One very interesting thing about Lloyd Henreid’s story is that it leads the reader to consider that you don’t have to be inherently evil to be a bad person. Lloyd’s only paranormally induced change over the course of the story is his intelligence.
His issue, the reason he spends his life doing such horrible things, robbery and rape and murder, is that he is miserably stupid. He does not get particular pleasure out of doing these things just because they hurt other people, unlike Poke, who does and is set up to be his foil. Lloyd participates in these activities willingly because it seems not to have occurred to him that other people are people. What pre-Vegas Lloyd lacks is empathy. He does what he feels like or what the people with him tell him to, and doesn’t really think of how other people may be affected. “Murder was,” as King says, “a trifle beyond their intellectual reach”. Take the Gorgeous George anecdote.
When Poke and Lloyd kill Gorgeous George, (what, you don’t remember GG? Don’t worry, I have enough tabs in my copy of the Complete and Uncut for the both of us) Lloyd feels slightly uncomfortable watching him suffocate. He seems to have a murky feeling that something here is wrong. But George flops around in a sort of funny way as he dies, and Lloyd chuckles, feeling “a bit cheered up”. He doesn’t seem to have the capacity to grasp the weight of his crimes.
This is why, when Flagg makes him smarter, he seems to the reader to become a better person. The text intentionally serves us a number of details that paint him in a different light. He is good with kids. He looks the other way to let his friends flee. He hates his job, but covers for people and helps them out when he can (“That’s what I’m here for”). He is visibly filled with guilt and horror at each crucifixion, and even makes clear efforts to restore his attitude to what it once was:
“Just tell yourself you don’t know him,” Lloyd said, “[…] that’s what I always do. It makes it easier.”
He attempts to cope with his guilt and fear by detaching himself from his victims and their feelings. It is a direct parallel to the Gorgeous George scene.
It’s also a sign that the change here is not that he has simply become a better person, but a smarter one. With intelligence comes empathy, and understanding the world as something other that what revolves around yourself. As a result, he cares about other people now.
This comes too late, of course. Flagg is making him smarter so he can run his empire, not take care of people. It’s clicked for him that all of this behavior is bad, but he’s in no position to stop doing it anymore.
Lloyd was not inherently malicious. The thing that made pre-Captain Trips Lloyd such a bad person, it seems, was that he was too dumb to consider that he could try being a good one.
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