The Stand by Stephen King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
** Spoiler alert for both this book (and minor ones) for the Passage by Justin Cronin **
At long last*, my review of the classic post-apocalyptic** novel.
Stephen King is a very talented writer, and commensurately, The Stand is very good. And yet, I still found this novel not completely to my taste.
I have always found Stephen King to be highly readable, and able to make both the pedestrian and the wildly implausible seem equally interesting and engaging. In particular, the characters in this book are pretty good. They're all distinctive, which is a pretty neat trick seeing as there are way too damn many of them. The main ones at least get a fair bit of character growth and maturation (even the bad guys change and grow--if not always towards the light...)
Despite this, the best parts of the novel don't really have much to do with the main characters at all. The chapter which documents the deaths, not by the the flu, of dozens of the survivors really sings, as does the creepy graph-theoretic montage of disease transmission.
But here's the problem. I get that King is really telling a story about religion and the arbitrariness of ritual sacrifice.*** But it makes the novel feel kind of hollow when the heroes whom over the past 1100 pages have been charged with saving the world don't actually have to do anything but be there to get snuffed.**** And beyond the climax, a bunch of the the other character endings didn't really have enough meat to them.*****
In the most egregious case, I get that King needed his villains to have some teeth, but, dude, you suddenly and capriciously killed my favorite character when there were like 4 (for lack of a better term) red-shirts
in the room. Not cool.
A few other details and comments. I read the extended version (why bother with anything else...) Having spent
a bit of time on the wikipedia page to figure out the differences, I think I'm glad I
read the expanded addition, if for no other reason than that "The Kid" is scary and funny. That being said, his is another character whose denouement was not...big enough for the novel. Nextly, what is up with the cover art? I get that it's the final climactic battle between good an evil,****** but that scythe guy that has been on the cover for basically every edition of the novel I've ever seen is not even actually hinted at in the text. Is he supposed to be Flagg?...why the scythe?!?!?!
And finally, is or is this not, basically, the exact same damn book as The Passage. Seriously, right down to the damn nuke. At least the Passage has some surviving characters (and a sequel)...*******
* This book has been on my radar since like the mid-90s...
** Does it count as "post" apocalyptic if the apocalypse happens during the events of the novel?
*** Or maybe Stephen King really believes in the cleansing power of arbitrally killing good people. I don't
know.
**** Don't get me wrong the nuke was pretty cool. But the hand of god thing was kind of dumb.
***** Like basically all of the bad guys, most of whom went up with the aforementioned nuke. I was ok with
Harold's exit, but Nadine could have used, you know, a couple more paragraphs, or something.
****** Except it's not, see *******.
******* Yes, yes, I know there's a larger Stephen King continuity. I'm slowly working my way through the dark
tower series, but i really don't think that counts.
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