Review: The Stand, by Stephen King

For the record, I hate this cover. Maybe I'll love it by the end of the book, but right now, it doesn't look particularly imaginative. Also, I'm weird about teeth, and this bullet-tooth thing is weirding me out.

Rating:

🦠🦠🦠🦠🦠

Initial Response:

THANK GOD I FINISHED THIS GOD DAMN BOOK. YES, I AM A CHRISTIAN. YES, I JUST SAID "GOD DAMN." DEAL WITH IT.

One Sentence Summary:

The world ends, and people rebuild.

Tell Me More:

Words cannot express how happy I am to be free of this novel. The beginning was really good, and the ending was pretty good, but the middle was a whole lot of moving parts that didn't really amount to much in the long run. Honestly, I'm kinda disappointed. King talks about this book as the one that tends to most affect his readers. It's the one he always gets questions about at signings. Perhaps it was overhyped for me, and that's why I reacted so strongly to it, but by the last hundred pages or so, I was sooooooo ready for this book to be over with.

Why, then, does it get 5 'stars'? Well... the book showcases what King does well: his characters. Frannie, Lloyd Henried, Trashcan Man-- I really felt for them, and understood them as people. Each of these individuals shine like stars in their own stories.

The problem is when they get together. This is a book about the breakdown of society and subsequent rebuilding period in the aftermath of an apocalypse. Two main coalitions form: one headed by "the Dark Man" Randall Flagg, the other lead by "Mother" Abigail. The most boring part of this book, for me, was the back half of the second book, where the Boulder Free Zone (so called because it's in Boulder, Colorado) is trying to form and govern itself. I'm sorry, but I didn't sign up for a socio-political textbook in the middle of my post-apocalyptic epic.

Reading this book reminded me of reading Milton’s Paradise Lost, in that the most interesting parts are the parts related to the villain. Readers of Paradise have long noted that the first few books, which chronicle Satan’s fall from heaven and the construction of Pandaemonium, capital of Hell, are the most engaging of Milton’s epic. For me, the parts of the book focusing on Randall Flagg’s operation in Vegas, and the lives of his cronies Trashcan Man, Lloyd Henreid, and Harold Lautner, were the sequences that held my attention best. Harold in particular was probably the most interesting character in the book. Like Carrie White before him, King portrays Harold with the perfect blend of sympathy and disgust. I felt bad for the guy even as I watched him undermine and try to kill our heroes.

And let’s talk about those heroes— because I wasn’t particularly impressed with most of them. Remember when I said this book does characters well? You'll note that I only listed 3. That's a fraction of the characters in this novel; and while I think King did a good job with all of them from a technical standpoint, I wasn't really interested in most of them. King has often said that his stories focus on ordinary people in extraordinary situations, and that’s certainly true in this book. Perhaps to it’s detriment. The heroes were so ordinary as to be almost uninteresting. (At some point I just forgot who Ralph was and didn’t bother to try and figure it out. There’s a guy named Ralph in this book. What’s his story? Yo no sé.) There were so many characters I thanked God when a bomb went off to clear the field a little bit. Unfortunately that wasn’t until the book was almost over.

However, early in the book, when Kings everyday heroes are trying to maintain their everyday lives while the world ends around them, King really shows off his ability to make even mundane experiences affecting. Everyone experiences the loss of a loved one at some point, and Chapter 28, where Frannie buries her father, is one of the most accurate portrayals of grief I've ever seen. Not necessarily in capturing the feelings of loss, but in capturing the way grief fragments everything. Shock throws out your ability to do basic stuff like cook dinner, or cut yourself a piece of pie. It's like your brain is having to rewire itself around the absence your loss has created-- like the person you lost was living in your brain (even when you weren't thinking about them) and now that they're gone, there's a hole there.

The scene where Frannie is interacting with her father's corpse, wrapping it in its shroud, carrying it to the grave she dug herself, was particularly affecting because I lost my Nana while I was reading this book. All I could think about while reading that scene was Nana on that bed in hospice: her skin yellow, the sheets white. She's the one who introduced me to Stephen King in particular, and fostered my love of reading in general. I probably wouldn't be writing book reviews today if it hadn't been for her; and I certainly wouldn't be writing fiction without a certain book she bought me on an especially wild family trip-- but that's a story for another time.

All of this to say: Living through grief while reading this book is not for the faint of heart. This book is soaked in death.

It's also weird reading this book post COVID. I thought I had worked through my COVID trauma, but APPARENTLY NOT. The apocalyptic event of this book (or, I guess I should say the FIRST apocalyptic event of this book) is the release and spread of a superflu that has a 99.4% contagion and mortality rate. The first fourth of this book, while the superflu is working it's way through the population (and we're watching it jump from person to person) was some of the most anxiety-inducing writing I've ever read. It didn't help that I got sick only a few days after I started the book (I probably had COVID, but I never got tested, so who knows). Reading about a pandemic while actively fighting symptoms did little to help me cope with my resurfacing trauma.

At several points while I was reading the first act (while the virus is spreading) I wondered how realistic the complete breakdown of society was, given what we'd seen in the COVID pandemic. I remember lockdowns and social distancing, not martial law and a self-destructing military. Online flarewars, but no assassinations like what happen in this book (granted, I also don't think anyone ever tried to claim COVID was a superbug made by the US government, so it would make sense there was no coverup).

Here's some statistics to put things in perspective: The fictional superflu has a mortality rate of 99.4%. According to this article (and you can see the raw data here) COVID had a mortality rate of 1%. Knowing this, I can give the book waaaaaaayyyyyyy more leeway. COVID wasn't the Project Blue bug. Not by a long shot.

At the end of the day, I have a feeling this book will become a favorite on re-read. Yes, I started this review by saying I was SO INCREDIBLY HAPPY TO BE FREE OF THIS BOOK; but I felt the same way about Crime and Punishment the first time I read it for AP Literature in high school. C&P is my favorite novel of all time now, and re-read it regularly. There's enough in this book to make me want to revisit it; particularly once I've read The Dark Tower. I'm curious if reading King's magnum opus will help me understand some of the more obscure, magical moments in the book. I also think this book is saying something about the idea of "America," but I'm not sure what yet. I definitely need to re-read, just so I can figure that out. An American author interrogating the concept of "America" in a country-spanning epic? My inner literary critic is drooling!

But all of that will have to wait until after I finish the story of Roland Deschain!