 Our Fragments of Faith series explores how we can find the Lord in popular culture and the things around us. THE STAND By Stephen King By: Bro. Pio Benedict The Stand is an epic novel written by the master of horror, Stephen King. It contains over 1000 pages, pages that weave a story that comparatively takes us from the Bible’s book of “Exodus” through “Revelations.” It is a story of an apocalyptic event: the escape of a deadly virus from a government installation that infects the world and virtually wipes out the human population. But in this story, Mother Abigail, a 108-year-old crippled black woman, has visions from God that she is to lead the remaining population to Boulder, Colorado, to start anew. God sends this revelation to several groups of the remaining population who travel to Mother Abigail. But the devil exists in the form of Randall Flagg, who gathers others as followers and forms a community in no other place but sin city, Las Vegas. The story emphasizes the free will of man and the choices they make, a choice of good versus evil. Mother Abigail leads her group, guided by God, to Boulder, all suffering with struggles and tribulations, while the devil, in the form of Flagg, takes his people to Vegas where they enjoy the conveniences of their old lives. The novel deals with the battle for souls and the temptations heaped on humankind by the devil himself. The story ends in an epic battle of good versus evil, with the hand of God using creations of mankind to seal the outcome. (You must read the book). Many of his books seem written for the Halloween season. While King’s horror-fiction-fantasy genre scares some people, and others criticize him as a hack, critic Douglas Cowan notes, “…many of King’s readers seek their escape in his sinister story worlds precisely because of the plain, unremarkable, yet profoundly disturbing ‘us’ he presents. Reflected there in his dark mirror, we see shades of ourselves” (NYU Press, c.f. America’s Dark Theologian: The Religious Imagination of Stephen King).
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