Hopefully I won’t sound too sociopathic when I say there is something seductive about the prospect of the end of the world. On the whole, humans are drawn to order. I’m no exception. I like things to be routine, controlled, and predictable. Still, every once in awhile, especially on a bad day, I welcome the Mayans’ prophecy, if only out of a sense of deranged curiosity. The primitive, barbaric part of my mind, the part I don’t talk about at cocktail parties (unless I get drunk, which is always), longs to rubberneck at the biggest pileup in history. Stephen King’s The Stand joins a long list of novels (of wildly varying quality) to tackle the collapse of civilization. As you might have guessed, I have sampled from this illustrious genre. In Nevil Shute’s short, mournful On the Beach, Australia awaits the fatal fallout from an all-out nuclear war, with government issued suicide-pills in hand. In William Brinkley’s florid-yet-pulpy The Last Ship, the mixed crew of a guided-missile destroyer must make love with each other, in order to repopulate a world decimated by atomic annihilation. And in Cormac McCarthy’s parable,The Road, a man and his boy traverse the desolate landscape of a dead earth. Every generation has its end-of-the-world stories, and every generation chooses its own fitting end. During the Cold War, obviously, nuclear war loomed large. Today, it’s zombies, such as in Max Brooks’ World War Z, or vampires, as in Justin Cronin’s The Passage. (The vampires in Twilight symbolize only the end of culture, not the world). King’s premise for The Stand is firmly rooted in an old-fashioned distrust of the government. In the opening pages, a highly contagious virus – the superflu – escapes from a U.S. Army biological weapons facility. Despite drastic, murderous attempts to quarantine and suppress, the virus spreads the world over. Most people fall victim to this lethal bug; however, a small number of folks, for reasons that aren’t explained, are immune. (Is it too late for a The Stand-related “We are the one percent!” meme? Probably). Stephen King tells this story in the only way he knows how: voluminously. This fully restored, painfully unabridged “author’s cut” weighs in at 1,141 pages. This length is partially an indulgence, something you can get away with if you are an international bestselling author. Yet King also uses the size of his canvas to construct a vivid, consistent, and painfully real portrait of a country gone to hell: highways clogged with vehicles; the power gone; bodies littering fields; simple medical procedures turned lethally serious. King has given himself the latitude to not only show the big effects of the plague, but also the smaller, telling details, such as the fact that all the beverages the characters drink are warm. (That would be the real hell of the situation. All those Diet Pepsis, and all of them room temperature).The Stand is a deliberately paced novel. It is a thriller with extreme patience. The first 300 pages or so is all set up, following various, unconnected characters whom – it turns out – are impervious to the superflu. During the middle portions of the book, these characters, including East Texan Stu Redman, music star Larry Underwood, pregnant girl Frannie Goldsmith, and fat guy Harold Lauder, start to make their way towards each other. (And yes, my facile descriptions of these characters are intended to make a point. Despite certain attempts at shading, especially in making putative hero Larry a bit of an ass, all of King’s characters start to meld together. They aren’t distinct as human beings. Even at the end, I was trying to keep certain individuals separate in my mind).King has taken his share of literary criticism (while reaping popular success), but he is an undisputed master storyteller. He writes in the third-person omniscient, taking a Gods-eye view of the world he has created and destroyed. His style is one that would burst the blood vessels of most creative writing professors. His prose veers from formal to slangy, often within a single paragraph. His writing is peppered with idioms, pop cultural references (old television shows, movies, and even commercial jingles), snatches of music, and contains an annoying level of puns and malapropisms. King is a product of a culture that valued the collection of trivia over standard intellectualism. He is, therefore, easily accessible to others of that same culture. King’s style is easy and fun and effortlessly maintains interest. On the downside, The Stand was first published in 1978, so many of the references are hopelessly dated. (The natural consequence of being up-to-the-minute is that the minute passes so quickly).Besides the time-capsule references, the other disadvantage of King’s voice is that it tends to overwhelm the characters and the situations. It has a homogenizing influence. Everyone talks the same and thinks the same. In one conceit, King excerpts the minutes of a council meeting in the Boulder Free Zone (where survivors have congregated); unsurprisingly, the tone of these “minutes” sound remarkably like King himself. The author and the characters almost become one. This is a disheartening prospect, when the narrator is describing a sex scene and all you can picture is Stephen King’s photograph. A great deal of time is spent giving depth and detail to a post-civilized landscape. There is a very real-seeming, Swiss Family Robinson aspect to the proceedings, as various survivors find ways to carry on in an environment bereft of government and modern conveniences. King goes to extremes