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The Stand by Stephen King
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The Stand (edition 2012)

by Stephen King

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2,709455,305 (4.29)None
"When a man escapes from a biological testing facility, he sets in motion a deadly domino effect, spreading a mutated strain of the flu that will wipe out 99 percent of humanity within a few weeks. The survivors who remain are scared, bewildered, and in need of a leader. Two emerge--Mother Abagail, the benevolent 108-year-old woman who urges them to build a community in Boulder, Colorado; and Randall Flagg, the nefarious "Dark Man," who delights in chaos and violence."--The publisher.… (more)
Member:msgbbritt
Title:The Stand
Authors:Stephen King
Info:Anchor (2012), Edition: Reprint, Paperback, 1200 pages
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The Stand by Stephen King

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Showing 1-5 of 45 (next | show all)
I had planned on re-reading The Stand, but then the pandemic came along so I waited a couple of years. But I just read it for the fourth time and it's still just as good as I remember. Honestly, it's a actually a fairly simple story of good and evil, but the execution, the details, the richly drawn characters, the embodiment of selflessness and selfishness, and the fact that Stephen King seems to know all of our deepest darkest secrets and is willing to expose all of it in order to get to certain human truths ... all of that puts The Stand in a category of it's own. It's just that good. ( )
  AliceAnna | Nov 21, 2022 |
Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I bought a copy of this as an ebook for my Kindle.

Thoughts: I set this one aside at 56% of the way through (page 727). I have been skimming large portions of this book at this point. I think I would have been better off picking up the original version rather than the extended version. I actually did not realize there were two versions when I bought this for my Kindle last year. There is so much fluff in this book, just pages and pages of characters' thoughts and background...occasionally even characters that aren't around for long. Seems like a lot of wasted page space with not much gain.

I know this is a Stephen King book, and it's been awhile since I read one of his books, but the overly gorey detail makes my stomach turn. The detailed, violent, explicit rape scenes also get old and just make me feel, well, yucky and sad. I get it, it is supposed to be horror and there is a reason I don't read a lot of gorey horror, I just don't enjoy it. I also don't enjoy feeling depressed for days on end while I try to push through this book.

The story took forever to go anywhere and once it started getting there it was like slogging through putrid mud. At this point I get where it is all going and I just don't have the patience or want to spend another 9hrs reading this. I get it, the world ended because people are over reaching and somewhat evil, there are good and bad people, all these people will probably buildup the world again and destroy it again...I got the message.

I did enjoy the first bit of this book. King is an awesome writer and has a very creative imagination. However, things just needed to get moving.

I have wanted to read this book for sooooo long. Now, I am over it. There was just way too much here that wasn't necessary to move the plot forward or even make this a decent story. I am all for building up characterization and providing solid backgrounds on our characters but this was borderline ridiculous. So yeah, not a fan.

My Summary (3/5): Overall I enjoyed the beginning of this story but it was just too drawn out and I ended up skimming large portions of it. I just didn't enjoy the wandering delves into random characters' backgrounds, the slow progress in the plot, and the excessive violence and gore. Maybe I will pick it up again at some point, but I am guessing not. This just wasn't for me. ( )
  krau0098 | Aug 10, 2022 |
I've never written a review this long but I've never read a book this long, so here we go.

My journey with The Stand began 9 months ago in January. I had heard of it the previous January as Covid-19 was becoming known and it sat on my TBR shelf all year. (Because why read about a devastating global pandemic WHILE you live it?) I've put it down to pick it up again and again many times, and also restarted it entirely once (maybe twice?) a third of the way through the book. This latest and final round took almost a month but I am finally FINISHED. 100%. It is done. And wow. My first Stephen King novel and I picked the longest one, what was I thinking?

So it's kind of a mixed bag. Some moments were exciting and terrifying and engaging, and some moments were stretched out and boring and tiring to get through. I am almost sure that the uncut 1990 version's 400 extra pages were better left cut out because around page 700 it really was getting to he a chore to stay committed to finishing the book.

Normally I enjoy a solid heavily character-driven book, and King does have quite a way with putting his characters on a page and making them real. At times, I was in awe of how real a character's thoughts and feelings seemed. I can't think of another time when a character's dread felt so real and relatable on a page.

But I felt more interested in the villains of the story and characters that just didn't get much page time. Everyone I found boring was just so damn predictable. (I think because we got such a long backstory for those characters, it was so easy to see who they were and what they would do next.) I was only ever interested in turning the page when an element of unpredictability was driving the story, such as what Flagg was doing, what role would Lloyd or Trash play, what is Harold going to do, what choices is Nick going to make. And every time that happened, the storyline would pause to go back to Larry or Frannie for a good boring chunk, and then skip past the point of interest with Lloyd or Harold where I was so interested! It was a huge tease the entire time and in writing it like that, it felt like I never read anything happening.

