It’s difficult to write a concise review of such a long novel, full of diverse plots and with so many characters. Although I’m a huge Stephen King fan, this was my first attempt at this novel. I only knew there would be a plague, an apocalypse, and references to The Dark Tower.
The apocalypse was the most intriguing to me. It’s not an unrealistic scenario, and I’m always interested in how authors depict the world during or after a global catastrophe. In this novel, the vast majority of the population is wiped out by a virus, and a handful of survivors, immune (for unknown reasons), organize into two groups in the western United States. There are elements of political fiction. Stephen King depicts a hypothetical situation in a country facing a catastrophe. It’s no surprise that chaos and a brutal struggle for power and resources begin to reign in the decimated world.
The plot is long and may seem unstructured. But I enjoyed it. It begins by presenting the lives of characters scattered across the United States (and there are many). Then we move on to the outbreak of the plague, and the story transforms into a story of road and survival. Each group of characters makes their own route to Boulder, Utah, where the bulk of the plot takes place. I must admit that there are a lot of subplots, and many of them seem unnecessary. These subplots add nothing to the main theme and dynamic of the novel. This is characteristic of King’s writing style, who likes to fill his novels with “genre scenes.” Each character has their own dilemmas and thoughts, which the author loves to expand on for pages. Sometimes this fleshes out the characters’ motivations, sometimes it’s boring.
As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, there are a lot of characters. Of course, there are more important and crucial characters to the plot, and then there are the secondary ones. However, there are so many of these secondary characters and they appear so frequently that I couldn’t remember their roles if they appeared later in the story. Some might consider this a drawback, but for me, this approach made the world presented in “The Stand” more believable and complete. The main antagonist, Randall Flagg, deserves special mention here. The author devotes considerable space to him, as he embodies evil, the lust for power and destruction, and is meant to symbolize the worst human traits. He is a crucial figure in the “Dark Tower” series, so placing him in a standalone novel provides another layer of analysis for Randall Flagg.
The climactic event, or rather a series of events, in the book is the confrontation between good and evil. For me, this is the greatest strength of “The Stand.” The motivations of both sides of the conflict are presented. Human nature has shades of black and white, and this is reflected in the actions of the characters, both the “good” and the “evil” allied with Flagg.
This was a great read for me. Although the book is one of the longest I’ve ever read, I wasn’t bored in a single chapter. It’s brutal, sometimes epic, and sometimes the characters’ success is driven by chance. Although “The Stand” is off-putting due to its length, for me it was a great adventure in this post-apocalyptic world.