World Famous Comics: The Stand: Expanded Edition: For the First Time Complete and Uncut (Signet)
The Stand: Expanded Edition: For the First Time Complete and Uncut (Signet)
By: Stephen King Publisher: Signet Average Rating: Binding: Mass Market Paperback Label: Signet Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 1141 Publication Date: May 07, 1991
Humanity has been all but wiped out by a lethal virus. But the survivors are divided by light and darkness, and must face a final battle that will decide the fate of more than their lives: their very souls...
Amazon.com Review: In 1978, science fiction writer Spider Robinson wrote a scathing review of The Stand in which he exhorted his readers to grab strangers in bookstores and beg them not to buy it.
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
One of his crowning achievements This is one book that can testify to the fact that Stephen King is a literary genius.
outstanding vision i just recently reread this book and i am just as "in awe" today as i was 20 yrs ago. the story of good vs evil is a "grab you" and take you for a non stop nail biting ride. i really like the uncut version as you get the little back storys that you did not get 1st time around. i loved mother abigail(the messiah figure)i like that she was all to human ,i liked stu's quiet strength,randall flagg's supreme evil,larry's uncertanity,i have always liked stephan king's books, but for me this is his best effort.
One of the longest (and greatest!) books you'll read... What an epic. What a masterpiece! While this novel might take a while to get through, it's totally worth the effort because you get to know the characters very well and fall in love with them. A good "apocalypse" story about what happens when a disease kills 99% of the world's population, and a few thousand are left to re-create society. Very eerie, especially during the parts where some of the characters are wandering through the empty cities. Makes you glad to be surrounded by people!
Insane, epic and brilliant There are plenty of pitfalls that drag epic, amibitous novels down; plots that don't hold up for a thousand plus pages, characters that grow tiresome, repetitive themes that feel like a broken record halfway through the book.
The Stand avoids all of these. The cast is large and varied enough to keep multiple plot threads going, but not too large to become confusing. And as many as there are, none are superfluous to the plot, all serve a purpose that is revealed before the finale. The plot is intense and ambitious, but divided into segments it is managable and sustainable. Daunting certainly at 1200+ pages, but always building towards the inevitable conclusion. The theme is as old as storytelling; the ultimate battle between good and evil, the eternal cycle of death and rebirth. But King manages to present these timeless themes with mythic, Biblical imagery melded with a down-to-earth humanity that makes them fresh and exciting.
This book is a chilling, thrilling home-run. At the end of the book (and at many places throughout) I felt as though I'd been completely wrung out. The amount of emotion the reader invests in this book is one of the greatest of any book I've read. Its exhausting and exhilirating at the same time. One for the ages, truly not to be missed.
So long, and with such a disappointing ending. I love long books, but this one is so long, and requires so much time to read it, that the ending was just way too much of a let-down.
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