The Stand

Locations
Call Number: Fiction / King, Stephen, Adult Book / Fiction / Horror / King, Stephen
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / King, Stephen	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / King, Stephen	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Horror / King, Stephen	4-week checkout	Due 05-10-2024
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Horror / King, Stephen	4-week checkout	Due 05-05-2024
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Horror / King, Stephen	4-week checkout	Due 05-16-2024
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Horror / King, Stephen	4-week checkout	Due 05-02-2024

"Complete and uncut edition" -- cover.
This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a chain letter of death. And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a handful of panicky survivors choose sides -- or are chosen. A world in which good rides on the frail shoulders of the 108-year-old Mother Abigail -- and the worst nightmares of evil are embodied in a man with a lethal smile and unspeakable powers: Randall Flagg, the dark man. In 1978 Stephen King published The Stand, the novel that is now considered to be one of his finest works. But as it was first published, The Stand was incomplete, since more than 150,000 words had been cut from the original manuscript. Now Stephen King's apocalyptic vision of a world blasted by plague and embroiled in an elemental struggle between good and evil has been restored to its entirety. The Stand : The Complete And Uncut Edition includes more than five hundred pages of material previously deleted, along with new material that King added as he reworked the manuscript for a new generation. It gives us new characters and endows familiar ones with new depths. It has a new beginning and a new ending. What emerges is a gripping work with the scope and moral comlexity of a true epic. For hundreds of thousands of fans who read The Stand in its original version and wanted more, this new edition is Stephen King's gift. And those who are reading The Stand for the first time will discover a triumphant and eerily plausible work of the imagination that takes on the issuesthat will determine our survival.

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Spoilers - Do Not Read This Review Before Reading Book submitted by jaegerla on December 20, 2010, 10:41am The Stand did not impress me as much as The Tommyknockers did. There. I said it.

This book left me feeling completely let down. King laid out a great premise. The writing style in the beginning was so different. You were restricted to looking at the plague through the eyes of a handful of survivors, and in the chaos you are able to piece together what is happening. It was a story explained through fragmented anger, sadness, and confusion. The set up leads you to expect great things from the story, but instead it's like the story falls down a slippery hill. By the end I honestly didn't care if any of the characters survived, save for Kojak and the Irish Setter puppy.

A breakdown of "The Walking Dude" shows how hollow many aspects of the plot are.

The Walking Dude had so much potential. A man with a face you could never quite focus on, seemingly everywhere at once, with an eye like Sauron. He could spy on people from great distances, generate loyalty through admiration as well as fear, could be charming as a salesman or as terrifying as a monster. He had the ability to levitate, travel great distances seemingly instantaneously, and could direct peoples' actions through psychic control. The more diabolical a person is the more use they are to The Walking Dude, and those are who he places the most trust in, a tactic that will clearly blow up in his face. In the end, a pyromaniac digs up an atomic bomb, drives it up to The Walking Dude to impress him, detonates it, and that's the end of the Devil's plans.

I don't like that the antagonist was weak at such inexplicable points. He could drive a person insane by staring them down but he couldn’t shoot a gun? He could force Nadine to remain a virgin for 38 years, then force her to walk hundreds of miles, and then force her to carry his unborn child, but he couldn’t stop her from jumping out a window? The weaknesses have no rhyme or reason. He's painted as an all-knowing, omniscient being that can manipulate people at will but there's no resolution for the character. There is no evolution or devolution, and then someone blows him up with the A-bomb in a plea for attention. It's so weak. I expected to either see the demon become unraveled and disoriented or to have an epic death. This wasn't an artful use of anticlimax. I think it was a poor climax.

There were other things in the story that seemed pretty low brow to me. Like the description of Tom Cullen having diarrhea from eating too many apples. Harold Lauder's sexual fantasies. These were things that had no bearing on the plot; they must have been there for comedic effect, but what kind of person would be sitting around on their own, reading The Stand, laughing at poop jokes? Stephen King is the only person that would do that. I'm beginning to question his taste after reading this and seeing The Shining TV miniseries he was so involved in.

The aftermath of the religious war is disheartening. The Old Woman and The Walking Dude are both out of the picture. Society has crumbled. It's a chance to start over. And the majority of people choose to settle in Boulder, turn the electricity back on, make sponge cakes and drink. Why wouldn't people make it their chance to move to an island, or settle along the beaches of Brazil, etc. King must have meant for that plot point to be disheartening: that even if the world collapsed, the survivors would go on living like they always had and any lessons they had learned would be meaningless to the next generation. Any cool survivors of an apocalypse would be hanging out on a Hawaiian island.

Another complaint is Frannie. I can't find anything to like about Fran. She told her boyfriend she was pregnant and then he smacked her in the face. She did not react at all to the abuse and continued driving. It made me want to jump into the book and shake her awake. Her entire function in the book was demonstrating how much she was in love with Stu and doing everything everyone told her to do. It makes no sense that she would be accepted into the local government as she had provided no ideas or improvements to their society. Then there's Lucy. Her entire role was that she was in love with Larry Underwood and she liked to cook. Outside of the antifeminist tendencies of the book I feel like King didn't put in a true effort to develop the female characters. They were there, they contributed to the story, but their inner workings were constrained to feelings of love and helplessness. There was also the repeated statement that in a world without technology women would become the property of men. I disagree with that idea. That system would only come into place if women consented to it.

But, the premise of the book was really well constructed, the first few hundred pages draw you in, and then it is a slow decline to an overdone climax.

Good, but eerie submitted by emjane on July 22, 2012, 6:26pm At 1141 pages, King’s epic novel The Stand is not for the faint of heart—and not just because of the length. Though it might not contain many “jump out and scare you” moments, The Stand more than makes up for the lack of big scares with an eerie feeling that permeates the entire book. It chronicles the aftermath of a flu epidemic that wipes out more than 99% of the population; Given the modern concerns of epidemics, I couldn’t help but think “Maybe this could really happen.”

Epic submitted by Judeyblu on August 30, 2016, 11:13pm This HUGE book details the war between good and evil, the self and the common good.

Test of Time? submitted by sushai on July 24, 2019, 9:53am This was my favorite S. King book when it first came out. Loved the beginning especially. Then, when I reread it decades later, I couldn't understand why I liked it so much. Times are different, I'm different...just wasn't the same.

Favorite submitted by TLW1998 on July 26, 2019, 9:06pm The book that made Stephen King a legend. This is worth reading.

My first Stephen King book submitted by bsimon3 on July 11, 2022, 4:59pm After reading in the New York Times book review section in around April 2020 that if you only read one Stephen King book in your life, it should be The Stand, I added this book to my queue. I’m glad I finally got to it this summer, but I’m also glad I didn’t read it in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. It hits a little too close to home for that time in our history. This book is probably 300-500 pages too long, several of the female characters are portrayed as weak/uncertain/dependent, and there are generalizations about cultures and people in this book that are based on racist ideas. I can’t give it a glowing review, but I don’t regret reading it. Grade: C+

The most entertaining 48 hours of my life submitted by lilliabrooks on August 5, 2022, 3:09pm I listened to the audiobook of this book a few months ago and while it was 48 hours long, I finished it easily within the two weeks I had to listen to it. Every moment was gripping and as I became more and more endeared to the characters, I wanted more and more to know what came next for them. I will say that many portrayals of disabled characters, women, and people of color are far more violent and discriminatory than they ever needed to be. The book would be just as incredible if it treated disabled characters, the one Black woman starring in the book, and women in general as equals to other characters.

Great! submitted by psbritton on July 28, 2023, 12:47pm One of Stephen King's best.