INTERVIEW: Editors Christopher Golden and Brian Keene and anthology contributors
For fans of Stephen King, there’s a nearly universal question: “How did you feel the first time you read The Stand?” It is the kind of novel one returns to with fresh eyes and older experiences years later. It is an enduring and scarily prescient novel about the ravages of plague, the price of power and both the fragility and persistent strength of hope. Moreover, it has become the novel that is the touchstone for generations of horror and speculative fiction loving fiction fans.
In The End of the World As We Know It, editors Christopher Golden and Brian Keene along with a bevy of powerhouse authors have come to tell stories within the world, reimagining, reinterpreting, and responding to King’s classic. There are no retellings here because there are plenty of fresh nightmares to be spun in the world of Captain Trips. I spoke with some of the brilliant minds behind the anthology and why The Stand still haunts us generations later, what it taught them about scale, hope, human persistence, and what it means to write at the edge of the world.
[GdM] How did the idea for this anthology come about? Was there a conversation, a spark, or just a shared love of The Stand that led you to revisit it through a fresh lineup of voices? And when it came to tone, what kind of balance were you aiming for—between honoring King’s world and building something completely your own?
[Christopher Golden] I’m going to take the second part of that question first. There’s no way that we could ever lay claim to any of this being “completely our own.” What we wished for, and what we got, were stories that would be unique to each contributor but that would live and breathe in the world of The Stand. We’re honoring Stephen King, of course, and his extraordinary novel, but I know I can speak for both myself and Brian when I say that we’re also honoring the love we share for the book, and the kids we were when we each first read it. The Stand is part of the foundation of who I am as a writer and as a human being. That’s not overstating. Receiving the email back from Steve that said “Do it!” was such a gift. Brian and I communicated our passion and excitement to the contributors and they gave us theirs in return, in the form of 34 fantastic stories that are weird and different and yet have all grown from the fertile soil of the original novel. As for the idea…I’d basically given up editing anthologies, and then one day I was thinking “wouldn’t it be cool if…” and I knew I had to tell Brian, and then I was emailing Steve, and then he replied, and suddenly it was real.
[Brian Keene] And those first few minutes after it became real were simultaneously wonderful and daunting and exhilarating and terrifying. Chris and I had previously edited another similar anthology together—The Drive-In: Multiplex, which was to Joe R. Lansdale’s seminal Drive-In trilogy what this book is to The Stand. Now… when you work on something with a friend, be it cowriting a novel or coediting an anthology, it can either be an awesome and rewarding experience or it can just be the worst experience you’ve ever had. In the case of working with Chris, it was awesome. The Drive-In: Multiplex was fun to put together, creatively challenging and rewarding, and well received by readers and critics. So, I was definitely up for doing it again, but when Chris said he was done editing anthologies, I respected that. I’ve edited eight anthologies, previously. Chris has edited four hundred thousand bazillion. I figured that was that… until during one of our almost-daily phone calls he said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we did this?” And I agreed it would. And luckily, so did Steve. (laughs)
[GdM] People often call The Stand one of King’s masterpieces—and one of horror’s most enduring stories. From your perspective, what makes it a horror novel, and where does it land in the larger landscape of the genre?
[BK] There’s a long tradition of such works within Horror and Dark Fantasy, stretching all the way back to M. P. Shiel’s 1901 novel The Purple Cloud and William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land from 1912. And there are various works that predate those, as well. The Stand rightfully stands alongside all of them. Indeed, I think it towers over everything that came before it, and is the blueprint that all of us who came after have been following, without ever exceeding.
[CG] The thing about horror is that it contains multitudes. Almost any story can be a horror story, depending on what ingredients you add, and the slant you put on it. For me, there are so many ways in which The Stand is horror, beginning with the fact that we see Captain Trips unfolding. Many apocalyptic stories start after the worst is over and then it’s about surviving. We go through it all with these characters. The symptoms of the Superflu are horrific, and the way King digs into the emotional and psychological experiences of characters watching their loved ones, and the whole world, dying around them…that’s horror. And that’s before you even get to the malevolent presence of Flagg, dreams about him, his corrupting presence…and the Holland Tunnel. As for the larger landscape of the genre…it’s one of the signposts on this road, for sure. Its influence will be felt by writers and readers, even those who’ve never read it, for generations to come.
[GdM] What do you think The Stand showed modern horror writers about scale—whether it’s how deep you go with characters, how wide you go with the world, or how much emotional weight you can pack into an apocalypse?
