I’ve been rereading Stephen King for comfort reasons, and I have a couple of observations. First, The Dead Zone—which posits political assassination as an actual solution to a potential presidential madman—hits a bit different these days. Second (and not unrelatedly), while I am happy enough to get the expanded version of The Stand, it was a huge mistake for King to try to change the setting from 1980 to 1990; random updated pop culture references can’t disguise the fact that America changed substantially in that decade, such that characters and settings that made sense in 1980 were no longer plausible in 1990. The teenaged, white Nick Andros would almost certainly not have used the word “Negro” to describe an old woman in 1990. The singer Larry Underwood would have different beliefs about music from the 70s, when he was a young child rather than a teen/early adult. From attitudes towards single mothers to how racism was expressed to the dumping practices of fabric mills, the revised version still reads like 1980, but with a mention of rap on the radio, and it’s not good.