The Stand

By Stephen King

I've been taking a bit of a break for the Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin series to read some of the other books that I've had stacking up. The Stand is the most anticipated of these books. It's also that last of the PA (post-apocalyptic) stories that I currently have, though I have my eye on more. I learned also that this one was made into a 6 hour TV miniseries that has gotten quite mixed reviews. I'll have to see about watching is sometime in the future.

I really enjoy Stephen King books. He does a phenomenal job of setting the world the characters are in, the back stories, jumping between multiple story threads, and tying all the loose ends together at the end. But I warn you, you better make time to read The Stand. Once I started I didn't want to put the book down. At nearly 1200 pages it took quite a while to read.

The Stand is a germ based PA story. It pretty much starts off with the dying from page one. The world quickly ends and the meat of the book is spent telling how the survivors are coping in a land suddenly void of people. One of my favorite aspects of the story was the transportation. The survivors were able to walk and ride bicycles/motorcycles (all the horses died.) With 99%+ of the population gone why don't they drive? Because when everyone got sick and started dying, they died while driving or while stuck in giant traffic jams caused by roadblocks. The roads are littered with derelict vehicles. Quite realistic if you ask me.

Another thing in the story that struck me as very plausible was that with so few people left there is little fighting between survivors. Now this is not always the case throughout the book but think about it. There is so much of everything sitting around that no one, at least in the first year or two, will really be hurting for anything, except companionship.

Like most Stephen King novels there is an odd twist. The survivors all start to have similar dreams about the same two people. The Dark Man (the devil) and Mother Abigail (the good side.) This leads the survivors to congregate in either Boulder or Las Vegas depending on their inclination to do good or evil. The end is wrapped up nicely, sort of. I was dreading a large scale war, which doesn't happen, but I also didn't think the destruction of Las Vegas was realistic. Oh well.

To borrow from a review of MMOG's I recently heard, the endgame isn't really the goal. It's the adventures you have along the way. That's why I loved The Stand. The rich side stories, the detail, the interactions between the characters, all made for a great read. I doubt the TV miniseries could live up.

Thinking back to the last germ based PA book I read, The Third Pandemic, I think the only thing that could have made The Stand better was if it had included the science aspects The Third Pandemic. But that would have really changed the dynamic of the book. The Stand was more about how the people coped with the deaths and the aftermath, where as The Third Pandemic was all about the creation of the killer germ.