre-Boulder Frannie, however, makes much more sense as a character in the 1978 version, and so do her parents.

This is how I got onto the subject in the first place: abortion.

If you know very little about me, know this: abortion is a medical procedure. It carries all the moral weight of a root canal, and anyone who feels otherwise should keep their decision to their own body and their opinion to themselves unless specifically asked. And, while I do agree that reproductive choice is a choice both ways, college students deliberately keeping unplanned pregnancies is both weird and, yes, something I do kinda roll my eyes at in fiction. 

(Which, even with everything I’m about to write, I also kind of judge King for writing this subplot this way. Reproduction is a central question after the flu-based apocalypse, yes, and my aversion to pregnancy plot aside, I can understand wanting a central character involved with that–I don’t love that she’s our only POV woman for loads of the book, but hey–but there are so many ways to write that without veering this close to Bethany House bullshit.)

That said, for Frannie as written in 1975–two years after Roe. v. Wade, being generous–it makes much more sense to have conflicted feelings about abortion and ultimately decide to continue the pregnancy than it would for the generic middle-class white chick of 1990. It makes way more sense for her father to talk about how he’s too old and still thinks it makes life cheap and blah blah handwavy bullshit that I want to think 1990 Peter Goldsmith would be way past: (Although he’s nearing retirement age, so he was born before 1930 in both versions, so he gets credit for only giving his opinion when asked and I’lll move on in general.) Similarly, 1980-but-really-1973 Peter’s hey-I’m-not-judging, you’re-impulsive-kids forgiveness comes off much better than 1990s, where my reaction was that…you’re forgiving a college student for fucking? Real big of you, Broseph: I don’t care how old you are, keep up with the times better.

Likewise, Carla…okay, Carla comes off as awful regardless of the era. That spectrum of 1970s Stephen King Moms I mentioned? If Alice Underwood is at the Problematic But Not Horrible end and Margaret White and Henrietta Dodd are on the Bring In CPS and Maybe Wooden Stakes end, Carla Goldsmith is in the middle. She’s status-conscious and prudish and awful and while I feel bad for Peter and his misguided affection for her when she dies, she’s one of those “no great loss” Captain Trips victims, to put it mildly.

But: 1980-but-really-1973 Carla is a hideous priss in the same way some of my own relatives were at the time. (My grandmother apparently told my mom and aunt that she wouldn’t come to either of their weddings if they were pregnant and she wouldn’t talk to them ever again if they got pregnant before they were engaged. Glad I didn’t meet the woman until she’d had about twenty years to get her shit together.) Pick a little, talk a little, what will the neighbors think, Harper Valley PTA, blah blah blah. When 1990 Carla loses her entire mind about–again–her daughter banging a guy when she’s a senior in college? When she’s not portrayed as a religious nut like Margaret or Vera Smith? I mean, obviously there’s a lot wrong with this woman, but in the 1990s it seems to go waaaay beyond her rather pathetic Freudian Excuse, because: who reacts that way to something pretty much guaranteed? People In Their Twenties Usually Fuck, Film At Eleven.

Speaking of which: Frannie herself.

Okay. Gonna try and tread carefully here. There’s nothing wrong with being a virgin at whatever age. People are ace or demi or too busy or haven’t met anyone who does it for them, that’s cool. 

But Fran is written as an allosexual, heterosexual college senior with an active social life, who’s been dating this guy for months and just a few weeks back let him “take her virginity” (barf) and in 1990 that’s…like, unless she was some kind of purity-ring-wearing, loophole-finding freakshow, that’s not how people work at the end of the 20th, Steve, sorry. (Honestly, I was a little skeptical about it in 1978 until I found out recently that my parents–professional adults at the time, neither particularly conservative–didn’t sleep together until they got engaged that year, though neither of them was the other’s first. The past was so goddamn weird and I’m glad that worked out for them, but damn.) 

I’d love the read where Fran is actually a lesbian who comes out during the apocalypse and ends up with Dayna (who survives, dammit, because she’s amazing) but that’s not what we’ve got here, and Janet Weiss doesn’t track in 1990.

There’s also a passage where Fran reminisces about telling the campus infirmary that she’s having bad cramps and acne to get the Pill, and how dumb an excuse that is and why didn’t she just ask for the damn birth control? That’s a fine question in 1978. In 1990, it’s absurd bordering on surreal–perhaps not for Carla Goldsmith’s daughter, but I don’t get the impression that we’re supposed to read Fran as a Carrie analogue, and that’s the degree of repression that would have to be in play. 

For comparison, I went to boarding school in 1997. The infirmary proactively asked half of the incoming assumed-female students if they wanted hormonal birth control. (No, I don’t know why half. Yes, we were debating afterwards what conclusions we should draw. Yes, as one of the people not asked, I was vaguely insulted, and yes, looking at my fashion choices and orthodonture back then, I am also not at all surprised.) That was considerably more liberal than most high schools would have been, granted, but still–nobody remotely normal would have felt obligated to give a college infirmary an excuse for wanting BC unless they’d gotten stuck at Holy Cross.

If there’s an actual point here, rather than me just ranting about how much the 1970s sucked, it’s this: if you’re going to update a work for re-release or a TV adaptation or whatever, you have to do more than change cultural references. If you’re working with text from more than five years ago, for the love of God have someone else take a look–and make it someone of the generation you’re writing about. A 26-year-old married father of two may be a fair distance from a college senior already (especially at a time when middle age seems to have hit six minutes after the wedding and definitely after the first kid came back from the hospital), but a 43-year-old father of three? Not only are you going to get it wrong, you’re not even going to understand how you’re getting it wrong. 

PS: Harold Lauder is, in fact, timeless. Creepy little incels we will always have with us, yea unto the end of the world. The only difference is that his modern incarnation would have spent a lot of time on 8Chan and Frannie, if she’d had any sense, would have pushed him off the damn barn.