The arc of the characters is certainly befitting the epic. My short version review is that there’s a great 450 page book in here somewhere. Inevitably, these two opposing forces have to clash, and they do. Both these opposing forces attract adherents to the cause, with Mother Abigail setting up shop with her new society in Boulder, Colorado, and Randall Flagg setting up his version of society in Las Vegas. But because it’s King, there’s more afoot here, mainly supernatural elements between Mother Abigail (a stand-in for God, literally) and Randall Flagg (a stand-in for the Devil, literally). I’m weird like that.Ī short synopsis: Captain Trips is a super flu that runs roughshod over the entire globe in a matter of days, and as a result, civil society as it’s known, collapses.

I revisited the novel from the beginning in late September, and it took me about two months to read the first 650 pages, and two days to read the last 503. I originally began reading this book years ago, made it 450 pages in, and for some reason put it down. The version of The Stand I read wasn’t the original 1978 release, but the 1990 re-release as “complete and uncut,” at a staggering 1,153 pages, about 330 more pages than the original version. Apparently, King was inspired to create a Lord of the Rings-style fantasy, and given how much journeying happens in the novel from one coast of America to another and back again, I can see that. And in the case of The Stand, an epic worthy of the Bible with how many names there are to keep track of. To quote Larry Underwood, baby, can you dig your man? Of course, I dig my man, Stephen King, creator of the macabre, the strange, and all with a modern American realism aesthetic grounding it.

The last stand stephen king