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Loading... The Standby Stephen King
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Great, great book. I have read it numerous times. (  ) ShariDragon | Nov 19, 2009 |  King's best in it's original form before the slog was added back in. ( ) jwcooper3 | Nov 15, 2009 | This is the story of the survivors of an accident that spreads a lethal virus and kills 99% of the population. They start to have dreams, and group in two "colonies": the ones guided by an elder lady that claims to receive messages from god, and the ones that follow the dark man. The beggining of The Stand is quite slow, buracratic. All the inumerous characters are presented, one by one, with a lot of flashbacks and all that stuff. When you reach page 250-300 it feels like there was no evolution. There is a lot of things going on, but you read an entire book (considering the number of pages) and you are still on the beggining of the story. It starts to be tiresome, but if you keep going, the story changes and get exciting. The characters gain depth (except for Fran, whose only role seems to be crying from the begging to the end) and the interesting sci-fi / apocalyptic / end-of-times plot gradually shows up. The plot also gets a religious tone, about the contest of good against evil, verging the supernatural. It still seems that's a lot more to come when you reach around page 800, close to the conclusion. At this point most of the characters are captivating, and the turns of the story keep it exciting. Things that generally don't occur in other romances, in this one can and will happen, and you will keep hoping it all goes well till the end. Stephen King doesn't spare anyone, good or evil. The last 15-20 pages are monotonous, useless from my point of view. (  ) thiagop | Nov 10, 2009 | This was my favorite Stephen King's book. I have read it twice. ( ) Vhcred | Nov 7, 2009 | One of King's best. Flagg isn't my favorite King character, but he's the epitome of evil. King's books are profound. ( ) Anagarika | Oct 30, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
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| Book description |
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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
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:11 -0400)
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