The same things keep happening at the end of the world

He has produced a mountain of great fiction in his long career, but I always thought The Stand was Stephen King's most monumental book, so I was fully on board for The End Of The World As We Know It, a new anthology featuring stories set in that world (or on the very edge of it).

There's more than 30 stories in the collection, and like any book like this, there are some mediocre tales, a couple of excellent ones, and many that are okay. They all make some kind of point about surviving in a world where 99% of the population has choked on their own fluids,  and some of them are mean, and some of them are hopeful, and there is a strong mix of grim nihilism and tentative optimism. There are also a couple of very good dogs, there at the end of everything.

It's also pleasingly linear, after the last big TV adaption made the perplexing decision to go the non-linear route, and completely demolished the greatest appeal of the book - seeing how things start off badly and get suddenly very, very worse in an inevitable slide into apocalyptic chaos. The new collection starts off with stories set during the plague, followed by a few tales of the immediate aftermath, and a handful at the end that look decades and centuries into the future.

Fortunately, these last few are among the best in the book, with a wicked sense of humour about how things turn out. And it is interesting to see how other parts of the world fare  - they still dream of cornfields and the Walking Man, but are also explicitly told there is no way they can influence the apocalyptic fight for America, and just have to fight their own spiritual warfare on their own battlegrounds.

But it does get very repetitive at the start, where everything is falling apart, and it's endless passages of people dying with swollen necks, and the ubiquitous dreams everybody is having just makes the complexity of human morality just a little more simplistic.

I can't say I'm really super inclined to check out any of the new writers - there are, of course, some very familiar names like Joe R Lansdale and Poppy Z Brite in the mix -  but nobody really shits the bed, and they're all perfectly readable. My only suggestion would be to space out the stories a little - I just read one story a day, and when few of them are longer than 20 pages, that was an easy ask. The end of the world might be very fucking nigh, but there is no need to rush it.