"The End of the World as We Know It"

 "The End of the World as We Know It" is not a specific Stephen King story, but rather an anthology of new tales by various authors set after the events of his novel The Stand.

It’s a whole collection of 34 short stories set in the world Stephen King created in The Stand. King himself even gave it his blessing and wrote the introduction. The book is massive—almost 800 pages—and was edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene, both of whom already have strong reputations in horror and fantasy. Some of the authors are familiar names like Richard Chizmar, Joe R. Lansdale, Caroline Kepnes, and Meg Gardiner. Others I didn’t know, but what unites them all is their clear affection for the world of The Stand. Each story takes place either during or after King’s original epic about good versus evil in the aftermath of a super-flu that wipes out nearly everyone on earth.

The stories go in all kinds of directions. One follows astronauts stuck on a Space Shuttle with no Mission Control to guide them back. Another comes from the perspective of an African Painted Dog, newly freed from the zoo and trying to make sense of a world full of death and strange smells. They’re not all wild premises, though. Some really lean into the heart of survival. My favorite example is Catherynne M. Valente’s “Came the Last Night of Sadness,” which introduces Fern Ramsey, a teenager born after the plague. She sums up survival simply: you’ll be okay if you can read, and if you’ve got a knife, a map, a fishing pole, and a bike—plus the know-how to repair the last two. Many of the stories circle back to the bigger forces of King’s novel, with references to Mother Abagail and Randall Flagg, the central figures of good and evil.