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| This is the cover to the first edition I read. All the other ones are better. I'm just a masochist, I suppose. |
(Novel, 1978 & 1990)
Written by Stephen King
US Paperback
- US Kindle UK Paperback -
UK Kindle
(easy way to check if you're getting the full, expanded version: use the Look Inside feature to see if it has the introduction where King explains why he did the 1990 Complete & Uncut edition)
Review (spoilers!)
A terrifying bioengineered virus escapes from a military facility and devastates the US, leaving only a few survivors plagued by dreams that drive them to engage in a conflict between good and evil.
The Stand
originally came out way back in 1978, and was pretty damn long despite the many
cuts King had to make to get it down to some kind of reasonable length. In
1990, King reissued the book, having become just a teensy bit popular in the
meantime, and was able to get everything back in that he originally wanted, as
well as revising and updating much of the rest.
It’s an epic length, and it’s meant to be an epic. The
original idea calls for a battle between good and evil that resembles a
Tolkien-scale fantasy conducted in modern-day America, a theme King
would return to more than once. This makes
it as much a fantasy novel as a horror novel, though the horror is very
definitely there (but I’ll come to what I think the true horror of the book is
later on).
The problem is that the book doesn’t start out with this
epic battle. It doesn’t even really get to it for a pretty big chunk of the
story, because first of all it has to get through a very well depicted and
harrowing viral apocalypse that wipes America clean of most of humanity and
leaves everything in place for the game of good vs. evil.
The only problem is that the apocalypse is the good bit and
the battle against evil is… well, it’s a bit tedious at times. There’s really
not much actual battling going on. King later reported that he ended up having
to kill off a sizeable chunk of the ‘good’ characters just to keep up the
interest in the story. And it doesn’t help that he always seems to be having so
much more fun when dealing with the ‘evil’ characters. The first appearance of
one of these in the early chapters of the book (with two unpleasant people on a
killing spree) bursts off the page in comparison to the personal and family
dramas that the ‘good’ characters are going through at that point.
And when you finally get to the battle… well, there
basically isn’t one. The good guys walk into town after the Dark Lord has
pretty much screwed up his own cause by trusting a maniac who derails all his
evil Dark Lord plans by basically being a maniac. He’s about to take revenge on
the good guys who finally showed up for the battle, and the aforementioned
maniac accidentally sets off a nuke. Or possibly the Dark Lord’s own lightning
does it. Or maybe the hand of god comes down and sets it off. It’s not entirely
clear.
The biggest problem is that the intended story (battle of
good vs evil) doesn’t actually seem like it’s the real, main story here. The viral apocalypse originally conceived of as a way of getting everything ready for the
battle is far more compelling, and the fantastical/religious confrontations
after that end up seeming like an attempt to trump the apocalypse with the only
thing the author could think of that might be bigger – a religious battle of
cosmic proportions.
But, as I’ve said before, this is a problem. Apocalypses are
just too devastating to use as an introduction to another story. You can’t top
the destruction of almost all human life by having the few survivors run around
having religious confrontations. The story might have worked if the apocalypse
had been presented in flashback – but the siren song of utter destruction was
clearly too great for King to resist. We’re left with half of an excellent
book, and then a long, slow trudge (even longer in the 1990 version) towards an
end that can never match the promise of the beginning.
DEPICTION OF THE APOCALYPSE
Usually one apocalypse is enough. But here we have two: one
viral, and one religious. They overlap and intertwine, but are fundamentally
separate in the way they operate. Despite his forays into other genres, King is
very much a horror writer and both these apocalypses are horrific – but for
very different reasons.
Firstly: the viral apocalypse. Unlike Contagion, there’s no pretence that this is anything natural, nor
is the response to the superflu quite what we would expect in the real world;
nevertheless, it’s gripping stuff. There’s a little bit of handwavium called a
‘shifting antigen’ to explain why the bug is so deadly, and thankfully this is
never explored further than that (though if you’re interested, viruses do shift
their antigens on a regular basis when they meet another strain and swap these
protein keys on their coat, and this is why influenza keeps coming back at us.
It just doesn’t do the shift constantly while it’s infecting
you, thus making it virtually impossible to defend against).
