The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition
by Stephen King

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Book Summary Information

• Expanded version of the original novel.
• A two part preface from the author.
• 1153 pages

Book Reviews of The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition

Book Review: Do People Ever Learn Anything?
Summary: 5 Stars

The plot of the novel itself borrows from a few different sources (the novel Earth Abides, The Bible, T. S. Eliot, the stories about the SLA and livestock-killing chemical-weapon spills which were then current in the news), and weaves them into a new fabric. A deadly strain of the flu is accidentally unleashed on the world, by a series of mishaps that Rube Goldberg would have been proud of -- only a handfull of people are immune, and while they stare in wonder and fear at what is happening around them, we are treated to such delights (if that's the word) as mass hysteria, suicide, execution, and government-ordained slaughter -- vis-a-vis King's retelling of the Kent State tragedy, which some saw as a cheap shot at Uncle Sam, but which I feel was totally appropriate to the story. The survivors begin having dreams -- some dream of an old woman in Nebraska, named Mother Abigail. Others dream predominantly of an otherworldly, frightening personage with no face -- Randall Flagg, the Dark Man, the Walkin Dude...his name is Legion, as one of the characters later points out. The dreams call the survivors -- the good ones to Boulder, the evil ones to Flagg in Las Vegas. And from there, King leads his characters into a battle between the forces of Dark and Light Magic as has rarely been seen in the realm of fantastic fiction.

The characters in The Stand are some of King's best; Stu Redman, Glen Bateman, Nick Andros, Tom Cullen, Lloyd Henried, the scarifying Trashcan Man, the Judaslike Harold Lauder and Nadine Cross...and of course King's finest creation to date, the deadly, destructive, Dionysian Randall Flagg. A word about the Walkin Dude: he's appeared in several of King's novels now, has come to be the villain of the Dark Tower series, and I would be hard put to find a character more evil, yet also more of a joy to read about, than Flagg. Like the Joker in the Batman comics, Flagg is a homicidal maniac -- but he's so damned happy about his work! There is a glee to him, a merriness that makes the character what he is. The sequence with Christopher Bradenton, is a great illustration of the Dark Man's wickedly funny menace -- ditto his first encounter with Henried in the Arizona jail. Flagg is fun -- but let's face it folks, he's also real scary. His "wedding night" with Nadine is the other side of his coin, and a more terrifying passage is hard to find in King's work.

The female characters though -- and this is typical of early King -- don't fare so well. With the exceptions of Frannie Goldsmith and Mother Abigail (more on her in a second), they all come off subordinate to the men. King even tries to rationalize this chauvanism at one point, and it makes someone of my postmodern sensibilities want to cringe. But this is a minor issue, and I won't take King to task for it. Much. The subject of Abby Freemantle is another matter. King here has created a female counterpart to Jack Halloran in The Shining, a mystical "super-black" character whose job it is to show whitey what to do, then get the hell out of the way -- not unlike J. C. in The Green Mile, Mike in It, and (to a lesser degree) Odetta/Detta in The Drawing of the Three. This is not perhaps an awful thing -- certainly others have done it before and since (cf The Legend of Bagger Vance), but neither is it very noble, despite what must have been King's best intentions. It isn't precisely demeaning, but it is condescending...and it's worth noting that one of the book's few other black characters, Rat-Man, is a stereotypical urban hood-type, whose Stepin Fetchit patois which makes you wonder how far we've really come. King himself has said that he writes well for neither blacks nor women, though he has made some inroads with respect to the latter -- see Rose Madder and Dolores Claiborne. Even so, his treatment of ethnicities and gender here is wince-inducing at times.

As to the question in the title above -- whose answer King never really gives, and rightly so -- I will say this: Maybe we never do really learn anything. After you live long enough, you see people, communities, and nations repeat the same mistakes so many times that you begin to doubt humanity's intelligence. Santayanna said that those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it -- and perhaps it will be required that God teach us a lesson as fearsome and unforgettable as the one in The Stand for us to ever accept Santayanna's thesis. I hope not. In the meantime there is King's tale of dark Christianity to do the job for us, to make us think about the consequences of all we do, to warn us of the dangers of pride, and to remind us who the future is really for -- our children. And that is a lesson worth learning, indeed.

Summary of The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition

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

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