The Stand

One of Stephen King's best! The Stand is the pre-Post-Apocalyptic novel that set the standards for all others. His blend of believable obstacles with hallucinatory dream-like sequences makes reading this substantial book a joy and an agony. I still re-read this book about every 5 years. It's become an old friend. ( )

I read the expanded/uncut version, which is pretty lengthy at 1,348 pages! I’ve never read the original version. This novel is split up into three unevenly-sized books and reads very much like a trilogy. The first book is about 450 pages and introduces us to a flu-like epidemic that’s spreading throughout the US. The second and third books deal more with the aftermath. There are some aspects of the story that haven’t aged well since its original 1978 publication date. There are hints that the virus eventually spreads elsewhere in the world too, but this is a very US-centric book. There’s almost no mention of what’s going on elsewhere in the world, which frustrated me at times. Even within its US setting, it doesn’t reflect the cultural and religious diversity we have within the US.

Although I started off interested, getting through that first book became a struggle. It cycles through a large number of characters, many of whom are only mentioned once and/or won’t survive, with a smaller number of recurring characters who start to become more familiar as we revisit them. At this point the stage is being set, showing us how the epidemic spread, how the government handled it, and how it affected US citizens. I thought this part was drawn out longer than was necessary, and I found it repetitive and tedious. I might have appreciated it more if I’d read it before experiencing a real pandemic, but reading it today it just seemed a little too over the top to take seriously.

I started to get much more interested near the end of the first book and the beginning of the second, when it started to focus more on the aftermath and it settled down to focus primarily on the smaller group of recurring characters. From that point, my interest was held through to the end. There are some supernatural elements to the story, which I had mixed feelings about. I also was a little less than satisfied by the end, although it did wrap things up well enough. There isn’t a ton of humor in the book, but there were a few spots here and there that made me laugh pretty hard.

Some additional spoilery thoughts:
I liked the part about only people with some mild psychic abilities surviving the epidemic, and would have liked to see more about that. What I didn’t care for was the way it sort of became a religious battle, with one side representing God’s side and the other representing Satan’s. That part was open for other interpretations I guess, but I would have preferred it to be left more ambiguous.

From a plotting perspective, it frustrated me that the leaders from the “good” community had to do illogical things based on faith. It also took away a lot of the suspense about whether their community would win in the end, because after all, how could God lose? But I did like that not all of the “good guys” believed in God and not all of the “bad guys” had evil intentions. I would have been far more annoyed if it had been portrayed in a more black-and-white manner. I was a little disappointed that the entire Las Vegas community was wiped out by a nuclear weapon whether they were evil or not, and also annoyed by the implications that most of the IT people (of which I am one) would naturally go to the dark side. :p

I didn’t think Larry, Glen, and Ralph’s presence there at the end made that big of a difference considering all the buildup about them going there on faith. Trashcan Man was the one who brought death to their community. And since “R. F.” survived to start over elsewhere, the main source of the evil activities wasn’t destroyed anyway.

It repeatedly struck me as odd just how many traffic jams all the characters encountered on the highways. I don’t think I’m unusual in that, when I feel really sick, I just want to be at home in bed. I’m sure as heck not going to go out driving around. If anything, I might have tried to get myself to the hospital. I understand that in some communities people were trying to flee, not knowing that things were just as bad elsewhere, but I just can’t see that many people continuing to drive once they’re so ill they can’t control the car anymore. I think most people would pull of to the side of the road to “rest a little” or something. I would think most of the people who ended up on the roads had left when they were still feeling mostly ok. The disease seemed to progress gradually for the most part, over the course of a few days at least. It’s not like they would have left their homes feeling ok, then driven for a few hours and suddenly keeled over dead in the middle of the road. Even in the areas where there were road blocks, it seems like people would have been diverted around to go back where they had come from and not just been stuck waiting in their cars for days until they died.

I’m rating this at 3.5 stars because I did mostly enjoy reading it, but I’m rounding down to 3 on Goodreads due to my various complaints. ( )

It's almost a cliche for me to give an early King book a 5-star rating, but having come back to this book for the first time in about 25 years--and this, the original, intitially published, edited down edition (the superior one, in my opinion) for the first time in 38 years--I have to say I initially approached it with something like dread.

It's a long bloody book, and, to be honest, I'd forgotten much of it. But my initial thoughts were, it's gonna take me quite a while to wade through this. What if it doesn't grab like it did when I was sixteen?. I shouldn't have worried.

Not only did I enjoy it just as much as the first time, I think I likely enjoyed it even more. I know a hell of a lot more about music, and caught so many more of the musical references (I think the only one I remember back at the time was one King spelled out - The Eagles' Peaceful Easy Feeling. And I may not have even heard of Lovecraft back then, so all those references went right over my head, as well as most of the literary ones.

And, of course, now, 38 years after this book was published, the world has moved on. Back then, all the references were timely. Texas Instruments calculators. Boston and Chicago as thriving, relevant rock bands. Albums. Now, the fact that most of that stuff has passed on adds to the devastation for me, because I've lost it all, too.

But more than that, I'm a parent now. I'm an adult. I've experienced loss that the sixteen-year-old me had yet to experience. So much of the heart-wrenching passages both at the beginning and at the end hit home a lot harder for me.

There was also the surprising inclusion of Stephen King's father in a short, blink-and-you'd-miss-it passage about a traveling vacuum cleaning salesman named Donald King. And what's even more interesting, though it was a flashback, this book sets the disaster two years ahead, in 1980. The year the elder King died.

But what of the story itself? Does it still hold up? God, yes. I still bought in to the entire story, start to finish, character by character. And it was really the characters that made this book. Stu Redman's implacability, Fran Goldsmith's strength as well as her crying jags, Larry Underwood's tragic nobility, M-O-O-N, that spells Tom Cullen...all the others. But mostly, Harold Lauder who, when we first meet him, seems to be an avatar of the young Stephen King himself, and he almost plays him as if he was the King that made all the incorrect choices, instead of the correct ones. And, of course, Randall Flagg, who we meet early on, and then he virtually disappears for the middle half of the story, only to come roaring back in at the end. The passages used to describe him were absolute poetry.

So, though I remembered being that sixteen-year-old wide-eyed kid sitting in Mr. Corrigan's Grade 11 homeroom class, having just been lent the book by my best friend at the time and reading about the infected family in the car as they crashed through the pumps, and dreading having to go through that entire story again, I come out the other side a fifty-three-year-old man who just enjoyed a hell of a ride thanks to Stephen King and Captain Trips. ( )

Read on Kindle and finished via Audiobook I believe

There's too much to say here but I read the expanded edition and it was extremely interesting - I cant see at this point what I would remove to shorten the book - almost every character and chapter seemed important.

Very much enjoyed this book - the characters were real and the story was beyond captivating. It is very long - it almost seems like the first half of the book is an entirely different book once you get near the ending.

I did have a question about the end where the giant ball of energy comes down and touches the nuke - I'm not quite sure how Flagg (or the man in black) (or the walkin' dude) lost control of it like that. I did not think I would see Stu Redman again that's for sure.

Again great book, I look forward to reading it again soon. ( )

I'd been warned by others that "The Stand" is a lot of book for not very much payoff, but I felt that that the ending wasn't as much of a let-down as I'd been led to believe. Certainly the antagonist of the story was rather one-dimensional and we never got to explore his background as much as some of the other characters, and the eventual culmination of the conflict between the "good" and the "bad" fell a bit short. It's definitely not a feel-good story, and was downright depressing at times, but I'm glad I wasn't dissuaded from giving it a read. ( )