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If Stephen King is a house, The Stand is the front door

Walking to work sometimes—my office is in Times Square—I think idly to myself about the benefits of a post-apocalyptic world. Fewer people. More space. The environment would probably get better. With any luck, Texas would be wiped off the map entirely. “A plague hits, and half of us survive,” I think to myself as I push past Elmos and Darth Vaders lined up like Wal-Mart greeters on 40th Street. “Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.”

For secret misanthropes like myself, Stephen King’s The Stand is as fascinating as it is horrifying. Felled by a government-created (and accidentally released) superflu known as Captain Trips, the U.S. (and theoretically global) population is eviscerated—only about 1 in 10 people prove immune. Those that survive find themselves cast adrift in a world absent their loved ones, and are scared by the arrival of vivid mass dreams, dreams of a faceless man and a kindly old woman, the former evil, the latter virtuous, the former Satanic, the latter Godly. Propelled by their visions, the country’s remaining residents gather together in two separate locations—Boulder, Colorado for the good’uns, and Las Vegas, natch, for the bad—where they begin to negotiate the formation of new societies, and to prepare for a final showdown between good and evil.

I always feel like, somebody’s watching me

For the vast majority of my adolescence, it would be safe to say that I didn’t care about the news. It’s hard to when you’re a kid—news is just a lot of grown-ups talking about things that seem boring, or complicated, or at the very least not nearly as exciting as Legos. If I’m being honest, it probably wasn’t until college that I really thought, “Huh. Things are going on in the world and I should probably know about them.”

As a result of my youthful Lego predilections—and longstanding struggle to remember things learned in history class—there are enormous gaps in my knowledge of What Hath Happened Before. And yet I, like everyone else, reacted to news of the NSA’s spying operations with a definitive lack of surprise. “Of course the government is spying on us,” I thought to myself while reading Edward Snowden profiles and snickering at the name Booz Allen. “I just assumed they always were.”

I wasn’t alone in this reaction—whether you think Snowden is a hero or villain, outrage over the actual content of his leaks has been relatively muted—and so I thought it might be interesting to fill in some of the missing details. How long have these programs been a thing? Who started them? Why? Should I really be all that worried?

Joyland: A Stephen King amuse-bouche

KING INTERLUDE!

If you’ve read this blog in the past, you’ll find that I enjoy me some Stephen King. He’s like a palette-cleanser, an old faithful I turn to between other books—more challenging books or less challenging books or books that are intellectually fulfilling but don’t quite suck me in. King for me is like a favorite record. You don’t listen to it every day, but when you do it’s like rediscovering music.

In the grand scheme of the King ouvre, Joyland is a throwaway. It’s more a novella than a novel, almost a campfire story. It occupies a limited universe, for the most part a single point in time, and lacks even one Maine resident, or rip in the space-time continuum (though there is a psychic kid). The book is short and sweet, and its supernatural elements are understated, almost to a fault. Joyland is the kind of novel I imagine King dreams up at a red light, or on a long elevator ride. “So…what if there was a carny legend about a haunted funhouse…” and then the signal goes green and he drives off. Bam. Novel.

And essentially, that’s what the book is about. Told in flashback by narrator/protagonist Devin Jones—now in his 60s—Joyland is the story of a summer and fall Dev spent working at Joyland, a seaside amusement park in North Carolina. While there, Dev makes friends, mourns a breakup and learns what it means to “wear the fur” on a 100-degree day in August. But throughout his time at Joyland, Dev is also haunted by the story of a girl who was murdered in the Horror House by her boyfriend. Carny lore is that her ghost still appears there to this day.

Reports from the front lines of the mommy wars

The first time I read the words “Mean Girls for moms”—a blurb adorning the back cover of forthcoming Gill Hornby novel The Hive—I threw up a little bit in my mouth.

Don’t get me wrong: I love Mean Girls. I watch the shit out of Mean Girls. But describe a book to me as “a tart vivisection of mother culture” and I’m already dozing off. Or running in the other direction.

The Hive—a debut novel for Hornby, whose brother is, yes, the fantabulous Nick Hornby—is pretty highly anticipated, as books go. (Released in the UK in May, it goes on sale here in September). The novel inspired a seven-way bidding war among publishers, and Focus Features has already bought the movie rights. At this very moment, some studio executive may be out in search of quirky middle-aged women to play each of The Hive’s caricatural leading ladies.

And who are these ladies? Well. There’s Rachel, our protagonist of sorts, whose husband recently left her for an intern. There’s Georgie, hilarious and uncouth mother of six, whose notion of “joining in” is muttering sarcastic quips from the sidelines. We have Heather, over-eager and desperately insecure mother of one, and of course Beatrice—Bea—the queen of the moms, the Regina George, the HBIC.

The raindead Megaphone. Not Fox News, the other one

The only thing worse than never having read anything by George Saunders is probably popping my Saunders cherry with the author’s inaugural book of essays, instead of any of his much-lauded compendiums of short stories. But my indiscretion couldn’t be helped—during a GABST trip to Elliott Bay Book Co in Seattle, The Braindead Megaphone simply spoke to me from the shelves.

TBM was actually the very first book I bought on the Great American Bookstore Tour, and so in that sense holds a very special place in my heart. A compilation of essays Saunders wrote in the early 2000s—many published elsewhere, though all new to me—it mostly pokes fun at what’s become of America in the last decade or so: our sensationalist media, snap judgments on other cultures and disconcerting militarism. Interspersed throughout are softer essays on literary subjects like the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and what makes for a good short story. There’s also an essay/letter written from a dog to his owner, and a series of faux advice columns from someone called The Optimist.