Product Description

When a man crashes his car into a petrol station, he brings with him the foul corpses of his wife and daughter. He dies and it doesn't take long for the plague which killed him to spread across America and the world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4106 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-31
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 1344 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

Review
'A writer of excellence...King is one of the most fertile storytellers of the modern novel' -- The Sunday Times 'His work!plumbs, with unnerving accuracy, the hopes and fears of an entire nation' -- Observer 'As a storyteller, he is up there in the Dickens class' -- The Times

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

‘King is the greatest popular novelist of our day, comparable to Dickens'. (Toby Litt, Guardian )

Customer Reviews

Powerful, tragic, haunting, romantic, terrifying...
This book has it all. Never have I read something that has captured me to the extent of The Stand. It tells of a scenerio we can all vividly picture. A lonely world where mankind is close to extinct, while the cities and machines are left to gather dust and remind survivors of a world lost through the mistakes of man.

This truly is the epic of all epics, and I assure those who are intimidated by the length to not be. You'll be captured by the story before you know it. The characters are so diverse and unique that it's impossible not to relate to them. My personal favourite had to be Larry Underwood, the drugged up rock-star whose life undergoes some extreme changes as the story progresses.

There are moments in the book that will bring a tear to your eye, there are moment that will leave you terrified. However, in my opinion this isn't a horror story, but instead a tragedy that tells of courage, hope and faith.

This is definitely the greatest book by Stephen King, and really makes me want to forget I read it so I can experience it all for the first time again.

A Stephen King novel to read and re-read
This is a great book in my opinion and shows Stephen King at the peak of his powers.
I remember trying to read this book when i was quite young and i never really enjoyed it.It sat in my collection until a couple of years ago and then i read it at a rate of knots!
The basic plot, is that a super-virus is accidentally unleashed on the public.Nearly all of the population is wiped out, and the few remaining survivors are drawn to two people they dream about.Flagg is one.Mother Abigail is the other.The story shows how people survived the outbreak, then begin to reform society and then decide how to fight against the evil Flagg.
That is it in a nutshell - without spoiling anything too much.
There are characters in here aplenty.Ones that you identify with, ones you dislike; but all of them grip you.The way King writes about these characters is excellent - you HAVE to know what is going to happen to them.And they are so well developed that you almost know what they are going to do before they do it! My own personal favourite character is Larry.He changes throughout the book and is the one who you really feel has an internal struggle about what he is doing - he constantly questions his own worth and morality and it is really insightful of Stephen King to do this.
The plot is excellent, and moves well.It does lull in the middle a bit, but this is the is the quiet before the storm, as the final section of the book moves on at a rip-roaring pace.Considering ths book is so long it is amazing how it holds your attention all the way to the last page.
This book is about good and evil and mixes the morality up well, by not making every decision so black and white.People do make mistakes, and people do deserve a second chance and you get to see quite a few sub-plots where these possibilities are played out.And you do get the voice in your head saying ' If only 'x' had done this, then they would have been okay......'.The book really involves you in so many ways, that most books don't.It has depth and it has meaning on one level.And on another it has a cracking plot!

Some people who have reviewed this book didn't enjoy it for various reasons.The two main reasons for this were a/ the length and b/ the ending.
In my view the length is just about right.The topics and characters the book covers justify the length.I don't read this book and think that Stephen King could have editted it down much more, without missing out some important sequences and developments.Second is the ending.And i can understand why people are disappointed by this.My challenge to someone reading this book would be to come up with a better one - I dare you!Alternative endings to the one Stephen King has written do feel cliched!

I would recommend this book to almost everyone.It has everything a good book should have - great plot, great characters, great development and great pacing.Another great aspect of this book is that you are left wanting more!
I would put this in my top 5 Stephen King books, and this is the book that most of his readers vote as their favourite.Why not try this and see for yourself ?

BRILLIANT READ - BUY IT!!

Classic tale of good and evil in post-flu world
The Stand, Stephen King's apocalyptic novel that mixes science fiction with horror (think of it as a realistic merging of The Andromeda Strain and The Final Conflict), was a runaway best-seller when it first hit bookstores in the late 1970s and is still regarded as one of King's best works, at least by his millions of fans. Its scenario of an accidental outbreak of a government-created strain of the flu -- which has a mortality rate of over 90 percent -- that wipes out most of mankind and sets the stage for a final showdown between good and evil makes for compelling reading.

What many readers did not know was that King was asked by the accounting department of his publisher to trim his already huge novel by several hundred pages to keep costs down and to make the hardcover's price affordable ($12.95 in 1978). Given the choice of doing the edits himself or letting the in-house editors do the cutting, King chose the former. As a result, most -- but not all -- the characters and situations appeared reasonably whole, although King remarks in the Preface that pyromaniac Trashcan Man's westward trek from the Midwest to Nevada has the most scars from the literary surgery he performed.

By 1989, though, King had enough clout -- and reader support -- to get Doubleday to publish The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition. Released in hardcover in 1990, the book sold very well and was later adapted by King as a miniseries for ABC-TV.

So what are the differences between the two versions of The Stand, besides the heavier weight and higher price? (Remember that
$12.95 retail price from 1978? In 1990 this had nearly doubled to $24.95!) Well, the novel's tale remains the same -- nefarious U.S. military creates a deadly strain of the flu...flu accidentally (and later not so accidentally) infects most of humanity...then the survivors split into two camps, one led by the evil Randall Flagg, the other headed by an elderly woman known as Mother Abigail, thus setting up the ultimate battle between darkness and light.

But in this novel, the magic is in the details. The long and fiery journey of the Trashcan Man across the United States is now more complete, and a frightening character who was completely excised from the original novel in '78 is now restored in a literary equivalent of the Extended Editions of The Lord of the Rings DVDs.

Another bonus: Illustrator Bernie Wrightson, who has contributed his drawings and artwork to King's Creepshow, Cycle of the Werewolf and one of the Dark Tower books, has added several illustrations to this edition. There are just a few and they are sprinkled sparingly, but they add a powerful jolt of visual effects to King's already vivid prose.

King acknowledges his penchant for writing big, sometimes rambling novels, and The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition is surely big and rambling. Yet the cast of characters -- Stu Redman, Frannie Goldsmith, Larry Underwood, Harold Lauder (whose descent from merely obnoxious teen to jealousy-driven traitor is one of The Stand's more interesting subplots), Nadine Cross, Nick Andros, Tom Cullen, Lloyd Henreid...and the mysterious entity known as Flagg -- is one of King's best ensembles of fictional creations, and the mythical landscape of post-flu America is truly unforgettable.