Product Description

Regarded by many as King's greatest early novel - as voted in 2003 as one of nation's best loved novels in the BBC BIG READ campaign.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #72283 in Books
• Published on: 1991-05-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 1440 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In 1978, science fiction writer Spider Robinson wrote a scathing review of The Stand in which he exhorted his readers to grab strangers in bookshops and beg them not to buy it.

The Stand is like that. You either love it or hate it, but you can't ignore it. Stephen King's most popular book, according to polls of his fans, is an end-of-the-world scenario: a rapidly mutating flu virus is accidentally released from a U.S. military facility and wipes out 99 and 44/100 percent of the world's population, thus setting the stage for an apocalyptic confrontation between Good and Evil.

"I love to burn things up," King says. "It's the werewolf in me, I guess.... The Stand was particularly fulfilling, because there I got a chance to scrub the whole human race, and man, it was fun! ... Much of the compulsive, driven feeling I had while I worked on The Stand came from the vicarious thrill of imagining an entire entrenched social order destroyed in one stroke."

There is much to admire in The Stand: the vivid thumbnail sketches with which King populates a whole landscape with dozens of believable characters; the deep sense of nostalgia for things left behind; the way it subverts our sense of reality by showing us a world we find familiar, then flipping it over to reveal the darkness underneath. Anyone who wants to know, or claims to know, the heart of the American experience needs to read this book. --Fiona Webster

The Sunday Times
‘A writer of excellence...King is one of the most fertile storytellers of the modern novel’

Observer
‘His work…plumbs, with unnerving accuracy, the hopes and fears of an entire nation’

Customer Reviews

Engrossing...
I've read this book many times since it first came out; both the original and the extended edition.

I'm now listening to the Audio Book of the original edition and I think I favour that version - it seems a lot tighter somehow. Anyway, it's making my hour long drive to and from work just fly by (I don't even mind traffic jams!).

Highly recommended.

Very good, but not great
I am a Constant Reader of Stephen King's works and it was about time that I finally undertook the epic that is The Stand.

The Stand follows the fate (and faith) of a group of apocolypse survivors and their subconscious drifting to one of two specific places: Boulder, Colorado under the watchful eye of Mother Abigail, a living angel, in all but name or to Las Vegas under the influence of the demonic Randall Flagg.
The book deals with the re-building process (rebirth) of both groups of people and their respective enviornments and the inevitable battle betewwn good and evil between them.

As a commmentry on mankind, The Stand explores the realms that man is indeed born to hate his / her fellow being. Both communities treat each other with deathly suspicion. The hope that Mankind can learn from the mistakes of the past is ultimately forlorn.

The Stand as a commentry on Mankind is an excellent piece of work. King develops his characters with such depth and feeling that eventually he sucks the reader in, making him/her truly care about (or despise) them whatever the case may be.

After finishing the book, I found myself a little empty. I cant help the feeling that King had run out of ideas towards the end of the third quarter and instead perhaps of taking a step back from his creation, he continued on, and thus made a very underwhelming ending especially considering the work which went before.

This book is not a horror story. With the exception of the depiction of death for 99.9% of mortals as a symptom of a superflu virus in the first quarter of the book, there are very few genuinely exciting passages. Throughout the novel King created situations where by he could set the readers heart racing with excitement, but for some reason he takes a step back and the chance for genuine shock or a breathtaking passage was lost.

The Stand is an eventful novel. The Stand has a message. The Stand is epic and grandeose. However, The Stand is not as exciting as it could have been.

A must-read
To start with, I should say that I never read the original shorter version of this novel. And now that I have finished the uncut version, I cannot imagine where this story could have been shortened, what could have been left out. I do not feel that any section or page was unnecessary. The story would be incomplete, if any page was missing. Due to the books' length, the story line is developed in much detail and the reader really gets to know the main characters.

In the story, mankind destroys themselves and the few remaining survivors of the super-flu find themselves drawn either to God's side or the devil's. Both groups are curious of what the other is up to, until they finally meet. I found the story so gripping that even after I put the book down for a few days, I could pick it up again without having to re-read a couple of pages to know what was going on. The book is very well written. One of Stephen King's best works (along with The Shining).