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: #71038 in Books
• Published on: 1991-05-02
• 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

A cracking good read
Although my personal favourite King is the Dark Tower series, The Stand rates somewhere near it. A massive story, dealing with the ultimate fears of human kind, focusing on the struggle to survive a kind of holocaust in the form of a man-made superflu that kills off most people, leaving a few survivors bereft of society and left to build a new life. The choices they have to make are quite simple - the old good v evil. But this doesn't make the book predictable or tedious. A book that deals with such weighty issues as man's destructiveness,the decay of society, and the consequences of the choices we make will always be thought provoking.

King, however, entertains as well as makes us think. His characters are well portrayed, recognisable, and inherently flawed - hence, they are understable and force us to place ourselves in their circumstances. The book is terrifying in parts, life affirming in others, and make you question your responses to the tragedies of the world we live in.

A great book. A fantstic read. I recommend it highly.

It just doesn't get any better.
I've read many authors through the years. Some I've loved and some I've just tolerated. From every professor's wet dream, Ayn Rand, to one-hit-wonder Harper Lee, to (tsk, tsk perish the thought!) Jacqueline Susann, to Stan Lee. Still, it was sitting in a quiet corner lost in the world of Stephen King's 'The Stand' that I first thought "this is it... it just doesn't get any better". Did it get better? Maybe. But you never really forget your first time.

The best book Stephen King has written to date
I bought this when it first came out many years ago and in my it is the best book that he has ever written. Longer than most it gets into the real detail of the story where sometimes he does tend to gloss over the plot a bit.
Buy and enjoy
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