“The Stand”, by Stephen King

 

823 pages, Doubleday & Company, ISBN-13: 978-0385121682

Way back in high school I went on a Stephen King kick and began reading all the books the Utica Public Library had – like The Stand, the ultimate in post-apocalyptic storytelling. I was surprised to learn in my research for this review that it was only King’s fourth novel, published in 1978. Nothing wrong with that, it was just that, seeing as how magisterial it was, I was expecting that it would have been from an older, more mature and self-assured writer. Perhaps that it was early in King’s career shows just what a good author he really was (I have not read a King novel in years so I can’t attest to what his more recent output is like).

The Stand is a post-apocalyptic dark fantasy novel about the aftermath of a deadly pandemic of weaponized influenza (nicknamed Captain Trips) in which 99.4% of the global population is wiped out and the all-too-few surviving humans gather into two opposing factions, fated to clash with each other. Each is led by a personification of either good or evil: Abagail Freemantle, also known as Mother Abagail, in Boulder, Colorado, and Randall Flagg, also known as the Dark Man, the Tall Man, or the Walkin’ Dude, in Las Vegas, Nevada. These factions fight for followers as they maneuver to lead humanity in a world born anew.

King was obviously not in a hurry to get to the final confrontation; while Captain Trips makes its appearance on Page 1 and the consequences follow just as quickly, King has us follow both essential and nonessential characters as they come and go, the situations they find themselves in get worse and worse and the sense of impending doom permeates the whole. That King should spend so much time in world building – or, I guess I should say, world dooming – may bore some readers, but it is, in fact, necessary in creating a world as real and believable as our own in which Big Ideas can be explored and debated. As King himself said:

 

For a long time – ten years, at least – I had wanted to write a fantasy epic like The Lord of the Rings, only with an American setting. I just couldn't figure out how to do it. Then…after my wife and kids and I moved to Boulder, Colorado, I saw a 60 Minutes segment on CBW (chemical-biological warfare). I never forgot the gruesome footage of the test mice shuddering, convulsing, and dying, all in twenty seconds or less. That got me remembering a chemical spill in Utah, that killed a bunch of sheep (these were canisters on their way to some burial ground; they fell off the truck and ruptured). I remembered a news reporter saying, ‘If the winds had been blowing the other way, there was Salt Lake City’. This incident later served as the basis of a movie called Rage, starring George C. Scott, but before it was released, I was deep into The Stand, finally writing my American fantasy epic, set in a plague-decimated USA. Only instead of a hobbit, my hero was a Texan named Stu Redman, and instead of a Dark Lord, my villain was a ruthless drifter and supernatural madman named Randall Flagg. The land of Mordor (‘where the shadows lie’, according to Tolkien) was played by Las Vegas.

 

For a novel of this size I found the character development to be excellent – and there are a LOT of characters, to be sure. Except, strangely enough, for the two leaders: Flagg just wasn’t that scary, seeming more impish than evil – and his motivations beyond being The Bad Guy who has been bad for a long time were opaque, at best. And Mother Abigail was the personification of sainthood, which made her preachy-boring as all get out. Beyond these character’s ability to contact potential followers via dreams, I found it strange that they could gather people to them giving their apparent lack of personalities or fortitude. The story needed to happen, though, and so there they are.

The Stand is also filled with amazingly powerful scenes – just take the opening, for instance, in which Campion, the deserter, weaves towards the gas station in Arnett – along with tracts of fluff in which I kept thinking to myself “Steve, get on with it already”. Some of this is worldbuilding, I know – but not all of it. In 1990, The Stand was reprinted as a Complete and Uncut Edition in which King restored over 400 pages from the text that were initially reduced from his original manuscript, but I wonder if even more than 400 pages couldn’t have been cut, seeing as how so much of what I read seemed like filler. I dunno.

The Stand isn’t perfect (but then again what is?); it is, however, entertaining, thought-provoking, shocking, lurid, violent, inspirational and simply unputdownable. Really, back in the day I was up well past my bedtime reading just one more chapter before exhaustion finally got the better of me. It has stayed with me all these years later and, even though I enjoyed both of the television miniseries adaptations – the first in 1994 and the second in 2020 (in which a world-altering virus took on a newer, darker appreciation) – the book was and is still better, and proves that King is more than just a mere “horror writer”. He is a true wordsmith.