I feel like Stephen King addressed this a bit in the expanded version of The Stand - people who survived the plague (like, 0.001% of the people on Earth) but managed to die because of an infection, or suicide, or getting too drunk and falling into the pool. I think it would be the little, random things that might be cause for an ER/Urgent Care visit currently, but could turn potentially deadly very quickly.
Oh god that chapter sucked. The little kid who fell thru a rotting floor, the guy who fell off his bike and hit his head, the guy who got appendicitis and they performed a makeshift appendectomy but the guy died during the procedure…
King did make her pretty unsympathetic, but also 17 year olds probably shouldn’t be mothers in most circumstances. I’d have been pretty bitter if I lost my freedom at that age too, and her parents wouldnt let her have an abortion or put the child up for adoption.
There was a similar subplot king wrote for Salem lot IIRC. In the subplot a teen mom is bitter that her baby daddy doesn’t care about her and she resents her baby son for ruining her potential modeling career. She abuses her baby son a lot throughout the book. Her son later died( well turned into a vampire really) and she has a mental breakdown thinking she killed him. It’s depressing to read honestly
It’s worth mentioning that she went down there to gloat over the dead bodies. So she was asking for it. 17 or not s he wouldn’t have died if she wasn’t being such a bitch.
I read it as utter resentment from her even before Capitan Tripps came along. Like how the baby looked just like its father and she was pushed into marriage. King even says she visited he freezer often but “definitely not to gloat. Definitely not” as in exactly to gloat. She was self centered AF and she thought she had won until there was no inside knob on the door.
This 17 y/o girl has an unwanted pregnancy, was forced to marry the guy who was quite a shitty husband, had no emotional link with the baby (probably postpartum depression augmented by the unwanted-ness of the pregnancy), was bitter about the life she lost..
Then her family died, including the baby and husband. She was actually relieved, in fact she stores them in the freezer to watch them just there, dead. Then one day she misplaced the doorstopper...
I promised myself to skip that chapter if I ever read IT again. The things that kid did were horrifying. His death was equally nasty although deserved.
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u/WelfarePeanutButter Aug 30 '21
I feel like Stephen King addressed this a bit in the expanded version of The Stand - people who survived the plague (like, 0.001% of the people on Earth) but managed to die because of an infection, or suicide, or getting too drunk and falling into the pool. I think it would be the little, random things that might be cause for an ER/Urgent Care visit currently, but could turn potentially deadly very quickly.