“How the World Ended, Day by Day” by Bev Vincent is a perfect-bound chapbook published exclusively for Brian James Freeman’s Patreon supporters in June 2026 as part of Lividian Story Box: Volume One. This Limited Edition one-time printing features an original essay and a full-color front cover, inside cover, and interior illustrations by François Vaillancourt.

Excerpt from the Chapbook:
Who dies in June 1980, June 1985, June 1986 and June 1990? No, this isn’t a quiz question from the Illustrated Stephen King Trivia book, co-edited by Brian Freeman and me. If it were, I’d be forced to add one of my infamous not-very-helpful hints.

The answer is: just about everyone in America (at least).

The original version of The Stand, published in 1978, was set in the near-future, 1980. The timeline in the paperback edition of that version was advanced to 1985. When the ka-tet crosses through a thinny in Wizard and Glass, they read newspaper accounts of the plague that happened in 1986, and the Complete and Uncut Edition moved the epidemic to 1990.

Changing a book’s timeline isn’t exactly easy. It’s not simply a matter of replacing a couple of digits whenever you find them. Peter Goldsmith, for example, was a World War II veteran in the 1980 timeline, which made him old (by his own admission) to be the father of teenaged Frannie. In 1990, he would be very old indeed, so there’s no mention of any wartime exploits. Some subtle things were overlooked in the updates, though, mostly to do with how much a babysitter was paid or the cost of a tank of gas.

In the spring of 2023, Christopher Golden and Brian Keene invited me to submit a story proposal for an anthology set in the world of The Stand, a book that came to be known as The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand (aka TEOTWAWKI), published in August 2025.

They accepted my pitch, so that meant I had to reread The Stand…

Publication Format:
This Patreon supporter exclusive chapbook is perfect bound, printed entirely in full-color, and signed by Bev Vincent and François Vaillancourt. Limited to a print run of 600 copies. Shipped with the other chapbooks in Lividian Story Box: Volume One.