remembered the Patty Hearst case when he began to write a description of DeFreeze: "Donald DeFreeze is a dark man". He remembered that in photographs of the bank robbery in which Patty Hearst participated that DeFreeze was only partially visible, hidden under a large hat. What he looked like was based on guesses made by people who only saw a portion of him. This inspired King, who then wrote "A dark man with no face". After reading "Once in every generation the plague will fall among them", King began writing The Stand and developing the character of Randall Flagg. In 2004, King said that Flagg had been a presence in his writing since the beginning of his career, with the idea coming to him in college. He first wrote a poem, "The Dark Man", about a man who rides the rails and confesses to murder and rape; written on the back of a placemat in a college restaurant, the one-page poem was published in 1969, but the character never left King's mind. To the author, what made Flagg interesting was "the idea of the villain as somebody who was always on the outside looking in, and hated people who had good fellowship and good conversation and friends". Characterization and critical reception When Stephen King created the character of Flagg, he based him around what he believed evil represented. To King, Flagg is "somebody who's very charismatic, laughs a lot, [is] tremendously attractive to men and women both, and [is] somebody who just appeals to the worst in all of us". This idea carries over into The Stand, in which Flagg first appears as the personification of evil opposing Mother Abagail, the personification of good. Character Tom Cullen ascribes to Flagg the ability to kill animals and inflict cancer at will, referring to him as the demon Legion, while character Glen Bateman refers to him as the Lovecraftian entity Nyarlathotep, among other ancient names. King wanted Flagg to embody a "gigantic evil", although he intended the character to weaken by the end of The Stand. He said, "I think the Devil is probably a pretty funny guy. Flagg is like the archetype of everything that I know about real evil, going back all the way to Charles Starkweather in the '50s—he is somebody who is empty and who has to be filled with other people's hates, fears, resentments, laughs. Flagg, Koresh,