to remind you on every page of the conditions his protagonists face. Indeed, there is an entire section in the book devoted to one-off characters dying in relatively mundane fashion, underscoring the heightened dangers you face when the safety net of community has been cut away. The realistic grounding is necessary, because Stephen King (being Stephen King) also has some supernatural elements to add to the mix. All the survivors, immune from the superflu, begin having shared dreams. Actually, there are two dreams. One dream, the good dream, leads people to an old black woman in Nebraska, Mother Abigail (King loves his mystical black characters). Another dream, the evil dream, leads people to a Satan-like figure known by several names, but mainly as Randall Flagg (a recurring character in the King canon). The two dreams lead to a coalescing of flu survivors into separate camps. The good guys, including Larry, Stu, a deaf-mute named Nick Andros, and a low-functioning man named Tom Cullen (in The Stand he’s referred to as a retard, but I’m not sure you can say that anymore), gather in Boulder, Colorado, and attempt to rebuild society. The bad guys, including a spree killer named Lloyd, make camp in Las Vegas, naturally, that den of sin. As you might have gathered, it is these two forces, good and evil, that must eventually come to conflict. And it is the good people of Boulder who will eventually make the titular stand. This biblical setup gives King ample opportunity for pop philosophizing. He even creates a character, sociologist Glen Bateman, for the sole purpose of soliloquizing on topics such as community dynamics and embryonic democracy. At this point, King’s reality, which he has worked so hard to create, begins to dissipate. It is replaced by cheap symbolism and on-the-nose commentary. For instance, with Glen’s help, Randall Flagg is tagged as a fascist, who crucifies anyone who dares cross him; yet his brand of leadership is efficient at getting the lights turned on. Meanwhile, the Boulder folk start committee after committee, strangling themselves in bureaucracy; but at least they have free will and a voice and the constitution.The Bible 101 also gets to be a bit much. I got that Mother Abigail was supposed to be Christ-like before she wandered off alone into the wilderness. All this adds up to an endgame disappoints. Instead of all the plotlines connecting and driving towards a thundering climax, the story just meanders along, studded with tepid monologues and cutaways to emotionally unfulfilling romantic interludes. As I reached the last few hundred pages, my interest waned dramatically. I stopped caring what would happen; I got distracted and started reading other books. I finally had to force myself to finish the damn thing, and frankly, there wasn’t much of a payoff. The actual “stand” of the title, the final battle of good and evil (and literally between white and black), is disposed of in less than twenty pages. I won’t spoil it, but the resolution relies more on deus ex machina than clockwork plotting.With that aside, The Stand’s virtues more than make up for any shortcomings I perceived. My chief complaint with the novel is that I could only find the unabridged version in a cheap, mass market paperback. The print is small and my ungainly fingers kept smudging the ink. When I complained to my wife, she called me grandpa. I yelled at her to get off my porch and continued sucking on my butterscotch candies, while squinting hard at the page. The eyestrain was worth it. The Stand is a fine mess: an ambitious, overstuffed epic that gleefully spills out in every direction.
You know what’s really scary? Getting sick while you’re reading the first part of The Stand. Just try running a fever, going through a box of tissues and guzzling the better part of a bottle of NyQuil while Stephen King describes the grisly deaths of almost every one on Earth from a superflu. On top of feeling like crap, you'll be terrified. Bonus!After a bio-engineered virus that acts like a revved up cold escapes from a U.S. government lab, it takes only weeks for almost all of humanity to succumb to the disease. A handful of survivors are mysteriously immune and begin having strange dreams, some of which are about a very old woman called Mother Abigail asking them to come see her. More disturbing are nightmares about a mysterious figure named Randall Flagg also known as the Dark Man or the Walkin’ Dude.As they make their way through an America almost entirely devoid of people, the survivors begin to unite and realize that the flu was just the beginning of their problems. While some are drawn to the saintly Mother Abigail in Boulder Colorado who tells them that they have been chosen by God, others have flocked to Flagg in Las Vegas who is determined to annihilate all those who refuse to pledge their allegiance to him.If King would have just written a book about a world destroyed by plague and a small number of people struggling in the aftermath, it probably would have been a compelling story. What sets this one apart is the supernatural element. Flagg is the embodiment of evil and chaos. He's a mysterious figure who has been giving the wrong people the push needed for them to make things worse for everyone, and he sees the plague as his chance to fulfill his own destiny as a wrecker of humanity. And on the other side, we have God. Yep, that God. The Big Cheese himself. But this isn’t some kindly figure in a white robe with a white beard or George Burns or Morgan Freeman. This is the Old Testament God who demands