Returning to The Long Walk by Ed Gorman

The Long Walk by Richard BachmanI couldn’t wait to read the Bachman books. By that time I was rereading the early Stephen King bestsellers simply because I needed a fix. I am of the age when realistic fiction was the standard form of the masters. In my top ten of novels is In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck. And the first trilogy I ever read was Studs Lonigan by James T. Farrell. Proletarian fiction if you will.

I’ve always maintained that Stephen King is the last of the working class novelists. I realize that the socio-economic background of his characters range up and down the scale. But I think his soul is with the folks he grew up with. He can break your heart with his take on the lives of average people.

And it is average people, teenage boys, King gives us in this spot on science fiction short novel about a militaristic government and a thrill-hungry populace drugged on spectacles of agony and violence.

So what we have here is a hundred teenage boys enduring a brutally competitive walk that ends only when all but the last one is eliminated. And by “eliminated” I generally mean has died from either sheer exhaustion or for violating the rules. An example of said rules: if you don’t keep moving at four miles per hour or better—and you are warned about this three times—you get shot by the soldiers tracking you on the sidelines. » Read more

Only Death Can Keep You From the Finish Line by Bev Vincent

thelongwalk-bookcoverIn an endnote in the chapter about The Stand in The Art of Darkness, Douglas E. Winter mentions a dystopian novel called The Long Walk “which owes much to Stephen King.” Was this an inside joke between King and Winter, who had interviewed King extensively for the book, or an astute observation on Winter’s part? Winter does talk about The Long Walk briefly in The Art of Darkness as one of King’s early novels, but without identifying the book by name.

King wrote The Long Walk in the fall of 1966 and the spring of 1967 when he was a freshman at the University of Maine. The story was inspired by a series of 50-mile hikes throughout the country that were sponsored by radio and TV stations. King didn’t have a car at the time and the idea for the story occurred to him while he was hitchhiking back home one night. “I was hitchhiking everywhere,” he says on his website. “I didn’t finish my 50-mile hike, though. I fell out after 20 miles.” » Read more

The Stand and Stephen King by Josh Boone

Stephen King was a god to me when I was a kid. I was raised by Bible-thumping Baptists in Virginia Beach, VA. Stephen King was a big no no. When procured, hardcovers were hidden under my bed on top of the wooden slats that supported my box springs, and paperbacks were stripped of their covers and glued inside the stripped covers of Christian books so I could get away with reading them without discovery. My life bore some disturbing similarities to “Fahrenheit 451,” and there was indeed a bonfire in our fireplace when a stash of King books was discovered at one point. Tears were shed and it wasn’t the smoke in my eyes from the blackened pile of ashes that used to be “The Stand” and “It.” » Read more

Revisiting The Stand (1978) by Richard Chizmar

THAT WAS THEN…

The StandTHE STAND was originally published in 1978, but I didn’t get around to reading it until a decade later — the very end of 1988/beginning of ’89. Christmas vacation of my final year of college to be exact. I was living in an apartment near the University of Maryland at the time, but had traveled home to Edgewood to stay with my parents for the nearly month long holiday break.

I had just finished with exams and the premiere issue of CEMETERY DANCE had just been published weeks before, so I spent my time at home recharging my brain and devouring a pile of magazine submissions…and reading THE STAND every night before I fell asleep.

Why, all these years later, do I so clearly remember reading it during that time period?

One simple image, which I will get to in a moment.

First, my thoughts on THE STAND upon that initial reading:

I loved it, but it was more than that: it almost felt like I was being hypnotized by the story — this was becoming a familiar experience when reading a SK book — as it took over my late nights and, on more nights than I care to remember, my dreams. » Read more

Richard Chizmar Is Writing His Essay About The Stand (1978)

Hey Folks!

Just a heads-up, Richard is now writing his essay about the original version of The Stand and it’ll be posted this week.

Remember, you can follow Richard on Twitter for his personal updates and other posts of interest to readers and collectors and Stephen King fans!

The Stand

» Read more

New eBook: The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia Book by Brian James Freeman & Bev Vincent

We’re pleased to announce Cemetery Dance’s most unique eBook to date, the Revised & Updated second edition of The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia Book by Brian James Freeman & Bev Vincent, is now available for immediate download.

The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia BookThis special eBook edition allows you to test your trivia knowledge with a unique design using links between questions and hints and answers, and it works with any standard eReader. No apps or special programs are needed. If you have a Kindle, Kobo, Nook, or any of their related apps for other devices, this eBook should work for you!

