The Stand

Took a little while, but here it is. In addition to the Dark Tower series Trev got me into and then subsequently abandoned, Trev also swore by what many consider to be Stephen King's greatest single work- The Stand. Marissa, the other King reader on the blog, insisted that the book was really boring and seemed to regret reading it. Well, I knew I was going to give it a shot sooner or later, and finally did over the last couple weeks. And I'm glad I did! The Stand begins as a gripping account of what would happen if the U.S. developed a super-virus and accidentally leaked it, killing around 99.9% of the population. The start of the book is very disjointed and it's hard to stay focused on what's going on- there's 6 or 7 different 'main characters' each dealing with their own problems as the plague starts to spread. It takes hundreds of pages before any of them meet up, at which point the book starts to drift into the supernatural. It would be pretty hard to have any hope or conceivable chance of survival if that much of the population just died off; America's a big country and no one would find eachother. The survivors start having visions though- the 'good' people all dream of a nice old woman, Mother Abagail, and follow her to Nebraska, eventually settling in Boulder Colorado. The 'bad' people all gather in Las Vegas to meet 'the Man in Black' from the Dark Tower series, Randal Flagg. A major chunk of the book features the good people in Boulder attempting to rebuild society and planning to destroy Randal Flagg, knowing nothing about him other than the horrible feeling he gives everyone in dreams. As the book draws to a conclusion, Mother Abagail tells the main characters to quit dickin around, they need to go kill Randall Flagg at all costs, setting up "the stand" the book is named after. And while it's up to interpretation how successful the main characters actually are in the task, the actual conclusion doesn't disappoint. So yeah, there's some supernatural aspects to this, but I've yet to see the overblown forced horror that spawned the whole "it's a haunted... lamp! wooooo!" joke. I'm definitely gonna read some more Stephen King soon, and I'm not ashamed!