Mike Flanagan, Tananarive Due, and Anthony Breznican will join Jason Sechrest in a 6-episode limited series podcast discussing Stephen King’s epic novel, The Stand.
The Company of the Mad: The Stand Podcast will debut on Friday, May 29, 2020 at TheStandPodcast.com, and will subsequently be available on iTunes, Spotify, and most other apps where podcasts can be found. Video will be available exclusively at TheStandPodcast.com, and you can sign up now for notifications when each episode goes live here: https://thestandpodcast.com/?page_id=179.
“The idea is that the four of us will read 200 pages a month, and then meet up on the podcast to discuss what we just read. Sort of like a virtual book club, but one the whole world can join in,” says Sechrest, horror author and writer of the popular column What I Learned from Stephen King. Sechrest will serve as the host of the podcast, guiding the conversation. “We’ll be encouraging listeners to join us in #TheStandChallenge, committing to reading 200 pages a month and letting us know their thoughts. We’ll also be encouraging them to donate to The EMS FDNY HelpFund, benefiting first responders of New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
While the superflu nicknamed Captain Trips in Stephen King’s The Stand is far deadlier than COVID-19, there are eerie similarities. “The Stand is a book everyone should read, and if you’ve read it before, there is no better time to re-read it,” Sechrest says. “There’s this great quote from the book that reads, ‘Love didn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn’t grow very well in a place where it was always dark.’ For all the scares King packs with a punch into his stories, there are equal parts wisdom, spirituality, and life lessons to be found – perhaps more in The Stand than ever. King doesn’t just write horror, he writes about people. He writes about the nature of the human condition, and that is what makes the horror work. That’s a big part of what we’ll be exploring in the podcast.”
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