About the Book:
This revised and updated second edition of The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia Book features all of the original questions from the first edition, along with more than one hundred new questions about Stephen King’s most recent releases!

Also included are ten brand new illustration-based questions from Cemetery Dance favorite artist Glenn Chadbourne, along with the 60 illustration-based questions from the original edition.

This new edition concludes with a brand new afterword by Kevin Quigley, founder of Charnel House, one of the oldest Stephen King fan sites on the web.

The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia Book by Brian James Freeman and Bev Vincent is a must-have for any of Stephen King’s Constant Readers.

Purchase the eBook:
Amazon.com • Amazon.ca • Amazon.co.uk • Nook • Kobo

Purchase the Trade Paperback:
Amazon.com • Cemetery Dance • Barnes & Noble

The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia Book

Welcome to the Lot by Christopher Golden

'Salem's Lot‘Salem’s Lot isn’t my favorite Stephen King novel—that’s The Stand—but it may be the one that’s influenced me the most. It never made me cry the way some other King novels have, but it got under my skin more, cut me more deeply, frightened me more than any of the others. I suspect I could spend entire chapters delving into my psyche and finding all of the scars that ‘Salem’s Lot left behind, but I prefer to think of the imaginative fires it ignited in me.

I know I should remember my first Stephen King novel. It’s possible that in other places I’ve lied about this, but the truth is that I don’t truly recall which of his books I encountered first. I suspect it was The Stand, which I bought in an airport bookstore as a kid, on my way to Florida with my family. It might have been Carrie, which I bought used at a little shop in my hometown of Framingham, Massachusetts. It wasn’t The Dead Zone, which I first spotted in the hands of a bouncer at Liam’s Irish Tavern—he was reading on the job. And it wasn’t Firestarter, which the nuns at St. Bridget’s heartily disapproved of my reading in the sixth grade.

It definitely wasn’t ‘Salem’s Lot.

No matter, though. Whatever else I read before it, I know I loved every word, but it was ‘Salem’s Lot that really woke me up. I’d spent a lot of time in southern Maine in the summers, so I fancied that I knew a little bit about Maine…and it didn’t feel too different from Massachusetts to me. There was an old house a mile or so from mine that we kids all called “the Lavolee Mansion.” I’m sure I’ve spelled that wrong, but you get the gist. The house had been beautiful once, with faux Doric columns in front, though in those days it was a fading, peeling, crumbling mess of a place with broken windows and overgrown grass. In the lore of the neighborhood kids, the house was—of course—haunted, and when we walked or rode our bikes past the old pile, we always picked up the pace. » Read more

Good vs. Evil by Bev Vincent

After Stephen King finished The Shining, he wrote the novella “Apt Pupil” before going back to work on his Patty Hearst[1] novel, The House on Value Street. After six weeks, he once again felt the book wasn’t coming together for him.

A few  incidents in the news caught his attention. The first was an accident in Utah where canisters of a deadly chemical fell from a truck, split open, The_Stand_faceand killed some sheep[2]. If the wind had been blowing in a different direction, many people might have died. He still had the Symbionese Liberation Army on his mind, so he wondered what would happen if a disease got loose and destroyed most of the world’s population—as in the George R. Stewart novel Earth Abides, which he had read in high school, and M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud—but members of the SLA were immune for some reason. Then he read about the first-ever outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease at the American Legion Convention in Philadelphia in 1976. When he heard a radio preacher utter the phrase “once in every generation the plague will fall among them,” he liked it enough to write it down and post it on his desk.

He had written about the survivors of a viral epidemic before, in the short story “Night Surf,” which was first published in Ubris in 1969 and reworked for subsequent publication in Cavalier in 1974. Though that virus was called A6, the survivors referred to it as Captain Trips. At that earlier time, he wanted to write more about the world after the apocalypse, but he didn’t feel ready to tackle such an enormous project.

He was also inspired to try to write an epic fantasy on the scale of The Lord of the Rings, but with a familiar setting. The problem with so much of high fantasy, he felt, was that readers had to learn a new language and geography to enjoy those books, whereas his would be set in contemporary America. » Read more

New Stephen King Revisited Contest! Win A Signed Stephen King Limited Edition

Cemetery Dance Publications is pleased to announce we’ll be giving away a SIGNED Stephen King Limited Edition to one randomly selected fan of StephenKingRevisited.com. There are a lot of ways to enter this FREE giveaway, including methods that don’t require social media accounts if that isn’t your thing. We hope you’ll enter as many ways as you can before time runs out!

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