The Stand by Stephen King - a review

[Blackbeez]

My favorite book of all time and not even a Stephen King fan lol! I feel his ultimate theme here is the battle between good and evil and it seems it was the first of it's kind when it came to 'end of the world' type novels in the eighties. I love how he takes evil and gives it a good run on it's side of humanity and then destroys it with its own weaponry. Beautiful. Then he takes the 'good guys' and makes them 'Stand' on their own without a leader while they face the devil. I loved this book and what it exposed within humanity

[carrie1485]

I am a big fan of Stephen King's work and have spent this year trying to read his books. I just finished The Stand a couple of weeks ago and loved it. It is my favorite Stephen King book to date!

[StephenKingman]

The Stand remains my number 1 Stephen King book of all time for too many reasons to go into here. Suffice to say its an ageless work of genius that spans the whole gauntlet of emotion from laughter to sadness and hairs-on-back-of-your-neck fear.

In fact I consider the "crow tapping on the window in the middle of the night at the abandoned hotel" scene to be up there with the only piece of fiction that affected me physically, it scared the sh!t right out of me and if words on a page can do that, its a tribute to the author.

For anyone interested, the second scariest Stephen King moment for me was "silver-eyed George" in the bath in The Overlook Hotel (The Shining) Brrrrr...........better turn up that heating. STILL gets me and im 33.

[Gannon]

Hey SKM, although I consider The Stand to be the better book, for me "It" was scarier. It's been so long since I read it, but I remember being almost scared the whole time while reading it, and it's a massive book.

[gali]

I have read and liked the stand as well. A great book indeed.

[Chris Dutton]

M-O-O-N spells moon.

My two year old comes out with that and I've not read the book in years. Marvellous.

+1 for the dark tower series...well, books 1-5. Book 6 starts to leave me a bit and book 7 has defeated me on at least 3 different occasions. Did-a-Chuck.

[jasteckling]

The Stand is one of my favorite books, but not just because of the great dialogue, memorable characters, and all the amazing scenes that have left an imprint on my heart.

The Stand is one of my favorite books for 2 major reasons:

1 - King's description of the one employee escaping the military base where the vial of the "super flu" was broken is exactly what any normal person would do. He sees the warning lights, has clearly not been trained properly in emergency lockdown protocol, and gets his family and escapes. The fact that King details how each and every person the family has come into contact with contracts the strain is also realistic. Too many novels on this topic gloss over exactly how the virus spread all over the country or the world. It all started with this one family, which is an important detail to me, as a reader. It's accurate, and it shows just how contagious the disease is. It also brings to light the fact that if something like this did occur, the virus would be spread just as he describes - starting with one person, that infects another person, that maybe boards a plane and infects a hundred people, who get to a country and infect hundreds more, who in turn infect thousands... you see my point. The fact that he took the time to think about how exactly this would turn into a global epidemic is what sets this novel apart for me from the very beginning.

2 - The government/military response in the book, which takes place very early on, is also something that I fear would truly happen in the event of a fatal viral outbreak. Authorities would force the media to report what they were told, and it would spread a false sense of security, and anyone that spoke out (like the news anchors and the radio DJ King describes) would be shot. The riots would be disbanded by military force. This is such a realistic scenario to real-life emergency response that it also brought home a lot of critical flaws in our emergency response systems.

The pandemic is described in the early chapters, in between the reader learning about various characters, and it sets the stage for the novel perfectly. The beginning set The Stand up for excellence.

The rest of the story is rife with amazing characters. What makes the characters so amazing is truly their flaws. It was also very interesting to me that King killed off the prophet that drew all the "good" people together, but allowed the antagonist to live. It quickly took away the righteous vs. evil cliche that we have all seen in too many novels. It means that the characters, with all their flaws, are left on their own to determine the fate of the world.

The kicker for me with this book was truly the ending, when the antagonist is reincarnated in some remote country, free to wait for another opportunity to rival the good in this world.

[C S Harper]

I agree. This was a really great novel. This was one of Stephen King's best novels ever. I read this novel years ago. He is definitely the master storyteller. It's funny, but I have never watched the movie adaptation of The Stand. I hope they did a fairly decent job with it because the book was great.

[willo]

Very classic. Deserves 5+ rating for a '70s horror.

[bluesky5_]

I saw the movie also. I need to read the book. It seems that the book is always better than the movie.

[Connie2018]

The Stand, by: Stephen King, is a Great book!
It has been several years since I read it, however, the step by step, story running into story, of the survivors, is thrilling.
What grabbed me was, it could really happen, of course, that's scary .
There is and always will be, Evil against Good! Age Old Fight.
Thank you
Connie 2018