Also, although I've never read a Stephen King book before this, I am well aware of his more problematic tendencies. I have to say it was difficult not to throw the book at a wall every time he mentioned Frannie's breasts or Nadine's sacred virginity and her entire purpose as a character to have sex with a man. I just had to say it. We all know it but I've been screaming it into the pages for a month so I had to write it out.

And I really have to give it to the audiobook narrator, Grover Gardner, too. I listened to this audiobook as well as read this book, often concurrently, and I have no doubt I'd have given up and DNF'd this book without Gardner's amazing narration. Top. Notch. He gave so much character to the most boring sections that were a slog to read through. I have a 57-hour audiobook in my queue with his narration and now I can't wait to start it!

To top it all off, I read this in part to watch the new TV series, which was so god-awful I can't even. I can't. I'm so mad that they butchered it.

Anyway. I can't bear to give this more than 3 stars because while it was well-written in most spots, it just could have been a lot tighter with a lot more purpose. ( )
  nydhoggyr | Jan 27, 2022 |
In Stephen King’s foreword to the revised version of The Stand, his 1,200-page apocalyptic tale about the impact of an accidentally released military superflu, King explains that he published the new edition in order to restore 400 pages that were originally cut “at the behest of the accounting department” (rather than for any “editorial” reason). I wish he’d gone the other way and cut an additional 400 pages.

I don’t say this to be mean. I think King is an extraordinary writer. His horror masterpiece It scared the bejesus out of me (when I made the mistake of reading it alone, at night, in the country). And I loved On Writing, in which he describes his philosophy of crafting fiction by starting with a situation instead of an outline. But while The Stand has swathes of evocative description—my favorite: “It was if his face was held together by a number of unseen bolts and each of them had suddenly been loosened a turn and a half”—I think the narrative would have benefited from more detailed planning.

Because, strange as this is to write, King’s apocalypse is kinda boring.

He reveals early on that 99.4% of the population is going to be wiped out by the superflu (nicknamed Captain Trips). But it takes forever: non-essential characters come and go, the situation gradually gets worse, more non-essential characters flit through… it’s just not as riveting as you’d expect. Part of this is the foreshadowing—King repeatedly steps out of the story to explain how the disease will spread. These interludes felt jarring to me, and although the sense of impending doom they imparted sustained my (begrudging) interest through the lengthy passages King spends establishing what his main characters are like before everything goes to hell, having that advance knowledge also made me think, “Get on with it; can’t everyone hurry up and die?”—another strange comment to find yourself making.

Maybe I’ve just read and watched too many more-recent takes on the end of the world—although my favorite is still Richard Matheson’s 1954 classic I am Legend (of which King is a noted admirer)—but I wish The Stand had skipped the outbreak and started in the aftermath. The characters’ backstories could have been compressed and worked in as flashbacks; no one’s arc really gets going until the halfway point anyway, when the survivors of the superflu begin forming into two camps: a mostly benign “Free Zone” in Boulder, Colorado, and a mostly malignant opposition centered around Las Vegas.

That’s when things get biblical.

The two camps are led by antithetical symbols: the Free Zone coalesces around Mother Abigail, a God-fearing 108-year-old black woman; the Vegas castoffs are drawn to The Dark Man, a probable servant of the Devil. Both leaders wield forms of magic, and both use dreams to summon their followers.

And man, are there a lot of dreams. The religious imagery certainly fits with the end-of-the-world motif, but other people's dreams aren't that much more interesting to read than they are to listen to, even when they're written by a good writer. The bits where the Free Zone grapples with how to rebuild society are thought-provoking, but there's a fair amount of fat here as well. (King delivers several conversations in this section via committee minutes… committee minutes!)

Eventually, the Free Zone and The Dark Man take their respective “stands” against each other, and the novel progresses to a relatively satisfying conclusion. But I still wanted the journey to be shorter. In On Writing, King says his formula for editing is “2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%.” I wish he’d taken his own advice (and then some) while revising The Stand, because there’s an excellent 400-page novel inside.

It’s just badly outnumbered by pages that should have been—and stayed—cut.

(For more reviews like this one, see www.nickwisseman.com) ( )
  nickwisseman | Oct 11, 2021 |
Loved this book. One of the only few books I have read twice. First time was the regular version, second was the unabridged. The unabridged version was good too but too long. Original was better. ( )
  goobertellii | Jul 29, 2021 |
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"When a man escapes from a biological testing facility, he sets in motion a deadly domino effect, spreading a mutated strain of the flu that will wipe out 99 percent of humanity within a few weeks. The survivors who remain are scared, bewildered, and in need of a leader. Two emerge--Mother Abagail, the benevolent 108-year-old woman who urges them to build a community in Boulder, Colorado; and Randall Flagg, the nefarious "Dark Man," who delights in chaos and violence."--The publisher.

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