We’re approaching the home stretch of the apocalypse and The End the World As We Know It. This past week’s reading was the third section of the collection, which is titled “Life Was Such a Wheel.” While the first two sections are set in the midst or in the pretty immediate aftermath of Captain Trips, the stories in this third section pick up after human society has had a chance to fall into some new rhythms and patterns, to properly start rebuilding from the ashes. In some cases, these authors tell the stories of humans a generation or two later. The stories in this section are Ronald Malfi’s “He’s a Righteous Man,” Somer Canon’s “Awaiting Orders in Flaggston,” Chuck Wendig’s “Grand Junction,” Preemie Mohamed’s “Hunted to Extinction,” Catherynne M. Valente’s “Come to the Last Night of Sadness,” and Sarah Langan’s “The Devil’s Children.” 

My big picture takeaway from this section is pretty straightforward and bleak, to be honest: when humanity has the opportunity to start anew, we’re still almost guaranteed to screw it up. Sure, there are glimmers of hope and humanity, a bit of human decency here and there, but overall, people kind of suck. Whether they want power and are willing to take out anyone who gets in the way of them seizing it, they just enjoy hurting other people, or they’re people in desperate situations driven to desperate measures, it’s not looking good for humanity. 

Malfi’s “He’s a Righteous Man” is a fascinating parallel and counterpoint to King’s iconic “Children of the Corn” (included in King’s 1976 collection Night Shift), with a “prophet” named Jacob Cree who wrote a novel that is a proxy for King’s The Stand and which many survivors believe foretold the apocalypse, and who now travels from one settlement to another, speaking to survivors, including the largely agrarian town of Calvary. “Awaiting Orders in Flaggston” and “Grand Junction” make it clear that while Flagg may temporarily be off the board, his influence and his followers remain just as toxic and dangerous as ever, though their devotion and the discourse of the figurehead they follow morphs with the times and the desires of their leaders. 

Valente’s “Came the Last Night of Sadness” simultaneously explores and intertwines two disparate directions: Fern Ramsey travels the largely abandoned countryside finding the missives that those who died left behind, hearing and celebrating the voices of the lost, but in the aftermath of Captain Trips, Fern herself is a striking reminder that not all survivors are created equal (much like Mercy in Tremblay’s “The Story I Tell Is the Story of Some of Us” in the second section). Langan’s “The Devil’s Children” builds on America’s history of discrimination and exploitation, with those in power in the post-Captain Trips world carrying out tests of new viruses and immunizations on marginalized people without their consent. While Langan draws on the horrors of the past, Mohamed’s “Hunted to Extinction” imagines a dark future, with beings that prey upon the surviving humans, a threat that is compounded by their ability to take on the disguise of humans themselves, which means that any vestiges of humanity or empathy become a potentially fatal liability. 

The full quote from which this section draws its title comes from the final lines of The Stand and reads “Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again” (1141) This wheel is dangerous, demoralizing, and potentially fatal. In the stories featured in this section, those who attempt to stand before it and challenge it are likely to be crushed beneath as the wheel keeps turning, and no matter what hope the survivors had for a better day and a brighter future, the wheel sure seems to have come “round to the same place again,” turning humans against one another and bringing the survivors right back to the brink of destruction. 

We’ve got just one more short section in The End of the World As We Know It, titled “Other Worlds Than These.” After seeing the new worlds the survivors have created, “other worlds” are looking pretty good right about now. We’ll venture there together and wrap up The End of the World As We Know It next week. 

[Page numbers are from the Signet complete and uncut paperback edition of The Stand, 1990]