I have finally reached the end of Christopher Golden and Brian Keene’s excellent anthology, The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand. I definitely took my time with this one: much like reading King’s The Stand (1978; complete and uncut edition, 1990), immersing myself in nearly 800 pages of post-apocalyptic end of the world possibilities was an emotionally exhausting feat (which I really should have seen coming). 

The final section of the anthology, “Other Worlds Than These,” is the shortest of the collection’s sections, featuring only two stories: Nat Cassidy’s “The Unfortunate Convalescence of the SuperLawyer” and David J. Schow’s “Walk on Gilded Splinters.” While many of the preceding stories focused on individual narratives and experiences, both Cassidy and Schow’s stories situate themselves within more macrocosmic contexts, Cassidy within King’s literary universe and Schow considering what hundreds of years of recitation, codification, and belief systems might do to the story of The Stand. 

As King’s Constant Readers are well aware, there are myriad interconnections between his fictional worlds, with the Dark Tower series the lynchpin that connects them, with intersecting narratives of The Stand, The Eyes of the Dragon (1984), Hearts in Atlantis (1999), UR (2010; revised and collected in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, 2015), and more. [If you’re interested in digging into some more of these Dark Tower and King connections, I spent a lot of time exploring these in my 2021 book The Quest for the Dark Tower: Genre and Interconnection in the Stephen King Series]. Given my enthusiastically nerdy fixation on these intersections and interconnections, Cassidy’s “The Unfortunate Convalescence of the SuperLawyer” was one of my favorites from the collection. I don’t want to give away any of the surprises, but if you enjoy those jolts of recognition when you’re reading King’s work or love poking around in the liminal spaces between creator and creation, this is a story for you. Cassidy also includes an author’s note at the end of the story that digs into some of the textual differences between the 1978 edition of The Stand and the 1990 complete and uncut edition, including details that inform his foray into King’s universe, that was meticulously detailed and utterly enjoyable. 

Schow’s “Walk on Gilded Splinters” draws on themes of insight and prophecy, though in this case, it is the events of The Stand that have become a sacred text of sorts, passed down through the generations and actively negotiated, as some elements are foregrounded while others fall away. The story Schow tells foregrounds a desire for meaning, but not much hope. While the prophets and monks argue and interpret the stories of this ancient history, even that meaning itself is elusive and corrupted, constantly shifting further from any notion of truth, calcified and codified into textual artifacts severed from the people who lived and died at the heart of them.  

The End of the World As We Know It is an incredible collection and a wonderful addition to King’s fictional universe, with the stories by C. Robert Cargill, Paul Tremblay, and Nat Cassidy being some of my personal favorites. As I have noted several times throughout this reading, in the sprawling world of The Stand, there are always so many untold stories hovering at the margins, minor characters who come and go, and other survivors fighting for their lives beyond the scope of Mother Abagail, Flagg, and the core cast of characters. The authors included in The End of the World As We Know It highlight these other possible experiences, the larger post-apocalyptic context, and the inescapable draw of the devastated world King created. The scope of The Stand is so expansive, so all-encompassing, that it feels like there will always be another story to tell, a challenge that these authors have tackled with heartache and grace, all grounded in homage to King and the narrative universe he created.