[CG] There’s a truly simple answer to that. Readers still have to care. Epic, sprawling, over one thousand pages…it could have been two thousand pages, and we would have read every page, because King makes us care. In many ways, the larger the apocalypse, the more epic the scale, the more intimate we need to be with the characters. We have to share their experience. If readers don’t care…they won’t care.
[BK] Exactly. Any form of horror works best if the reader is invested in the characters. That’s why a franchise such as Friday the 13th, for example, isn’t necessarily terrifying. Oh, it may have some genuine scares, but it’s not going to stick with you and effect you weeks or months or even years later, because you just don’t care about a bunch of surplus teenagers with minimal backstory. Give the readers people to identify with or be invested in, and the horror becomes much more effective. I think The Stand represents some of Steve’s best character-work, at least for that era of his career. These are characters who I knew as well as my friends and family. Characters who I saw glimpses of myself in (Larry when I was younger, Glen Bateman now). If I am emotionally invested in them, then when the horrific things start happening, it’s far more effective.
[GdM] Why do you think The Stand still hits so hard after all these years? What is it about King’s version of the end of the world that keeps pulling readers and writers back in?
[CG] That intimacy is a big part of it. The characters are so beautifully drawn—the ones we love and the ones that get under our skin. But it’s also such a purely American novel and paints such an interesting 20th century American landscape. But beyond its American-ness, it’s also such an exploration of human behavior. The way characters behave, their hopes and fears and struggles, their courage and their cowardice, are so recognizably human. And, of course, in 2025 when we’ve had our own pandemic and the world is being willfully unraveled by greed, corruption, and idiocy, the feeling that it could all end abruptly (and stupidly) is overwhelming. We can hide in these pages while also processing those fears.
[BK] The most common refrain I heard from people in the early days of the pandemic and the lockdown was “This is just like The Stand”. And I wasn’t immune to that thinking, either. I vividly remember when we were first getting reports of Covid-19 here in America. Chris and I were spending the day at Joe Hill’s house, and all three of us had just gotten done traveling the week before, and we joked that we were Patient Zeros for the horror genre. But on my train ride back to Pennsylvania… seeing less people than normal, and folks starting to mask up, and reading conflicting news reports… all I kept thinking was, “This really is like The Stand. Okay, I’ve prepped for this. I’ve reread that novel once a year every year since it was first published. I’ve got this!” In retrospect, processing what was happening through the lens of the book helped me with the apprehension and anxiety I felt as a father, and as someone who has immunocompromised loved ones. It was a way to deal, you know?
[GdM] Do you think the way we talk about “the end of the world” has changed since 2020? Did that shift shape the stories you gravitated toward—or how you interpreted them as editors?
[CG] All of the stories in the book were contributions from authors we approached because we had a sense they would give us something unique. We wanted that same sense of humanity, but from a wide variety of perspectives. I took for granted that living in the world as it currently stands (pun intended) would influence the writers and their stories. We’ve all been changed now, irrevocably and most of us probably not for the better. But there is always hope, even in the darkest times. We can always dream of Mother Abagail and gather in Boulder with like-minded people who want a better world. And we can write stories to explore our hopes and fears.
[GdM] When readers finish the last story and close the book, what do you hope sticks with them—a feeling, a question, a particular image they can’t shake?
[BK] As a fan of the novel, I hope they have the same reaction to the stories that Steve had. Hopefully they’ll love and enjoy them as much as he did. And I hope that they’ll discover some new favorite authors to read more by. One thing we made sure of was that all of the genre’s various forms were represented. Whether your preferred horror is mainstream, quiet, weird, splatterpunk, dark fantasy, thriller, supernatural, surreal, or even comedic, its represented in the anthology.
[CG] My hope is that readers have been unsettled, amused, saddened, horrified, and made to think about the world and the nature of human beings. But I also hope that they feel Brian and I, and each of the contributors, have added something worthwhile to the world of the novel and to readers’ conversations and feelings about it. Finally, I hope everyone who reads this book is inspired to go and read The Stand all over again.
[GdM] Now we will get an opportunity to chat with some of the contributing authors of the anthology. I asked each author the same three questions so that we can compare how The Stand affects each of us differently and how those differences are translated into storytelling.
[GdM] Do you remember how you felt the first time you read “The Stand”? Has that feeling stayed with you, and did it shape how you approached your own story for this anthology?
[Chuck Wendig] I do remember it! I was in high school and I was reading it alongside some friends and I remember not only the sense of communal joy and power (and horror, obviously) in that, but I also clearly remember us interfacing whenever we were getting to parts that were like, whoa what the fuck. Best example of that: Larry and Rita escaping NYC through the nightmarish Lincoln Tunnel.
