Hello Enthusiasts,
Today's review will be of Stephen King's epic, "The Stand". I personally think that this is the best story King has put out, and I have read it a couple of times now. It can be a bit lengthy, with most printings of the book coming in at over 1,000 pages, but it's worth the effort.
I'm not going to give away much, but there are MILD SPOILERS BELOW.
To summarize, this is a tale about the end of the world. A super-flu has been released, killing off over 90% of the population. The world goes into a panic, and then it dies. The few remaining survivors begin to group together, but it's more of a more supernatural element calling them to group up than anything else. Without spoiling much, this book is essentially suggesting that mankind is a chess game between God and Satan. Really, it would have been an okay story if it was just the apocolypse caused by the superflu, but the supernatural element really adds a lot.
This story makes excellent use of almost every King trope you know of. People travelling long distances, people having unexpected supernatural powers, and descriptive writing that does not miss a detail. I swear King could write a whole book about how one room looked when he walked in. He uses this to really get the setting to stick out. With people rotting all over the world, there's a good amount of unsettling imagery spelled out for the reader, but it adds to the overall uneasiness of the setting. Never have I felt like I knew a world more than I knew the barren world of The Stand. The characters aren't perfectly crafted, but most of them are well rounded and I felt like I knew them well as I was reading through. The villain is also pretty menacing and doesn't go down without a fight.
The book starts off strong, jumping right into the action, but after the first scene there is a good amount of time where we encounter a whole lot of nothing until the virus really hits. King had to have known that he was writing a brick of a book, because he spends a while setting up the characters in their pre-apocalyptic world before he destroys it.
There are several scenes in the book that stand out for me (no pun intended). There's one where a character has to walk through the entire Lincoln Tunnel in pitch-black darkness, with only his zippo for occasional light, while surrounded by a traffic jam with corpses behind the wheels of the cars. As he walks through the tunnel his fear causes his imagination to run wild, and I vividly remember this being the first time I had a nightmare from reading a book.
The raw emotion in this book can be moving as well. So much fear and pain just come pouring out of the pages that I gripped onto any sense of hope that King would provide. Any spark of love or kindness really stood out to me with everything else that was happening.
I would recommend this book to anyone who likes King or horror as a genre at all. There was a somewhat disappointing TV series for this book, as well as a line of Marvel comics. Other than the Dark Tower Series, I don't think any of King's other work comes anywhere near this one.
I give Stephen King's "The Stand" a 10 out of 10.
Sincerely,
The Bored Enthusiast
No comments:
Post a Comment