I enjoyed Bruce Baugh's review of THE STAND. He gives attention to both the audio reading and the novel itself. He kindly gave me permission to reprint his review here. Thank you, Mr. Baugh! You can find the original posting at his journal, titled "Young Enough to Look At, and Far Too Old to See."
Enjoy! -- I did.
2012 book log, #8: The Stand, by Stephen King
A few words on the reading first. Gardner's excellent. He's been in this line of work a long time now, and he's really mastered the craft. The Stand is a book with a very large cast, and he distinguishes them all. Not all the characters with a Maine accent sound the same, nor do all the Californians, and so on. He produces a startlingly deep but entirely suitable drawl for the Kid, and in the passage where Nadine Cross remembers her first experience with a Ouija board, he gets pitch-perfect the effect of a college girl imitating Boris Karloff and Bullwinkle. His pacing is great, and he captures emotions clearly without exaggeration.
Now about the book itself. I must say up front that this is one of my favorite novels in the world. I loved it when it came out. I loved it all over again when the expanded/restored edition came out and gave me several hundred more pages of the character development that's the heart and soul of the story. I re-read it every few years, and like it every time. Did this time, too. The rest goes behind the cut tag.
If you're not very familiar with the book, this is what happens: An engineered strain of super flu escapes from the lab where it was developed, and in a few weeks kills about 99.4% of the human race. The survivors find themselves drawn into an sort of post-apocalyptic apocalypse, with a not-really-a-man figure of incarnate evil and those drawn to him by bonds of fear and desire pitted against the forces of good, centered on the oldest living woman and an unplanned circle of (mostly very reluctant) leaders. Complications ensue, a lot of them.
But for all Stephen King's love of good plot and storytelling, this really is a book of character of studies at heart, I've always thought. All the best moments, with a very few possible exceptions, are about the characters in and after crisis - what they do when forced to do something, and how they think about it, and how they try to live with it, and what they try to do next. As is usual with King, there's more decency than real villainy, and when decency fails, it's more often because of fear and lack of knowledge about alternatives than because of actively appreciating harm in means or ends.
This is a story that puts young people in very prominent roles. It's more obvious to me now that I am myself no longer a young person :), and it was a little obscured in the lumpy but sometimes first-rate TV mini-series adaptation. Frannie Goldsmith is 21; Harold Emery Lauder is 17. Stu Redman is in his early 30s, Larry Underwood still in his early 20s, Lloyd Henreid about the same. I have no particular commentary about this, I just find it really interesting.
Two things did bug me this time around.
First, it's a really America-centric book. It's like Canada and Mexico don't even exist. I know that King does Americana, and he often does it brilliantly. But the book felt weak for lack of that presence of the rest of the continent. I can understand giving no space to what's going on in the United Kingdom, or Afghanistan, or Australia—once air and sea travel collapse, followed by the rest of the infrastructure, they're off in their own stories. (And there's one brief mention that Flagg thinks there may be others like him elsewhere in the world. Now I want to write that story and/or run that game.) But c'mon, there are highways and big open spaces and all that stuff to this country's north and south. Strike out and you can't really help getting to the next country along unless you hit a wall or fall into the water.
Second, King was at the time very much writing with a male reader in mind. Several passages have "you'd see this and think" kinds of setup that aren't at all what a woman, or for that matter a non-straight man, and in several cases any person of color, would think. There's only one bit of authorial projection through a character that really clunks for me (Larry Underwood's version of Stephen King's own fondness for '60s rock 'n' roll; Larry should be a glam and arena kind of guy, I always thought); it's the outside-the-character digressions that make me think of all the people those passages aren't aiming at. He's grown on this, though. Speaking of young people, he wasn't yet 30 when he got this thing rolling, and of course now he's rather older, and he's made real conscious effort to grow his awareness. It would be interesting to see how he'd do the project now, if it wouldn't be such a massive effort that I'd really rather he put into new stories to entertain me with. :)
I enjoyed it, as I always have, and continue to recommend it highly.
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