Madmen and Office Chairs (A Narrative)

A narrative about my experience with one of my favorite books.

Be me, a 16 year old with more opinions than your average political activist. Reading all the books I can get my hands on and spending all day in my room only leaving for meals. Growing up I was almost exclusively exposed to Christian literature, reading books like Narnia and the Left Behind series. These books have great merit and I did learn from them, but I became tired of the happy endings and the flawless characters, I wanted something real. When I read my first Stephen King novel I was floored. I could smell the charred bodies and feel the paralyzing dread Stuart Redman experienced when he watched a man shriek in pain as he was torn apart by live crows. I had never read anything so raw.

I found a copy of Stephen King’s “The Stand” on the shelf of an old English/Spanish bookstore in my hometown of Cancun, Quintana Roo. The picture of a dark figure with a scythe fighting a glowing white knight jumped out at me. I opened to the first page and began reading. Soon I was 20 pages in and convinced that there really was a super-flu that had killed 99% of the population. My mom approached me and glanced at the enormous book I had in my hands.

“You should be careful what you read.” She said in a serious tone.

“I’m buying this.” I said defiantly, slamming the book shut and walking to the register.

She didn’t protest but I could tell she wasn’t happy. We left promptly and I read the whole way home, my eyes never leaving the teeming words. The pages seemed to produce their own energy, constantly running the machine within the story. King wrote the flesh onto his characters, he made them human. They felt so real to my impressionable teenage mind. I drank the descriptions to every last drop and felt each characters world materialize around me.

 I remember vividly, reading from the perspective of a character named Trashcan Man: an insane pyromaniac who traveled around the post-apocalyptic wasteland burning everything that would catch fire. His character was so convincingly psychotic that I wondered if King himself had to be certifiable to conjure such convoluted thoughts. Having visions of Randall Flagg, Trashcan Man journeys west living by the creed “Live by the torch, die by the torch.” The voice of this character was so unsettling that I found myself noticeably cringing while reading his constant nonsensical ravings, I couldn’t stop reading.

               I became so completely enthralled in the story, everything about it was so brash and vivid. The good and evil seemed to exist between the lines, I would be disgusted one minute and in love the next without a clear understanding of why. It took me 2 weeks to finish all 1300 pages of the monster, and by the end my breath was taken away. I remember very clearly the moment that I read the last sentence.

“Life is such a wheel that no man can stand upon it for long, and it always, in the end, comes round to the same place again.”

I looked up from the last page and sat completely still then looked down at the page and re-read the last paragraph. My office chair squeaked awkwardly beneath me.

“Is that it?” I said angrily.

I closed the book and set it on the ground in front of me. I knew this book had set off something inside of me, but I wasn’t sure what it was quite yet. For the rest of the evening and into the night I thought about the characters and their trials. I thought about Randall Flagg and Stuart Redman, one the image of evil and one a guiding light. Both so real but so powerful. I wanted to meet these characters and hear Stu describe the hell he went through and the love he experienced.

                To this day I still think about the book on occasion. With time the ideas and themes cured. I began to write differently, with an edge. I wanted my writing to cut like The Stand had cut me. It had satisfied all of my cravings while affecting me with sledgehammer force. I believe that fiction is what matters. It brings us places we’ve never been, introduces us to people we’ve never met, and makes into people we never would have been. The books I read from that office chair in my homeschool room are the books I will remember for a lifetime.

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”

-Oscar Wilde