More interesting than the bug itself is the rather paranoid
attitude to how it’s created and how it develops. A secret, off-the-books
government installation develops a wide variety of diseases with this
particular nasty twist; there’s an accident, one of the army guards realises
what’s going on and does a runner with his wife and child, not realising that
he’s already infected. The government then does everything it can to try and
stop the outbreak – and prevent anyone finding out that it was their fault in
the first place. Even as millions die, the military is deployed to kill
journalists and suppress protests with live ammunition (at Kent State, of
course). The pointlessness of the cover-up might seem a little bizarre at first,
but we’re in a darker America than even the one we have now. In the original
version, the story is set in 1980, and it’s easy to believe that the people who
brought us Mutually Assured Destruction and were willing to push the Soviet
Union to the brink of nuclear war only a few years later might decide to behave in such an insane manner, even as they find themselves with the first sniffles that presage
death within a few days. It makes slightly less sense in 1990, when the updated
version is set, but still seems plausible if you’re willing to be paranoid
about the more secretive arms of the US Government. And indeed, the updated
version shows us much more of this, expanding significantly on the government
side of things. There’s a very clear feeling of impending armageddon that was a familiar dread to anyone who lived through the cold war; you could even
interpret this as a novel about those terrible dangers we were subjected to for
forty-five years (if it weren't for the second apocalypse).
King’s skills as a horror writer come to the fore as the
apocalypse builds: that sick, lurching sense that things are just going to keep
getting worse is prevalent as the superflu spreads, and he’s very much at home
dwelling on the nastier aspects: a prisoner locked in his cell considering
cannibalism as he regards the corpse of his cellmate; towns suddenly depleted
of people; cars turned into coffins on every highway; and even the details of
the disease itself, with the swelling and blackening of glands in the neck,
show signs of King’s fascination with the unpleasant side of life.
But eventually, the tidal wave of death dies down, and the
surviving characters head out on the road, driven by dreams into the arms of
the second apocalypse – the religious one. And this is where the story falls
down, for more reasons than just the loss of interest after the first
apocalypse ends.
It rapidly becomes clear that the second apocalypse
considers the first one to be just a curtain raiser, and in that regard, it’s
basically the Rapture with a twist; instead of the good people going to heaven
and leaving the sinners behind to choose sides between god and the devil, a
seemingly random (but possibly hand-picked) selection of people are left alive
to choose sides between a saintly old woman in Nebraska and the Dark Lord who
gathers his forces in Las Vegas. There’s no concept of ‘the elect’, but
otherwise it’s pretty clear that we’re in Christian fundamentalist territory as
far as the workings of the universe go.
Some of the characters object to this (or at least the good
ones do, anyway; the evil ones get nailed to crosses for far lesser infractions).
As saintly and kind as their prophet is, it’s clear that what’s required of
them is really quite vile. Not content with putting them through the horrible
experience of watching all their loved ones die and leaving them to try and
survive in a world filled with corpses, the good lord then requires that they
march off to sacrifice themselves on cue so that the final battle can be won.
Except that this isn’t a final battle humanity has any real
say in. It’s not their fight. It’s two supernatural beings playing chess with
each other, and this is the true horror of the second apocalypse: this is the
kind of universe that religious fundamentalists actually believe in, where
humans are no more than pieces on a board to be positioned and sacrificed at
whim. And what’s more, they’re expected to like it, or else they might be
punished with greater suffering. It’s a pointless, hypocritical waste that’s
only addressed in the book through the mouths of the characters who recognise
this for the horror it is, and are then shouted down or bribed with miracles to
keep them playing the game. Other than that, no one really deals with the true
enemy: God and the Devil combined, who are willing to sacrifice billions of
lives so they can play their game.
I don’t know if King intended this to be the true horror of
the second apocalypse, or whether he was just trying to depict an epic quest
using the mythology of the land in which it’s set, imitating the structure of
Tolkien. It was certainly effective in horrifying me, much more than most
horror stories I’ve read or seen. And perhaps if the horror of this
supernatural interference had been further explored as the true reason for all the suffering in the story, and maybe even confronted somehow, then the book might not have ended in such a
disappointing way.
(time to go and re-read Preacher
as an antidote, I think)
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