The End of the World as We Know It

This anthology, edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene, collects 34 stories set in the world of Stephen King's novel The Stand, in which a superflu called Captain Trips kills the vast majority of the world's population. In King's novel, survivors experience shared dreams drawing them toward either Mother Abagail, an elderly Black woman on a Nebraska farm who represents a force of good, or Randall Flagg, a malevolent figure known as the Walkin' Dude or the dark man, who establishes an authoritarian regime in Las Vegas. The anthology expands this premise across geography, time, and perspective, imagining what else happened during and after the plague in American cities and remote islands, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, England, and even aboard a spacecraft in decaying orbit.

In his introduction, King reflects on his longstanding dissatisfaction with The Stand's ending, in which Frannie Goldsmith can only respond to her husband Stu's question about whether people ever learn anything with a repeated "I don't know." He describes how a hip replacement and the COVID-19 pandemic shifted his perspective on Golden and Keene's proposal, which he had initially resisted as resembling an unwanted tribute album for an aging musician.

The anthology is divided into four parts. The first, "Down with the Sickness," collects 17 stories set during the superflu outbreak and its immediate aftermath. In Caroline Kepnes's "Room 24," a lonely police officer named Abel becomes obsessed with a woman named Amelie Blanchard after responding to a domestic disturbance call at her home. He murders her abusive husband and her elderly neighbor, then inserts himself into Amelie's life as a protector. He drives her and her baby to a motel room tied to a humiliating memory from his adolescence, where the baby dies of the superflu and Amelie follows, calling Abel by her dead husband's name. Abel survives, apparently immune, and nearly kills himself before a housekeeper's knock pulls him back.

Wrath James White's "The Tripps" is set in a Black urban neighborhood where 10-year-old Talik watches neighbors die from Captain Trips while violence continues unabated. After his brother Malcolm dies whispering that Mother Abagail warned him the Walkin' Dude is in their house, Talik's mother, seemingly under Flagg's influence, tries to kill him with a kitchen knife. The children fight back and kill her, but as they flee, Talik's younger sister Lawanda begins showing symptoms and raises the knife toward him, whispering to "Mr. Flagg."

Tim Lebbon's "Grace" unfolds aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery, stranded in orbit with nuclear missiles in its payload bay. Payload specialist Gemma, corrupted through dreams by the dark man, kills the commander and attempts to crash the shuttle into Nebraska to irradiate Mother Abagail's territory. Mission specialist Lizzie, guided by Mother Abagail's voice, dons a spacesuit without air supply and manually opens the payload bay doors, tearing the shuttle apart in the upper atmosphere and sacrificing herself to prevent nuclear contamination.

Other stories in this section follow a flight attendant protecting a child through a collapsing Las Vegas, a video store clerk and a fugitive woman battling cannibals in the East Texas woods, a grieving widower who bonds with a dik-dik (a tiny antelope) before losing it to the plague, a woman in Puerto Rico who walks to the coast on the promise of a rescue boat that never comes, and African painted dogs escaping a zoo to roam the empty American plains. Catriona Ward's "The African Painted Dog," narrated by one of the dogs, answers King's own curiosity about what happened to the animal kingdom.

The second part, "The Long Walk," follows survivors on physical and spiritual journeys. In S. A. Cosby's "The Legion of Swine," Woodrow Teller, an elderly Black man living alone on a Virginia mountain, is visited by three travelers who reveal themselves as cannibals. When he opens his pig pen as if to comply with their demands, the pigs, seemingly guided by a protective force, attack and kill the intruders. Woodrow paints a message on his door and heads west to find Mother Abagail.

Rio Youers's "Keep the Devil Down" follows Elise, a young woman fleeing the criminal world of her dead boyfriend, who picks up Ruby, a nine-year-old girl who also dreams of Mother Abagail. A sinister black muscle car called the Corvid pursues them across the desert. Singing Mother Abagail's train song, Elise drives across railroad tracks a second before a silver locomotive obliterates the Corvid.

Usman T. Malik's "The Mosque at the End of the World" carries the plague's aftermath to Pakistan, where survivor Nasir Khan and 14-year-old Palwasha find Maulvi Khizar, a blind imam protecting his mosque in the city of Sheikhupura. A community forms around the mosque, but a paramilitary force arrives and shoots the imam dead. Supernatural beings, identified as jinn, emerge from the mosque and destroy the soldiers. Palwasha leads the survivors south to rebuild.

Wayne Brady and Maurice Broaddus's "Abagail's Gethsemane" explores Mother Abagail's spiritual crisis during her pilgrimage from Boulder, interweaving it with a 1919 memory in which young Abagail witnessed a racist mob led by an early manifestation of Flagg. Tempted by the dark man to surrender to despair, she reaffirms her faith and prepares to return.

The third part, "Life Was Such a Wheel," extends the narrative across decades and centuries. Chuck Wendig's "Grand Junction," set decades later, follows a young hunter named Leaf who is recruited to eliminate a cult only to discover that its leader, "John Low," is an infant: evil reborn. The mission's architect intends to control the child rather than destroy it. Leaf kills her and takes the baby, choosing to raise it with goodness. Catherynne M. Valente's "Came the Last Night of Sadness" spans centuries, following Fern Ramsey, a girl with supernatural abilities who is revealed to be the never-born child of Flagg and his bride. Carrying both her father's destructive potential and her mother's capacity for grace, Fern resists her dark nature and lives a quiet, watchful life on the outskirts of a rebuilt Colorado settlement. Sarah Langan's "The Devil's Children" imagines a distant future where humanity has split into immune and non-immune populations, and a viral mutation ultimately reverses the power dynamic between them.

The fourth part, "Other Worlds Than These," contains two metafictional stories. Nat Cassidy's "The Unfortunate Convalescence of the SuperLawyer" follows a man who discovers he is a character cut from The Stand during its revision from the original 1978 edition to the 1990 Complete and Uncut edition. He encounters characters from other King novels who are searching for doors between worlds. David J. Schow's "Walk on Gilded Splinters" is set over a thousand years in the future, where the events of The Stand have been transformed into a fragmented religious canon called the Vulgate Book, its characters' names garbled beyond recognition, carried forward by oral storytellers called sooths who travel dangerous landscapes to deliver their portions of the text to Lewis the Monk, a scholar compiling the definitive version.

Throughout the collection, the stories circle back to the questions King raised in his novel: whether people ever learn anything, whether evil can be permanently defeated, and whether goodness is strong enough to endure. The anthology suggests that the answer, as Frannie once said, remains "I don't know," but that the act of telling the story, passing it forward, and choosing to stand against darkness is itself a form of faith.