By Cory Allen Heidelberger on 2021-08-03
I’d been thinking about Stephen King’s plague novel
The Stand since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. In that novel, a flu virus engineered (unlike the real coronavirus, which is worse than the flu but for which there is no clear evidence of laboratory origins or human engineering) by the U.S. military gets out and kills almost all of humanity in a couple weeks. (And that’s just King’s way of setting the stage for the novel’s real cosmic conflict.) Having read
The Stand in my formative years and thus always carried that dreadful apocalyptic vision in my worst-case-scenario soul, I found some relief as March and April and the rest of our dreadful 2020 dragged along and left most of us alive to worry and complain and wait for vaccines.