Grover Gardener: The Return of The Stand

This is good!  Grover Gardner, who has narrated LOTS of audio books, was the reader of both the abridged and unabridged editions of The Stand.  In a recent blog post, Gardner discussed the recent recording of the 1990 version of The Stand.

Mr. Gardner graciously gave me permission to reprint his blog post here.  It comes from Grovers Audiobook Blog, and was originally posted on February 14, 2012.  

The Return of The Stand

by Grover Gardner

Well, it's out on Audible today--Stephen King's The Stand. This is not the edited version I recorded twenty-five years ago, it's the complete, uncut edition published in 1990, all forty-eight hours of it! It took four weeks to record, and I had to pace myself so I wouldn't sound fatigued or thread-bare at any point. I'm pleased with the recording, though I'll be interested to see how it holds up against the earlier version in the memories of King devotees. The old version was only available on cassette and has been out of print for a decade or more. I still get emails from people asking if I have a copy they could borrow and duplicate for themselves. Alas, no, I never got one. But now there's no need. The new version is complete, and in my humble opinion I'm a better narrator than I was twenty-five years ago, so I was delighted to have a chance to re-record it.

There are few better writers for audiobook narration than Stephen King. He gives you all the right cues, creates wonderful characters, keeps the story moving and injects emotional twists and surprises at every corner. Never a dull moment in the booth with this guy.

The odd thing is, as I read the uncut version in preparation, I found that I remembered very little of the story and the characters. The opening scene remains vivid--the clunky old Chevy containing the first victims of the superflu plowing into a lonely little gas station in rural Texas. And I remember Randall Flagg (who could forget Randall Flagg?). But beyond that most of the book felt completely new to me. Perhaps it was the added material that threw me off, I don't know. But it's just as well, since there was no temptation to replicate any voices or characters or moods from the earlier recording. What you hear is as fresh as last month, not a recycled rendition from 25 years ago.

I'll be interested to see what "the critics" say. The proponderance of male characters seemed to hail from the Midwest or Southwest, so there were an awful lot of "good ol' boys" to sort through and make distinguishable. The most difficult characters for me were Harold and Frannie. Harold is a pimply, overweight, pompous-sounding 16-year-old, not an easy person to replicate. And eighteen-year-old Frannie is the emotional core of the book, enormously smart and feisty, but extremely vulnerable--and pregnant. I played around with a Maine accent for her and it sounded just awful, so I let my native East Coast tones predominate. A fifty-five year old man is already handicapped in this regard, and I didn't want her to come off as a caricature. So she's voiced in a pretty straight-forward manner. I gave her father and some of the other Ogunquit characters a dose of down-east, so hopefully that will placate the die-hards.

My favorite character, of course, is Tom Cullen (who doesn't love Tom Cullen?). In the uncut version he really gets fleshed out, and it's truly wonderful to experience his transformation from a fool to a hero. In one critical scene I took a risk that, under normal circumstances, I would have avoided like...well, like the plague. But to do other than what I did seemed like such a cop-out that I took the plunge. I'm curious to see if anyone even notices--and whether they like it or hate it.

But by far the biggest, most overwhelming challenge, of all the challenges in a story so fraught with them, was that of coming up with seventy-plus ways of saying, "NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!" It seems that every character, at some point in the book, shouts or screams or bellows or rasps the word, "NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"

Anyway, it was a terrific experience and it's great to have the story out there again for everyone to enjoy.
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reposted from March 2, 2012

King Makes MSN's Choice For Great Commute Audobook's

Shannan Rouss at msn has an article titled, "LISTEN UP! 10 best audio books for your commute." (Rouss lists more  than ten.)  King makes the list twice. I think he is the only author to be mentioned more than once.

The first choice is an obvious choice, but you better have a long commute!  It's the unabridged version of The Stand.  Rouss writes:

Clocking in at just under 48 hours, this Stephen King thriller is by far the longest on the list. When you finish it, you'll realize that you've spent the equivalent of two full days driving, probably over the span of a few weeks. That's a lot of time, but this book makes for good company. It begins with a super-flu that wipes out roughly 98 percent of the population. The survivors converge and attempt to rebuild society, but first they must contend with the Dark Man, who haunts their dreams. 

 The second choice is another classic King story, Salem's Lot.

Before Stephenie Meyer's lovesick vampires sucked the menace out of the genre, there was Stephen King's contemporary classic about a small town in Maine and the terrifying vampires who haunt it. (Sorry, no Edward Cullen here.) Salem's Lot is an ominous story with relatable characters that will draw you in and keep you reading long after the sun has set. 

The full article, and many other great suggestions, is at  msn.com

What's your favorite Stephen King audiobook?

I have two.  Dolores Claiborne is a great one to listen to, since it is told in first person like a confession.  You really feel like you're in the room with her as she tells her dark tale.  Chatty, wise, observant -- this is one of my all time favorite novels.  A story of revenge with a great twist!

I also like the most recent recording of The Stand quite a bit.  I didn't blog much about my most recent trip through it, since there's not a lot new to say.   But it is wonderful, and Grover Gardner makes it a great journey.

OH!  A third. .  . I also cherish King's own reading on Needful Things.  I forget to list the King recordings, because they stand out as something else; something other than just a recording of the book.  Something special happens when King reads this story.  You can feel it the moment he starts with "you've been here before."  His accent is right and his narration is quite energetic.  Of course, he know how to play each line, since he wrote the book!

My favorite non-King audio book is Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett.

So, do tell -- favorite King audiobook.  (or  non-King if you want.)

ebay: THE STAND audiobook

For those of  you who said  you could  not find a physical copy of The Stand -- check  out this ebay  auction at /www.ebay.com/itm/THE-STAND-UNABRIDGED-AUDIO-BOOK

The seller writes:

Actually picked this up at Comic Con NY in 2012. Was given away on Sunday at 5pm when the booth was closing up and was the table display. I picked the most expensive thing there and that was this 37 CD audio book. Almost 48 hours of content. I have listened to it once and the discs are in PRISTINE CONDITION!

The photo's are from the ebay seller.

The audio version can  also be purchased at audible.

Bruce Baugh: Review Of THE STAND Audio

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.