obedience and worship while usually rewarding his most faithful servants with gruesome deaths. King calls this a tale of dark Christianity in his forward, and one of the things I love about this book is that it does feel like a Biblical story, complete with contradictions and a moves-in-mysterious-ways factor. Stories don’t get much more epic than this, and King does a great job of depicting the meltdown of the world through the stories of a variety of relateable characters. (Larry Underwood remains among my favorite King creations.) One of my few complaints is that this features a lot of King’s anti-technology themes that he’d use in several books like Cell or The Dark Tower series. We’re told repeatedly that the ‘old ways’ like trying to get the power back on in Boulder are a ‘death trip’. The good guys gather in the Rocky Mountains, but if they try to get the juice going so they won’t freeze to death in the winter, they’re somehow acting in defiance of God’s will and returning to the bad habits? Not all tech is bad tech, Mr. King. Nature is a bitch and will kill your ass quicker than the superflu.Here’s another thing I’m not wild about. When this was published in the late ‘70s, the bean counters at King’s publishers had decided that the book as written would be too pricey in hardback and no one would pay a whopping $13 for a Stephen King hardback. So King cut about three hundred pages.Around 1990 after it had become apparent that King could publish his shopping list as a best seller, he put those pages back in and released the uncut version. Which I’m fine with. The original stuff was cut for a financial reason, not an editorial one, and there’s some very nice bits of story added in. If King would have stopped there, we would have had a great definitive final version as originally created by the author.Unfortunately, he seemed to catch a case of Lucasitis and decided to update the story a bit and change its original time frame from 1980 to 1990. I’m not sure why that seemed necessary to him. Yes, the book was a bit dated by then, but it was of its time. He didn’t rewrite the text (Which I’m grateful for.), but just stuck in some references to Madonna and Ronald Reagan and Spuds McKenzie. This led to a whole bunch of anachronisms. Would students in 1990 call soldiers ’war pigs’? Someone in New York picks up a phone book to look up the number to call an ambulance instead of dialing 911? A song called Baby, Can You Dig Your Man is a huge hit? None of it quite fits together. There's also a layer of male chauvinism and lack of diversity that you can overlook in a book written in the late '70s, but seems out of place for a book set and updated for 1990.The things that irritate me are still far outweighed by one of my favorite stories of an apocalyptic battle between good and evil.I’m also glad to get a long overdue audio edition of this book. Great narration and 40+ hours of end of the world horror make for a damn fine listening experience.
What do You think about The Stand (1990)?
Why did it seem I was the only person not to have read Stephen King’s The Stand, at the moment I feel like kicking myself because my excuse does seem a crap one. When I look back through the stuff I’ve read it becomes apparent that I’ve always tied myself to a genre and never strayed far from it, I read the Dark Tower series years ago because fantasy was my thing and then although I loved it I just never revisited The King. Now as my tastes have deviated once more, I’ve discovered Stephen King again and wish that I’d never turned my back on the man, and it turned out to be a mistake of mammoth proportions.So the past three months I’ve slowly been bought over to the Kingside and The Stand is another step along the way, only what a fucking step, this book is awesome, all 1320 pages of it and I devoured it like a man possessed in 11 days.I won’t review it as such because, well everyone else has read it but I will say what I loved about The Stand in a sort of hero worshipping fashion.The characters were all compelling and enslaving in their own way, I loved how Fran could be reduced to uncontrollable giggles in the most serious of situations, the development of Harold & Nadine as dreams of the walking dude finally come to bare, epitomizing the evil and dragging them into a web of deceit and Nick, man I shed a tear when he bought it, absolutely gutted. Stephen King certainly puts your emotions through the wringer killing off main characters with wanton abandon.I loved how Kojack travelled thousands of miles to get back to his master and what an important part he played in the run in, the Trashcan man was another favorite, dressed in a suit of madness and with a quote that just goesKA-WHAMM!‘That was another one of the tanks, and the air resistance in front of him seemed to disappear and a large warm hand pushed him firmly from behind, a hand that fitted every contour of his body from heels to head; it shoved him forward with his toes barely touching the road, and now his face bore the terrified, pants-wetting grin of someone who has been attached to the world’s biggest kite in a high cap of wind and let loose to fly, fly, baby, up into the sky until the wind goes somewhere else, leaving him to scream all the way down in a helpless power-dive.’Quality, too many quotes, too little time.Tom Cullen, Larry and Stu, loved them all.I give The Stand 6 stars and it now sits proudly atop my best reads pile, absolutely fucking awesome and I’ll be sticking with the King for the foreseeable future.http://paulnelson.booklikes.com/post/...
