Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

There are books that perhaps define a generation with a greater sense of unfathomable fear than others; the late Victorian age for example, obsessed with standards and the in-built contempt for the so-called lower orders saw disease and unregulated, unprotected sex as the reason why civilisation would eventually fail and rot, and which they arguably saw in the Gothic spine tingling and ungodly, to their mind, Dracula.

For Generation X perhaps, and those on the edge of the remains of the Boomer age, Stephen King’s The Stand was the haunting spectre of many a nightmare, a tale so powerful, so immersed in the uncertainties of the day and the inevitability that the world was hanging on a political tightrope that it was not hard to see the resemblance of the world ravaged by Captain Trips, a flu so devastating that it killed over 99 percent of humanity, and that to which the presence of nuclear war and Armageddon had been bought on by a dividing of faith…this was arguably Stephen King at his most prophetic, and one that was returned to when the world ground to a halt during the Covid crisis of 2020.

Edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene, The End Of The World As We Know It brings together a huge swathe of writers who have produced something rather incredible, a support for the original novel with new stories and characters that add an extra dimension to the tale of good and evil in a world decimated by a virus so virulent that those who remained would shudder at the thought of what they lived through, and in one case, in the far off future would see the time as a new expression of misguided faith.

The only constant references to the original epic though comes in the names of Mother Abigail and Randall Flagg, and that of the song by the singer Larry Underwood, to whom his song was perhaps the last vestige of civilisation that many heard as they died surrounded by the dead and the infected. It is these building blocks though that the book finds itself adhering to, like laws laid down to instruct and maintain the vibe, the unpleasantness, the hope, and the fall out of the disease, and which to all the writers and authors who took part in this incredible literary exercise have maintained with respect and foresight.

It is to this end that the narrative of each story feels fresh, joined to the hip of The Stand, but having their own separate space, their entities entwinned but never repeating the already obvious.

The End Of The World As We Know It sees talented writers such as V. Castro, Nat Cassidy, Usman T. Malik, Hailey Piper, S A Cosby, and the combined forces of Wayne Brady and Maurice Braudaus, tackle the near impossible, of enlarging the myths and cannon of one of the great books of a generation and doing so with incredible competency and fierce pride.

With thanks to Christopher Golden and Brian Keene for bringing such an impressive body of work to an already genre defining novel, the influence of Stephen King still resonates nearly half a century after its humble beginnings.Ian D. Hall