The Stand (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition) Review
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I won't be a poser here and say that The Stand is what turned me into a King fan...considering I just finsihed the book last week, and I've been reading King since at least high school. In fact, I initially started reading The Stand as a HS fresman, and for some reason, just never got around to making it through more than the first chapter.
So, years go by, and at the begining of this summer I picked up the complete and uncut (read:much, much longer) edition of The Stand. I figured if I was going to finally read the damn thing, I might as well read every single page King meant to put in there originally. And I'm sorry to see what a great book I missed out on all these years.
The plot is pretty simple: a flu outbreak has wiped out all but about 1% of America's population and survivors begin to migrate to the Midwest, fueled by thoughts of recreating society and a dream of a dark man with dark intentions.
Although there are very defined good and bad characters (and some who seem to toe the line between both), this book is more than just good vs evil. In fact, until the last 3rd of the book or so it has less to do with this than it does just people coming to grips with what Captain Trips (the flu) has done to America and how those who survived make it from day to day; from finding food that isn't spoiled to maneuvering through roads clogged with cars and their dead passengers, to dealing with sickness and injuries without the help of doctors.
When the Good Vs. Evil situation does come to a head, it's over pretty quickly (and efficently). Again, The Stand is about more than just good vs. bad, right vs. wrong. It's really asking the question:If you were the survivor of a mass epidemic (or bomb, or asteriod, or whatever) that claimed just about everyone else in the world, how would YOU handle it? Would you seek out others for companionship and help make a new society, or would you just hide in your home, living as long as you could until you eventually died? Would you be willing to follow someone else's vague directive from God, even if that meant sacrificing yourself?
Yes, this is a long read, but it is worth it. King, as usual, builds his story around strong characters and descriptive narritive. You feel empathy for the characters who have lost everything head out on a blind journey to start over. You can feel their anxiety, fear, and hope as time and again they are met with roadblocks and successes, fall in and out of love, and struggle with the simple challenge of being human. If anything, read it for the ideas you could get about how to make it in a post-apocalyptic world.
The Stand (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition) Overview
FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. A monumentally devastating plague leaves only a few survivors who, in a desert world, experience dreams of good and evil in confrontation and, through their choices, move toward an actual confrontation.
The Stand (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition) Specifications
In 1978, science fiction writer Spider Robinson wrote a scathing review of The Stand in which he exhorted his readers to grab strangers in bookstores and beg them not to buy it.
The Stand is like that. You either love it or hate it, but you can't ignore it. Stephen King's most popular book, according to polls of his fans, is an end-of-the-world scenario: a rapidly mutating flu virus is accidentally released from a U.S. military facility and wipes out 99 and 44/100 percent of the world's population, thus setting the stage for an apocalyptic confrontation between Good and Evil.
"I love to burn things up," King says. "It's the werewolf in me, I guess.... The Stand was particularly fulfilling, because there I got a chance to scrub the whole human race, and man, it was fun! ... Much of the compulsive, driven feeling I had while I worked on The Stand came from the vicarious thrill of imagining an entire entrenched social order destroyed in one stroke."
There is much to admire in The Stand: the vivid thumbnail sketches with which King populates a whole landscape with dozens of believable characters; the deep sense of nostalgia for things left behind; the way it subverts our sense of reality by showing us a world we find familiar, then flipping it over to reveal the darkness underneath. Anyone who wants to know, or claims to know, the heart of the American experience needs to read this book. --Fiona Webster
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