When I was a teenager, there was this older man who used to do a lot of walking around the town I lived in. He had an aging Elvis kind of a look with a greying ducktail, tinted aviator glasses, denim coat and jeans, and click-clacking cowboy boots. Always the cowboy boots. We probably all have these people we don't know who just pop up everywhere we go and I saw this maneverywhere. Yet, I assumed he had no idea who I was, giggling with nervous hilarity with my girlfriends if we ever happened to pass him in a car, us young and cruising along, he old and plodding. Click-clacking along the sidewalk. This man was there at the edge of my awareness, like a piece of the scenery, until I started reading The Stand. And then he became the Walkin Dude:
Randall Flagg, the dark man, walked rapidly, rundown bootheels clocking against the paved surface of the road, and if car lights showed on the horizon he faded back and back, down over the soft shoulder to the high grass where the night bugs made their homes... and the car would pass him, the driver perhaps feeling a slight chill as if he had driven through an air pocket, his sleeping wife and children stirring uneasily, as if all had been touched with a bad dream at the same instant.
He walked south, south on US 51, the worn heels of his sharp-toed cowboy boots clocking on the pavement; a tall man of no age in faded, pegged jeans and a denim jacket.
He moved on, not pausing, not slowing, but alive to the night. His eyes seemed almost frantic with the night's possibilities. There was a Boy Scout knapsack on his back, old and battered. There was a dark hilarity in his face, and perhaps in his heart, too, you would think - and you would be right. It was the face of a hatefully happy man, a face that radiated a horrible handsome warmth, a face to make waterglasses shatter in the hands of tired truck-stop waitresses, to make small children crash their trikes into board fences and then run wailing to their mommies with stake-shaped splinters sticking out of their knees. It was a face guaranteed to make barroom arguments over batting averages turn bloody.
He was a clot looking for a place to happen, a splinter of bone hunting a soft organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate - they would set up housekeeping and raise themselves a cozy little malignant tumor.
He strode on at a steady, ground-eating pace. Two days ago he had been in Laramie, Wyoming, part of an ecotage group that had blown a power station. Today he was on US 51, between Grasmere and Riddle, on his way to Mountain City. Tomorrow he would be somewhere else. And he was happier than he had ever been, because -
He stopped.
Because something was coming. He could feel it, almost taste it on the night air. He could taste it, a sooty hot taste that came from everywhere, as if God was planning a cookout and all of civilization was going to be the barbecue. Already the charcoal was hot, white and flaky outside, as red as demons' eyes inside. A huge thing, a great thing.
He had been born when times changed, and the times were going to change again. It was in the wind, in the wind of this soft Idaho evening.
It was almost time to be reborn. He knew. Why else could he suddenly do magic?
He closed his eyes, his hot face turning up slightly to the dark sky, which was prepared to receive the dawn. He concentrated. Smiled. The dusty, rundown heels of his boots began to rise off the road. An inch. Two. Three inches. The smile broadened into a grin. Now he was a foot up. And two feet off the ground, he hung steady over the road with a little dust blowing beneath him.
Then he felt the first inches of dawn stain the sky, and he lowered himself down again. The time was not yet.
But the time was soon.
He began to walk again, grinning, now looking for a place to lay up for the day. The time was soon, and that was enough to know for now.
Something about The Stand terrified me as a teenager, and totalling identifying with the Walkin Dude as evil incarnate, I would be doubly creeped out if I heard my own cowboy boot wearing walker making his way down my street late at night as I was devouring my Stephen King. And the thing about Stephen King and The Stand is that, as an author, he's allowed to set up a perfectly plausible science-based dystopian situation and then add in some magic. We buy that, expect that, and slurp it up.
And then there's Justin Cronin. I really enjoyed The Passage, particularly because it sets up a perfectly plausible science-based dystopian situation; it's a vampire book that uses science to explain all of the mythical information that we all know already about the evil bloodsuckers (garlic, crosses, sunlight, stakes…) and it drew me in completely. I even accepted the telepathic abilities of the original twelve as reasonably scientific, and I believed and accepted the world he created.
I see many reviewers of that book drawing comparisons to The Stand, some even saying that it seems derivative, but I didn't really think that was fair: vampires are a definite point of distinction. So imagine my disappointment when one of the first new characters we meet in The Twelve is Danny the mentally challenged school bus driver-- I expected him at any point to pull on his Oshkosh (B'gosh!) and crow out, "M-O-O-N spells bus!" Why add a character like this after you've already been accused of being derivative?
No matter, my biggest complaint about this book is the overwhelming use of coincidence; that fate is moving everyone to exactly where they need to be at exactly the right time. It became a bit of an eyeroller. I understand that the middle book of a trilogy must be the hardest to write, it's often the hardest to read, but there was something a bit lazy about the feel of this book, like a place filler. I also thought that there were some gorgeous bits of writing in The Passage, but in this book, Cronin kept taking me out of the story with some clunky look-at-me-I'm-really-writing-here phrases.
With excruciating miraculousness, she took Sara by the hand.Flesh meeting flesh. The unbearable corporeal smallness of it, its discreet power, its infusion of memory. All of Sara's senses molded around the exquisite sensation of her child's tiny hand in her own. It was the first time their bodies had touched since one was inside the other, though now it was the opposite: Sara was the one inside.
Excruciating miraculousness. Despite the fact that my spell-check is telling me that "miraculousness" is not even a real word, I think that phrase (and the spoiler that followed) sums up what I found wrong with this book. I accept that Stephen King will throw in magic and the impossible (and evil clowns), but I wanted Cronin to stick to the rules of the world he had created in The Passage, and with the fate and the coincidences and the excruciating miraculousness of this book, I didn't feel as engaged with the characters this time; I didn't feel any real danger to the main characters and they're battling vampires.
And yet, this is still a good book. I kept reading and am definitely looking forward to how the author will wrap it all up in the third book. One more thing-- I wish the Dramatis Personae was at the beginning of the book; I never flip to the end of a story I'm reading and I could have used the reminder of who some of these characters were as I went along.
And I do hope that the real life Elvisy Walkin Dude that click-clacked down my sidewalk when I was a teenager never heard me and my girlfriends and our nervous laughter-- it was never at him, but more the idea of him; he was simply a character who popped up with regular coincidence, perhaps even with excruciating miraculousness, in my very nonmagical, ordinary world.