[Premee Mohamed] Yes! I read it in my final year of high school (1997), and I remember that because I did a tour of the university I was planning to attend and I picked the book up at lunchtime at their bookstore (I was attracted to the bright orange and black cover, and was like “I already like Stephen King and this seems like a ton of book for the money”). I remember being instantly hooked. He so instantly threw me into the world of “Something is wrong, very very wrong.” He had built such a vast and complicated cast of characters, and yet wove them so smoothly into the overarching plots and subplots that every individual was utterly memorable. When I re-read ‘The Stand’ to refresh my memory for my own story, I found myself feeling profoundly reconnected with all these people, as if I had gone into a room I expected to be empty and instead found dozens of friends there. It absolutely shaped how I approached my own story — I didn’t want the supernatural aspects to overshadow the characters, because the main thing you always get from a King story of any length is “These are people.“
[Tim Lebbon] I think I first read The Stand when I was about 15, and it instantly became my favourite novel. It still is now. That meant that I felt a huge responsibility when I wrote my story ‘Grace’ … but it also gave me the opportunity to answer the question I asked myself 40 years ago on that first reading: ‘What happens to astronauts in space when Captain Trips hits?’
[David J. Schow] I was stuck in Chicago during the blizzard of 1978. I cadged a review copy out of Doubleday and read it three times in a row―literally going back to page one after the final page. THE STAND was a good place into which to vanish for awhile.
Original version only. (Steve amended a bunch of it, even for the first paperback.)
[Alex Segura] I do—I read The Stand around the time my son was born. And as any parent can tell you, having a newborn is a moment of chaos and uncertainty and fear—so reading The Stand was almost soothing, ha! I still think about those opening scenes, and how King ratcheted up the tension so masterfully. It still sticks with me today,
[Meg Gardiner] I was immersed, transported, terrified, exultant, and riveted from start to finish. From my early teens I craved books that would sweep me away for entire days, weekends, weeks. The Stand swallowed me whole. It grabbed me by the heart and throat. It has never let go. In writing my story, what I wanted to do most was what the novel does: embrace the characters’ humanity. That’s why The Stand stays with me.
[Bev Vincent] I read the abridged version of The Stand in about 1980 and it was definitely one of the books that made me want to read more of King’s work. It was an immersive experience and I remember being totally swept away by the story and becoming deeply fond of the characters. When Stu breaks his leg and gets left behind, I was devastated because of King’s cunning pseduo-foreshadowing. I’ve re-read the book numerous times, including once before writing “Lockdown,” and it is still as compelling and involving as the first time through. I am so familiar with the story that I was easily able to put myself in that world and carve out a little corner of it for myself to explore.
[GdM] Writing in the shadow of something as massive as The Stand has to be a balancing act. How did you navigate the tension between reverence and reinvention, while still making sure your own voice came through loud and clear?
[Chuck Wendig] I think, though it sounds counterintuitive, the best thing writers can do—and not just in a situation like this, but in general—is to turn their brains off. Obviously I don’t mean to turn off the part that’s devoted to the story, ahem, I just mean, you gotta know when to block out the stuff that isn’t really designed to write the story. And I think worrying too much about reverence and reinvention and being a part of something so so hug and so so important can really be a paralyzing thing. There is a tension there! And I don’t know that such tensions serves the beam, so to speak.
It’s mostly after you’ve written it that you think, okay, is this the story it needs to be? It has to cast its own shadow and not be lost. But it also has to be somewhat true to the thing that cast the first shadow, you know?
[Premee Mohamed] That was really hard for me. I haven’t written much in someone else’s world (so actually I was very glad that our editors said we could write way outside the novel provided that we didn’t actually break canon) so I spent a long time fretting about how close to adhere to the timeline and events of the novel, or how far to stray, and then how much I could make up and whether it ‘fit,’ or whether it was totally unreasonable. I think in this case, being a longtime King fan helped — he’s not afraid of dropping obscurities and explaining them later, or leaving them entirely unexplained, because that’s one of the fun things about his particular brand of horror. You just don’t know what’s happening sometimes and you have to act despite that, if you want to survive the story. So I ran with that, and tried to use setting and community to add my own voice. I was trying to ask the most basic King question, which is, “If you didn’t believe this was supernatural, but you still had to solve the problem, what would you do?” And the answer is, “I’d get my friends, hop on my quad, and go rescue the kidnapped child.”
[Tim Lebbon] I just wrote the best story I could, and soon realised that it was actually a story that served as a sort of prequel to the main action in the book. Honestly that didn’t really worry me when I was actually working on it … but once I’d delivered it I suddenly felt the pressure! Luckily Chris and Brian liked the story, and I’m pleased to say Stephen King did too.
