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."

King's Magnum Opus

This is the deinition of a masterpiece. The characters are deep, diverse, and well managed. You really care about these people after getting to know them. King really builds them well. The story is really fantastic, well thought out, and delivered expertly. This book will scare you. It will make you laugh. You will most likely shed a few tears. You will cheer. You will be angry. You will ponder deeply your own beliefs. But most of all, you will love it, every single page, period. I loved this book and would recommend it to any avid reader.

The book I read was the stand by Stephen King.

The book I read was the stand by Stephen King. In the stand the book is separated into three big sections, and has seventy- eight chapters and has one thousand one hundred and fifty three pages. If I were suggesting this book to a reader I would say If you like horror books than this book is for you.
This book is definitely a horror for the genre. This book is a remake of the original version of the stand, but the old characters do not act in different ways, Stephen King has just added more to the story. The book is fiction, but does take place in real cities like Las Vegas, Nevada.
There are fictional towns as well also. This was a very long book, but was a very good book to read. I enjoyed this book. This book is not a sequel or apart of a series, but was a remake.

The Devil in the Details

The uncut version of The Stand is a behemoth; weighing in at 1141 pages in the paperback version I just finished, there is room for all of the loving detail that King wanted to stuff in there. It seems to be every author's wet dream - carte blanche to write as much as he wants, for as long as he wants, to tell the story he wants. Since we all know that King's long suit is characterization, in weaving in the little details and subplots to make you care about the terrible things that will inevitably happen to the unhappy denizens of his world, how can that be a bad thing?

The short answer? Because he didn't do his homework. I was willing enough to suspend my disbelief. The premise of the book is inherently interesting, and on the whole, King does a great job of painting a picture of the country as a plague runs amok. Unfortunately, "on the whole" doesn't cut it in this book; King's stock in trade is in the details, and in this book, the details are sixteen-penny nails of reality that jab out of the page into the reader's eye.

The most annoying of them is the Payday candy bar. King hangs his hat on a plot device in which the character of Harold Lauder is painted as a brilliant, socially maladjusted, fat teenager who leaves a trail of "chocolate Payday" candy bar wrappers across the country for Larry and his party to follow. It's drummed into the reader's head - hardly a Harold-Fran vignette passes without a reference to the "chocolate Payday" candy bar. Midway through the book, the critical point in which Harold is driven irrevocably onto the side of evil is driven by a sequence of events precipitated by Fran discovering the chocolate thumbprint left by Harold when he had stolen her diary and read it while munching on "chocolate Payday" candy bars. The candy bar is hardly ever referred to simply as a Payday - it's inevitably the "chocolate Payday." So what's the problem? The Payday candy bar has no chocolate in it. It is peanuts and caramel. It's probably one of the few candy bars King could have selected that doesn't have chocolate in it. Every time I ran across the phrase "chocolate Payday," that nail of reality flashed out of the page at my tender eye.

King might have run his draft by someone who had come within spitting distance of the military, as well. A great deal of the book deals with the military, from the weapons program that gave birth to his superflu, to the sinister figures figuring out how to contain and quarantine, to the ever-present soldiers trying to control the movement of the population and the disease it carries. And King gets it jarringly wrong just often enough to keep that nail poking into my eye. In at least one scene, King has a soldier shoulder a "recoilless rifle" and empty the magazine at someone. The term "recoilless rifle" might cause someone wholly unfamiliar with weapons to think it's a large-caliber rifle designed to minimize kickback, but in fact, it's a large-bore anti-tank weapon, much too large for a man to "shoulder," that is recoilless in that the gases from the antitank round are vented out the rear of the weapon. As several Chinese soldiers allegedly discovered during the Korean War, anything behind the weapon when it is fired - a shoulder, another man, the inside of a vehicle - would be incinerated. Clearly not what King thought it was when he decided to throw in a gratuitous and jarringly incorrect detail.

Nor does it help when he has soldiers calling "over and out" to one another on the radio. "Over" means "I'm done talking and expect a response," while "Out" means "I'm done talking, and expect no response." Now, civilians may say "over and out" all the time to one another, but soldiers simply do NOT. "Over and out!" There's that nail again! I don't recall if King's character - the Master Tech Sergeant - used the phrase, as I was too busy pulling the other nail out of my eye; there is no such thing as a Master Tech Sergeant in any of our services, and there hasn't been a "Tech" anything in the Army for many a long decade. The Air Force has Master Sergeants and it has Tech Sergeants, but it no more has Master Tech Sergeants than it has Private Sergeant Corporals.

Why do I complain about these piddling details? Because the only possible reason for King taking a 200-page story and stretching it past 1000 pages is to lavish the reader with detail to draw him into the story. Unfortunately, King was either too important or too rushed to allow someone else to read his copy and help him with the basic research that a lesser writer might have been required to do, and that comes back to haunt him. I enjoyed the book well enough, I suppose, except for all the nail holes around my eyes.

Apart from that, the first part of the book, describing the country descending into chaos, is gripping enough. The apocalyptic confrontation between good and evil, though, seems contrived and hurried. For all that he took a thousand pages to get to the denouement, it ends up feeling rushed. He has spent hundreds of pages setting up the movement of the three spies into the West, to no apparent purpose except to give King a device on which to hang descriptions of more people in Las Vegas. There's no real sense that the people in Boulder made "a stand" against anything.
jxm