townesvanfaulkner

Writing Style: 5.2
Originality: 5.6
Plot:5.5
Literary Merit(whatever that means): 3.7
Overall:4.8

This book is half (the first half) a brilliant idea, well thought out, great character development, smart, edgy (American government and military is bad and capable of great atrocities), and dead-on perfect storytelling. The second half is completely random nonsense, God-sent miracles, stupidity, and just plain ridiculous crappiness. Alright, maybe I should begin with my experiences with Stephen King in the past and my general feeling towards him. I went through a King phase in middle school, as is apt to happen. I read some good stuff, I liked his books under the name Richard Bachmann, The Running Man and Rage stood out, and I read some horrible junk, I think there was one called the Dark Half and one called Thinner where a guy gets cursed by a gypsy and he starts to lose weight (That’s the whole book! Very scary stuff, huh, a guy losing weight? Shwew… really makes you stay up at night and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up). That’s all I remember. I never read The Shining, but I loved the movie and I know his stories have been adapted into other good movies (Stand By Me, The Green Mile, Shawshank Redemption, I think). But regardless, I can’t help but kinda feel like reading Stephen King is a hop, skip, and a jump away from reading John Grisham. That said, I picked this one out as a beach book. I don’t normally pick things I would call “beach books”, but recently I’ve been enjoying reading big, thick paperbacks that while they may be bestsellers are somewhat intelligent and I’ve had some success lately with Shogun, the George RR Martin Fire and Ice books, and An Instance of the Fingerpost by Ian Pears. The Stand looked like it had that kind of potential and I loved the premise even though it seems a little clichéd now it was probably pretty fresh when this was first published in 1978.

So the story is, the US military is doing secret germ warfare research in violation of international treaties. An accident occurs at a base, one guy escapes the emergency quarantine and spreads a superflu to the rest of the world that kills 99.4% of the population. The first half of the book is society dealing with this as the superflu takes over and the government tries to cover it up. Then when almost everyone is wiped out he (King) goes into several stories of the individuals who were immune and how they find each other and form groups and come together to set up a new society. This stuff is great. It’s perfectly paced, he doesn’t just kill everyone off in the first 50 pages and then get straight into scary violence and general eeriness. The flu spreads quietly at first and then people deal with denial and the government cover up and the media at first helping the government but then turning renegade and trying to warn everyone of what the government is doing. And then the idea of a handful of modern day people coming together to reinvent government in the middle of America. My gosh, this is brilliant, there are so many great things that a great writer could do with this! Could this be the same guy who wrote Thinner? But alas, I guess he just couldn’t keep it up. It feels like he spent all this time and effort setting up this scenario and then he figured that something huge and earth-shattering’s got to happen and what could be more earth-shattering than a superflu wiping out 99.4% of the world’s population? So he thought, well, I guess I’ve got to go with visions and dreams and miracles and supernatural characters to top that. And once he gets this ball rolling, it snowballs in a hurry. Basically, all the good people have a dream about a nice old black lady that lives in Nebraska so they flock to her, and all the bad people dream about a mean guy that lives in California and they flock to him (it kind of reminded me of the climax to American Gods by Neil Gaiman). So you’ve got the good community vs. the bad community for sole possession of America. No grey areas here folks, bad’s bad and good’s good. And guess what, God is good. So any time you build up a good conflict He just reaches down, performs a miracle, and poof everything’s right as rain. For Christ’s sake, what’s the point of building towards a climax when you’re just gonna ruin it with a God-damned miracle? Now don’t get me wrong folks, I’m a fan of the fantasy genre, I’ve no problem with gods and magic in my fiction, but you’ve got to set rules for it. You can’t have a human character with omnipotent powers, that’s a god, and it makes any sort of conflict boring, and if you do have a god he’s got to be complex. You can’t pretend to write an intelligent story about the true, real-life nature of evil in society and have some dumbass omnipotent, omniscient God who sits around twiddling his thumbs until right before the good guys are REALLY about to get whipped and then WHAM smash the baddies for them. Ah, it was painful and to have invested over 1100 pages for this?

Apparently, this is the expanded, uncut version. I’ve no idea why anyone would want an expanded version.

So there you have it. There’s a realistic, very smart first half of the book that is terribly addictive and then… well, I’ve said my piece. There are people out there that love this book, it’s easy to read, and if you like King or have a penchant for apocalyptic novels you might try it. But, be wary of investing the time building towards the things that I’ve warned you about.