This week, I continued reading the first section of The End of the World As We Know It, Christopher Golden and Brian Keene’s edited collection of stories inspired by King’s The Stand (1978; revised and expanded 1990). “Part One: Down with the Sickness” features stories set during the outbreak and immediate aftermath of Captain Trips, with this week’s stories including Jonathan Janz’s “Lenora,” Gabino Iglesias’ “The Hope Boat,” C. Robert Cargill’s “Wrong Fucking Place, Wrong Fucking Time,” Hailey Piper’s “Prey Instict,” Tim Lebbon’s “Grace,” and Richard Chizmar’s “Moving Day.” 

A couple of really interesting themes emerged for me while I was reading this set of stories, ones which both drew me back to the descriptions in King’s novel and offered some new perspectives: individuals’ approaches to dealing with the bodies of the dead and the role of fictional horror in grappling with real-life horrors. 

The overwhelming mass of dead bodies was an omnipresent concern in King’s The Stand. There is little choice but to leave bodies where they fall, as a result of their sheer volume: with 99.4% of the world’s population susceptible to and dying from Captain Trips, there’s no way the remaining 0.6% can realistically keep up with laying each of these bodies to rest in a formal or respectful way. The overwhelming volume of the dead dramatically shifts the experience of grief, as does the fact that for most of the dead, there’s likely no one still alive who knew, loved, or remembers them.  

But there’s something fundamentally human in this interaction between the living and the dead, which is something that several of the stories show the survivors having to wrestle with. In Cargill’s “Wrong Fucking Place, Wrong Fucking Time,” for survivors Derek and Alan, finding and burying the dead in their small Texas town becomes part of their daily routine. With lots of open land and a population of less than one hundred people, this is an unpleasant but do-able job for the survivors. However, in Iglesias’ “The Hope Boat,” Sandra is one of the few survivors on the island of Puerto Rico and when her husband Miguel and her infant daughter Angie die, she has no choice but to leave their bodies where they are: Miguel in their shared bedroom and Angie in her crib. Sandra’s dying friend Mercedes tells her there is a boat that will be coming to the beach to pick up survivors and this is Sandra’s opportunity to get away from the otherwise inescapable death that surrounds her, including the bodies of her dead loved ones. When the boat doesn’t show up, she thinks through her next move, deciding “She has two options now. She can turn around and try to walk back home. There’s nothing waiting for her there except the rotting bodies of her daughter and her husband. But home is always home. Maybe she can wait and see where things go” (Iglesias 194-5). Coexistence with the corpses of her loved ones is a horrifying proposition and “The second option is to walk into the ocean. Maybe at the bottom of the ocean, away from people, she can find some hope” (Iglesias 195). The no-win choices available to her are to either live with the dead or to die herself, and Iglesias leaves the conclusion of the story and Sandra’s choice open-ended, saying simply “Sandra stands up and starts walking” (195). That simple sentence opens up a wealth of possibilities, at the heart of which are the very questions of what it means to be human: will she be overcome with grief and the abject horror of her loved one’s bodies and choose death or will her survival instinct carry her into this terrifying new reality? 

Another theme that was particularly interesting in this section of stories was how survivors turned to horror narratives to deal with the post-Captain Trips world. In the opening lines of Jonathan Janz’s “Lenora,” Baker Ludlow is watching Creepshow (1982) and later, when he is caring for a sick dik-dik he names Lenora, he and the animal watch The Exorcist (1973). Baker is trying his best to keep his new companion comfortable and hopefully see her through her illness and injury, and “He’d tried Animal House and The Blues Brothers, but Lenora didn’t take to them. Only horror movies held her attention” (Janz 168). Later, they spend a day together “pigging out, watching horror flicks, and reading a novel called I Am Legend. He’d planned on getting to it for years and figured now was as good a time as any for a story about the last man on earth” (Janz 174). From monsters and possession to vampires and the end of the world, horror provides a way for Baker to both escape from and live within this new reality, as well as serving as a shared experience and comfort for himself and Lenora. 

Horror films are also central to Cargill’s “Wrong Fucking Place, Wrong Fucking Time.” At the end of a long day of taking care of the ranch on which they have worked for years—the people have died, but the cows still need plenty of tending—and burying the dead, Derek and Alan grab a few VHS tapes from the local video store and spend their nights watching horror films. They meet up with another local survivor, Bill, who doesn’t have their familiarity with horror but starts joining them for these movie nights, and they decide to start introducing him to the pantheon of slashers: “The three returned to the boys’ place shortly thereafter with Friday the 13th 3D, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The boys reckoned it was about time Bill got a proper education in horror and that meant starting with the heavyweights—the all-time best slasher killers ever to grace the screen” (Cargill 206). Bill is unsettled and baffled, asking Derek and Alan why they like these characters: “Freddy, Jason, Leatherface. Why them? They’re not the good guys” (Cargill 207) and Alan explains that “when you talk about the basics, the fundamentals of what makes horror horror, there are just two types. Scary horror, in which we feel terror through empathy, and catharsis, in which we watch people who really deserve it get their just desserts” (Cargill 207-8, emphasis original). There is a duality at play here that appeals to Bill and sparks further conversation and connection, but this philosophy explodes into their real world when some people traveling through attack Derek and Alan, and Bill comes to their rescue with a chainsaw. The three men fight violently back against their attackers and prevail, but while Derek and Alan are sickened by this violence, Bill is much more sanguine, telling them “Ain’t nothin’ in lifetime but death … Wives. Daughters. Dogs. Everything. Sometimes, just sometimes … the bad guys get it too” (Cargill 217). As the story closes, Bill has become an active participant and even leader in the personal post-apocalyptic horror narrative the three men are constructing, asking if he can choose that evening’s movie, with the student poised to become the teacher. 

In the aftermath of Captain Trips, how survivors treat the living and the dead shapes how they see themselves and who they become. Whether they’re adjusting to the harsh realities of his terrifying new world or turning to established narrative genre patterns to figure out what might happen next and how they can survive it, they learn to live with the dead and even become forces of death themselves.  

[Page numbers from The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales from Stephen King’s The Stand; Gallery Books, 2025]