The Stand by Stephen King

Stephen King's apocalyptic vision of a world blasted by virus and tangled in an elemental struggle between good and evil remains as riveting and eerily plausible as when it was first published. Soon to be a television series. 'THE STAND is a masterpiece' (Guardian). Set in a virus-decimated US, King's thrilling American fantasy epic, is a Classic. First come the days of the virus. Then come the dreams. Dark dreams that warn of the coming of the dark man. The apostate of death, his worn-down boot heels tramping the night roads. The warlord of the charnel house and Prince of Evil. His time is at hand. His empire grows in the west and the Apocalypse looms. When a man crashes his car into a petrol station, he brings with him the foul corpses of his wife and daughter. He dies and it doesn't take long for the virus which killed him to spread across America and the world.

When I was in high school, they released a TV miniseries if The Stand that I watched. I always thought it was the best end of the world/virus take I’d seen. Not because it’s realistic or gritty, but because it frames the story with great characters battling good and evil.

When I read the book, I wondered how closely it would follow the miniseries. Turns out the show was a near scene for scene recording of the book (one of the bonuses of making it 6 hours).

What’s amazing to me about The Stand is that it follows so many characters storylines so well. It would be easy to get lost with that many characters, but somehow they fit together in a way that I didn’t feel overwhelmed. Add to that a story that had me on the edge of my seat and I see why this is considered one of the best sci fi books of all time.

Utterly fantastic.

King weaves a n enthralling plot with well-realized characters into a masterpiece well worth the steep 1100-page price tag. Tom Cullen is the most lovable, Trash the most interesting. I'm interested in understanding how this ties in with the rest of the King multiverse.

M-O-O-N, that spells TOO DAMN LONG, GOD DAMMIT! Laws, yes! Everybody knows that.

Where to start? Characters? Story? Setting?

Characters are standard SK business, however at least half of them are just deus ex machinas that are, on top of it, sometimes even underutilized. 1 300 pages is way too many. I cared about some of the main characters, whether I loved them or hated them, but in the end I was just glad it was over.

Story is set in 1990 USA and we witness what seems to be the end of human race. A new flu virus is killing 99% of the population. And here comes the first WTF - the rest of the people (that is one 1%) has weird dreams about a man in black and an old woman. Randall Flagg, The Walkin' Dude as they call him, is embodiment of evil, Satan's spawn, the last magician of the rational thought.
Mother Abigail is herald of God. But not the god some of you may pray to before the bed. This is the Old Testament God, the jealous son of a bitch that requires human sacrifices and total obedience. He's still “the good guy” in this conflict, though.
People either go to Mother or to Randall. Depends on how good/evil and brave they are.

Personally, I was a bit dissapointed when I found out about this. Battle between good and evil is the basic fantasy trope but to make it this bluntly obvious and on top of that religious was kind of a lazy move. It allowed for some “miracles” = deus ex machinas to happen and overall degraded the story a little. I like complexity. When you put divine miracles like in this book before me I'll just yawn and wave them away with my hand. But maybe that's because I'm spoiled with Steven Erikson's take on divinity in Malazan Book of the Fallen.

The book is divided into three... well... books. You could call them acts, of course. The second WTF comes in here. The first two acts are long. That's a huge understatement, though. King knows how to write characters, that's his biggest talent. However, when the story just drags and drags and drags and drags and drags and drags and drags and drags and drags and drags... See what I mean? It gets annoying!

The first two acts have a total of 1060 pages out of 1325. When you get to the climax, “the final stand”, if you want me to be punny, it's more of a relief than anything else. Actually, it can't be anything else. Despite the fact that the moment is epic the way we get to it is still very underwhelming even if I ignore the thousand and some pages that led to it. And have I mentioned the fact that it was obvious from a thousand miles (pages) away?

As if that wasn't enough, the book continues another 50 pages! What a drag, dammit. I'm never reading it again. The characters were good, the setting was great, but the page count is insane without any comprehensible reason. The book suffered on behalf of its length and it's a god damn shame. If it was 700-800 pages long it would've been perfect novel, one of his best. But with it being 500 pages longer I can't recommend it. There are other, shorter, better works out there that deserve more attention that this one. Go read The Shinning.

P.S.: Have I mentioned that this is extended version? Yeah, he published “only” 1200 pages long book back in the 70's because technology wasn't there to handle bigger paperback. The hundred pages are a bonus from more recent era. Thank you very much...

P.S.S.: You might wonder why I read it if I didn't like it. Well... the truth is I liked it at the beginning and by the time I found out it's a never ending story I passed the half mark. So I figured I'd finish it to see the story to the end.

What an incredible adventure. It's the longest and most detailed book I've ever read so far. In the beginning you have this ultra detailed and frightening story of the death of almost all mankind. In the middle it gets a bit slow but picks up again at the end.