The Stand

Amazon.com Review 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 From Publishers Weekly In its 1978 incarnation, The Stand was a healthy, hefty 823-pager. Now, King and Doubleday are republishing The Stand in the gigantic version in which, according to King, it was originally written. Not true . The same excellent tale of the walking dude, the chemical warfare weapon called superflu and the confrontation between its survivors has been updated to 1990, so references to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Reagan years, Roger Rabbit and AIDS are unnecessarily forced into the mouths of King's late-'70s characters. That said, the extra 400 or so pages of subplots, character development, conversation, interior dialogue, spiritual soul-searching, blood, bone and gristle make King's best novel better still. A new beginning adds verisimilitude to an already frighteningly believable story, while a new ending opens up possibilities for a sequel. Sheer size makes an Everest of the whole deal. BOMC selection, QPB main selection. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. Stephen King's apocalyptic vision of a world blasted by plague and tangled in an elemental struggle between good and evil is a classic for our times. First came the virus. And then the dreams. A man escapes from a biological testing facility, unknowingly carrying a deadly weapon: a mutated strain of super-flu that will wipe out over 99 per cent of the world's population within a few weeks. Those who remain are scared, bewildered, and in need of a leader. Two emerge - the survivors must choose between them - and ultimately decide the fate of all humanity."[The Stand] has everything - adventure, romance, prophecy, allegory, satire, fantasy, realism, apocalypse, etc., etc... In many ways, this is a book for the 1990s, when America is beginning to see itself less and less in the tall image of Lincoln or even the robust one of Johnny Appleseed and more and more as a dazed behemoth with padded shoulders." - The New York Times Book Review"A masterpiece . . . King says in the novel's introduction that he "wanted to write a fantasy epic like The Lord of the Rings, only with an American setting", and that's absolutely what he did . . . The Stand is dense and rich. Every character is full and alive." - The Guardian