—Paul Nelson
And so the Apocalypse Trifecta is complete, with my one, true favorite End of the World book. I have no idea how many times I've read it now - I know the first time was in junior high school, though, and a lot of time's gone by since then. I also think I have about three different copies floating around....It's hard to know where to begin when writing about this book, probably because I work under the assumption that everyone has read it. But I guess that's what everyone thinks about their favorite books, so I'll fill in those of you who haven't.It's the end of the world. Not in the horrible confluence of blindness and carnivorous plants, or in the fiery desolation of nuclear war. The world dies in a more unpleasant way than that, and it all begins in Project Blue - a US military lab in the southwest. There they've built the greatest plague mankind has ever known, a shapeshifting flu virus that is 99.4% communicable and 100% lethal. Its intended use was probably against the Soviets or some other enemy state, but... Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, as Yeats said. And on June 13th, 1990, the superflu got out.It was carried by Charles Campion and his family, spread throughout the southwest until Campion died in a gas station in Arnette, Texas. From there it hopped into the men gathered at the station, who passed it on to nearly everyone they met.By June 27th, most of America was dead. And thanks to the final command of the man in charge of Project Blue, the virus was spread around the world as well. By Independence Day, the population of the world was reduced to less than the pre-plague population of California.Of course, not everyone who was immune escaped unscathed. There were accidents, mishaps and murders that probably brought the number down, but not by much. Scattered survivors struggled to understand why they lived when so many had died, and started to seek out others like them.And then came the dreams. An ancient woman, living in a cornfield. She radiates goodness and compassion (and still makes her own biscuits). Mother Abagail is the beacon of hope for those who see her in their dreams. And then there's the other, the Dark Man, the Walkin' Dude, whose shadow brings madness and whose gaze brings death. He is Randall Flagg, a man whose time has come 'round at last. Just as Mother Abagail attracts the good and strong, so does Flagg attract the weak and frightened. Around these two do the remains of America come together. And neither one can let the other exist without a fight....What keeps bringing me back to this book? Well, a lot of things. For one, the writing. King has said that he's a little disturbed about The Stand being the fans' favorite - it means he did his best work thirty years ago. Not entirely true, I think, although I am hard pressed to say which of his other books exceeds it. King's sense of scale as a writer is outstanding. We get into our characters dreams, in their innermost secret thoughts, and then a few pages later are presented with an overview of what's happening around the nation. It's like being able to go, in Google Maps, from someone's bedroom all the way out into space. He dances between characters smoothly, so just when you get to the point where you're thinking, 'Yeah, but what's Flagg doing?" he brings you there.And speaking of the characters, they're people who will stay with you long after you finish the book. The quiet confidence of Stu Redman, the single-minded madness of the Trashcan Man, Larry Underwood's late maturity, Lloyd Henreid's devotion, Fran Goldsmith's determination.... Each character rings true. Even the ones who really shouldn't have ended up the way they did - and I'm thinking of Harold and Nadine here - you can't help but find bits of them to love. Had they been strong enough, Harold and Nadine never would have gone as bad as they did, and I think even King kind of had a hard time making them do what he wanted.Underlying all this, of course, is a kind of Old Testament religiosity. The God of Mother Abigail is not the kind and friendly God of the New Testament, He is the angry one of the Old. He is the God who will gladly wipe out nearly all of mankind to prove a point, and will make a 108 year-old woman walk into the desert by herself because she's getting a little too uppity. In this world, at least, God is most definitely real, even though His purpose is hard to understand.I could go on. Thesis papers could probably be written about this book, and I reckon they already have been. But that's not why I do these reviews. I do them because I want y'all to know what's worth reading.This book is worth reading.Oh, and one more thing - if anyone wants to send me the DVDs of the TV movie that was made back in the 90s, I'd be your friend for life. One of my favorite college memories was getting a whole bunch of friends together in my dorm room to watch it when it was broadcast....
—Chris
I am not a Stephen King fan. That being said this is one of a handful of works by him I enjoy. Mr. King seems to have a congenital inability to write an actual “hero figure”. The fatal-flaw motif is very evident in his protagonists. This will appeal to some readers, and they find it “a touch of realism”. There are times I wonder. At any rate that isn’t quite so evident here as in his other books. The main characters while definitely within the “feet of clay” school aren’t in general carrying around major crimes in their past.....not all of them any way.The book opens up a lot of King's attitudes on God also I suppose, (of course I can’t be sure, but it seems so) in the development of the story and eventually (major spoiler coming ) (view spoiler)[ the death of Mother Abigail. (hide spoiler)]
—Mike (the Paladin)
