The Stand - Stephen King

I just reviewed The Cell by Stephen King & it reminded me how much I loved his book 'The Stand'. The stand was published in 1978, by the horror writer Stephen King & is hailed by fans as one of his very best works of fiction. However, in 1990, the complete and uncut edition was published, which is longer & the setting is changed from the 80s to the 90s by changing some pop culture references. I have the uncut edition, so that's the one I'm going to be talking about in my review. Plot - The Stand is based on one of Stephen Kings earlier short stories called Night Surf (Which is published in his book Night Shift) In The Stand, a mutant flu virus, ...  Read the complete review

Personally I have read 'The Stand 'around four times already, and it never ceases to amaze me – both in it’s plot structure and in it’s originality – quite definitely a classic and one that will be remembered as one of King’s greatest, maybe his all-time greatest, but I think The Dark Tower series is peaking that now. The thing about ‘The Stand’ that makes it such a great book is not the actual plot itself – but the very possibility of the plot. What is even more frightening is that King wrote this during the 70’s – today it is even more possibly with our technology…think about that for a while, ...  Read the complete review

You might want to heed this warning before you go any further - I have went into quite a bit of detail about the plot of this book – it is very long and to get it across accurately I feel I must give away some of the middle of the book in order to make the plot a bit clearer. This means there are a few spoilers in this opinion, but nothing to give anything important or vital away. The Stand is set in America in the summer of 1990. The government has been secretly testing a deadly new super flu, which somehow escapes from the test tubes and escapes the testing establishment. This starts the auto lock-up sequence, however one guard manages to escape with his ...  Read the complete review

I have read through a couple of ops on The Stand and must say that it is quite a daunting thing to do, this book is such a huge one (about 1600 pages!) that, to summarise it and allow people to get an impression of the book's good and bad points, is a very difficult thing to do. But here goes: I recently re-read this book in preparation for writing this op and must say that I had forgotten just how involved it is and also how GRIPPING! As a few of you will know I'm very keen on the books of Stephen King, he gets a great deal of horror into the pages of his books, he gets across a lot of frightening details and fantastic information which should ...  Read the complete review

When the recent news broke about a potential Swine Flu pandemic I was perhaps more hysterical about it than most other people. Why? Well, I was reading Stephen King's novel 'The Stand', a fantasy horror story in which 99% of the world's population die from a flu like virus. The spread of the killer flu, or 'Captain Trips ' as the novel's chracters refer to it, and how it is so easily transmitted is delineated in the first section of the book. The flu's origin is in a military laboratory in the USA, an artificial bio-weapon created by soldiers that was accidentally released. It spreads across America like wildfire and it's far-reaching influences are also ...  Read the complete review