Take your stand! (The Stand - Stephen King)

Member Name: hugon

Product:	The Stand - Stephen King
Date:	11/02/01 (155 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Excellent book, very descriptive

Disadvantages: Overlong in places

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 wife and child. He makes it to Arnette, a dead-end town near Houston before he finally crashes.

The super flu is high contagious and is easily passed between its victims. It starts off as normal flu symptoms, except it just gets worse and worse and eventually you die a slow agonising death. Little does the escaped guard know exactly what he has unleashed on the world. His escape has let the cat out of the bag, so to speak. Had he stayed in the compound, he certainly would have died anyway, but he would not have begun a spread of disease that would wipe out the majority of the world’s population.

As with all diseases, some people are immune to it – they just don’t get it. This book follows what happens to a group of them. There is Stu Redman, an ordinary working class man who is present at the very start of it all when the guard crashes his car in Arnette. There is Nick Andros, a travelling deaf-mute, a highly intelligent young man. Fran Goldsmith, a pregnant young girl from Maine. Harold Lauder, in his late teens, the only other survivor in Fran’s town. There is also Larry Underwood, a pop star who has just had his big break in New York.

This is a very long book – over 1400 pages, it isn’t a one-night job. And typically of Stephen King
, it is exceptionally well written in his very descriptive style. The first part of the book describes the initial stages of the plague, where practically the whole world contracts the disease. At the start, it is just introducing characters and letting us get to know them, as the world doesn’t know what is about to hit it. Some of my favourite chapters describe the progression of the plague between people, almost as if it was some kind of baton in a relay race – people simply passing the germs onto people they meet on the way.

The start of the book was a little confusing for me. As I have already said it is quite a long book, and it has quite a lot of characters, more at the start than at the end, as the plague finishes some of the earlier characters off. I found it hard to keep up with who was who at the very start. The book manages to deal with each character individually, by taking it chapter about and alternating between characters.

In the final throws of the plague, the world descends into anarchy, people rising up against the martial law that has been imposed upon them, turning on the army and looting everywhere. This part of the book is quite gory, but it is also very exciting and well thought out and written.

After everyone is dead, the survivors start to have dreams – good and bad. They have strange dreams about an old black woman in the east, where everyone is happy and they can see other survivors. The bad dreams involve a strange “dark man”, whose face is always obscured and is chasing them. The man seems to be in the west. The dreams are so strong and vivid that they cause them to move eastwards to find the woman, to leave the relative security of their surrounding, so sure are they that these dreams are real. A good part of the book is devoted to the journey to find the old woman, as they journey isn’t simply hopping into a car and then onto the motorway, as the roads are blocked with ma
ny crashes and stalled cars as people desperately tried to escape the disease.

However, not everyone is moving east. This is where the book starts to become about the battle between good and evil – the “good guys” are going east to Mother Abigail, the black woman, and the “Dark Man” in the “West” attracts the rejects and the petty thieves.

In the middle of the book, it becomes a little bit tougher to get through, it doesn’t seem to read as well and becomes a little bit of a chore. I was tempted to give up, but I was very glad I didn’t. Not wanting to give too much away, I think I can tell you a bit more without spoiling it for you. The main characters that I have told you about meet up in the east, and together they start to re-establish a community. They discover that they have been having the same dreams about the threat from the “Dark Man” in the West is, one that they must deal with, unless they want to be turned over by him.

From here on in, the book is very exciting and becomes quite hard to put down. The experiences the characters go through cause them to change quite a lot – some for the better, others not for the best. The book keeps us abreast of what is happening on both sides of the country so that we know the threat being posed to the good side more clearly than they do. I think this works well as it builds up a kind of tension in that we know that they are going to have to do something soon or they will be in trouble. It is particularly well done in that King doesn’t see his main characters as indestructible super hero types – they are just ordinary people with normal flaws and failings, and they aren’t indispensable either – he has no qualms about bumping them off or injuring them either, because after all they are supposed to be normal people like me or you.

I can’t tell you a lot more for fear of spoiling it for y
ou. What I can say is that the ending, the stand between good and evil was all over a bit quickly for me and I was a little bit disappointed, although the stand isn’t the absolute end of the book, and a few lose ends are tied up.

Overall it’s a very enjoyable book, a bit over long and drawn out in places, but well worth a read. I read the complete version, which was the original text by Stephen King – apparently when it was first published, he was told it was too long and he had to cut some parts out of it, so this version is the way it was intended to be read. I have wanted to read this book for a long time because I have vague memories of seeing a televised version of this years ago and really enjoying it, when I finally saw the book in a second-hand bookshop I just had to give it a go. Yes it is long in places, but the story is well described and thought out. Many regard this as King’s finest book – I wouldn’t say that, it is good but I have read better efforts by him. What it is, however, is a very original idea, made very real by King’s obvious talent. It’s pretty scary to read the possible implications of a super flu germ – what if the governments are testing something like this as you read this….?

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