The Stand

The Stand is Stephen King's 1978 post-apocalyptic epic (and 1990 Complete & Uncut edition, restoring roughly 400 pages cut from the original publication for length reasons). A weaponized plague engineered by the U. S. government escapes a California laboratory and kills approximately 99 percent of the global population within three weeks. The survivors begin to dream: dreams of Mother Abagail in Hemingford Home, Nebraska, and dreams of Randall Flagg in Las Vegas. The novel follows roughly a dozen survivors across the continent toward one or the other.

What lifts The Stand above its genre is the character work. Stu Redder, Frannie Goldsmith, Nick Andros, Tom Cullen, Larry Underwood, the Trashcan Man, and Harold Lauder are each rendered with the kind of patient attention literary fiction usually claims for itself. The plague chapters in the front quarter remain some of the most carefully imagined apocalyptic prose in American fiction. The Boulder chapters in the middle third earn their length. The Las Vegas reveal does what an epic needs to do.

Recommended for readers who want one big American apocalyptic novel in their life, for fans of post-collapse epic fiction (Justin Cronin's The Passage, Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven), and for readers looking for books like The Stand in the patient-multi-POV-pandemic tradition. Five stars and one of the standard American novels of its decade. The 1990 Complete & Uncut edition is the version to read.