[David J. Schow] Easily—I always try to write the one story nobody else would think of.
[Alex Segura] It was daunting at first, but I tried to approach it the same way I would writing in the Star Wars or Marvel or DC universes—you find a little space where you can use your voice and create something additive and unique. I knew I wanted to tell a harrowing story about parenting and about dealing with the aftershocks of a seismic, worldwide event—which unfortunately seems less impossible today than when the book came out. But my hope was to create something that complemented the work and felt special on its own.
[Meg Gardiner] Being asked to contribute to the anthology was a privilege, and imposed a responsibility. I wanted to honor the novel. I was being admitted to its imaginative world. I wanted to create characters that were wholly mine, and put them to the test within The Stand’s inimitable setting.
[Bev Vincent] Someone who has read the anthology told me that they thought I had captured King’s style in “Lockdown,” but that was never my intention and I was surprised to hear that. My main goal was to be true to the chronology of the story, which is why one of the first things I did was reread the novel and create a day-by-day timeline of events to make sure I wasn’t stepping out of continuity. I knew the story I wanted to tell, inspired by the various reactions to pandemic lockdown we’d seen just a short while earlier. Would King have told the same story differently? More than likely. I didn’t try to emulate him–that would have been too hard!
[GdM] When we tell stories about the end of the world, are we also asking whether anything is worth saving? How important is it to leave space for hope—and in your story for this anthology, did you choose to offer that space, or close the door on it?
[Chuck Wendig] Hope is complicated, but we need the space for it, for sure. And my story aims to leave room for it—while also being clear that hope is complicated. It’s not a Free Parking card in Monopoly, you can’t just get it and zip past Go and collect your check. Hope is a thing with teeth, and it can bite you if you give too much to it. I aim to find that balance—that place where hope is both a light in the tunnel, but a place where hope might just be a train barreling toward you in the dark. Horror lives in that uncertainty, I think.
[Premee Mohamed] I guess it depends on the story and how we’re defining ‘the end of the world’! If we’re saying, as in ‘The Stand,’ that a lot of people died but the essential infrastructure was still available to re-start everything exactly the way it was for the survivors, I think hope is inherently there: you have all the blueprints, you can rebuild as fast as your trauma allows. In a lot of other ‘end of the world’ narratives, that’s missing — the knowledge is gone, or the infrastructure is gone, or the physical world itself is irreparably changed (radiation, desertification, solar flares, asteroid strike, whatever) and then that becomes something you have to contend with. Then the hope is that you can save the absolute bare minimum, which is humanity. I think there’s a lot to be said for asking what we’re hoping for, at the end of the world. Is it merely survival? Is it erasure of the past? An advancement of civilization, a carbon-copy of what came before, something better, something different, new rules, new governance, etc? In my story, I left the door (I think) a little less open than the end of ‘The Stand,’ but not shut all the way. Hope lives in the uncertainty of knowing whether the human race is really in its twilight or not — the characters in the story have just had their particular hopes dashed, but even they have to admit it’s a big world and there’s room for surprises.
[Tim Lebbon] I’m still an optimist at heart, despite the troubled world we live in. So yes, there’s absolutely a strong vein of hope running through my story, as there is in the novel.
[David J. Schow] No spoilers! No guarantees! As a species, we don’t control as much as we like to believe we do. Even in our bleakest scenarios, we either tilt against chaos or embrace it. Usually a survival mindset prevails. Self-interest drives humanity—enlightened self-interest can be revelatory.
[Alex Segura] I don’t want to spoil the ending, but there’s definitely a moment where the reader will hopefully think “wow, he could have gone the other way with this”—meaning either positive or really, really grimdark. I hope the end result provides readers with a powerful ending.
[Meg Gardiner] The novel features indestructible hope, in the direst of circumstances. I didn’t want to write something that lacked it. There’s space. I let it open. Maybe just a crack. I do write suspense, after all.
[Bev Vincent] I think “Lockdown” is completely about people deciding that a small corner of the world was worth preserving as much and for as long as possible. The characters in it are people who know how to survive a long time without access to the larger world. It’s almost like they’ve been training for this all their lives! So, they have hope, but it’s a selfish, survivalist hope. As for the rest of the world? They don’t really have the luxury of worrying about that too much. They do hope things will return to normal eventually because they will eventually not be able to sustain themselves.
This interview was first published in Grimdark Magazine Issue #43
Read The End of the World as We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand Ed. by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene
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