The Stand: Expanded Edition: For the First Time Complete and Uncut (Signet)
by Stephen King
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Book Summary Information
Author: Stephen KingEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1991-05-07
ISBN: 0451169530
Number of pages: 1141
Publisher: Signet
Book Reviews of The Stand: Expanded Edition: For the First Time Complete and Uncut (Signet)
Book Review: Reinventing American Democracy
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is the only book by Stephen King that was published in an abridged format first, before being published in full quite later on. The general idea is the destruction of the whole of humanity by a « superflu » - also called « Captain Trips » - germ produced in and leaked out of some military research center : biological warfare. This is a common theme in Stephen King's books or films. We find it in Firestarter, Golden Years, The Talisman (in collaboration with Peter Straub), and some others still. Only a few immune people survive, and there Stephen King revisits history. On one side, in Boulder, Colorado, the good ones, summoned and gathered by an old Christian black woman, Mother Abigail. The core group is composed of a deaf-mute man, an old intellectual university professor, a judge, a working-class Texan, a female student from Maine, a rock-star singer, and a mentally-retarded man. On the other side , the Devil, in the shape of the Dark Man (a common character in Stephen King's books like The Eyes of the Dragon, The Talisman, The Dark Tower, and some others, and also known as Flagg in some of these novels), also appearing as a crow, gathers in Las vegas all types of discontents, criminals and (ethics-deprived) technicians to revive the nuclear center and the air base near by and then to conquer the world. He hangs delinquents and those who resist his power (according to his law) to lampposts at street corners, like Hitler did with working class activists, trade-unionists and communists, crucifies some others, like the Romans did, and dismembers some more, like the Inquisition did. His main assistants are a killer he recuperated in a prison, and a crazy man, Trashcan Man, whose only pleasure was, has been and is to set things afire and blow up anything he may think of. The good ones have to save the world and can only do so by following Mother Abigail's recommendations she gets directly from God. Their first action is to send three spies. The judge will never reach Las Vegas. A girl will become the mistress of the ex-prison-inmate, and she will be discovered and will commit suicide. The mentally-handicapped man will survive and fulfill his mission because he is invisible to the Dark Man who can only see a moon (the man generally says M.O.O.N.-MOON to signify his understanding of some instruction or situation). But these were sent by the political governing committee of Boulder, duly elected by a general assembly of the brand-new community with the American flag, the American national anthem and democratic procedures in agreement with the American Constitution they revive for the occasion. But the old black lady, Mother Abigail, who had disappeared, unknown of all others, before that meeting, comes back later on and gives God's orders to send four (we may think of The Dark Tower, The Drawing of the Three, where the gunslinger draws three people from the normal world to save the underground supernatural world : a young boy, a drug-addict and a physically handicapped black woman in a wheelchair, thus building up a group of four) of the members of the governing board (the deaf-mute man, the old university professor, the Texan and the rock-star singer) to Las Vegas to be sacrificed there by being put to death by the Dark Man, also known as the Walking Dude, and thus save the world. The Texan will break his leg on the way and will be left behind with the old university professor's dog who will help him survive, thus reducing the pilgrims to three, a christian symbolical number. Later on the mentally-handicapped man will come across him and save him from a bad case of flu with the mental help of the deaf-mute, dead by now, who can speak in his visions. They will be the only two to come back in the middle of the winter, close to Christmas. This is both a realistic vision of the birth of Christ and the resurrection of the saving group. The others will be caught, interrogated and tortured, and finally set in place for public dismemberment. At this very moment the crazy man, Trashcan Man, arrives with an atom-bomb he has recuperated from the underground arsenal of the United States in Nevada, on a tractor. At this moment the magic of the Dark Man, his magical fire, will be redirected by God's hand onto the atom-bomb ; thus destroying the whole of Las Vegas, the Dark Man disappearing out of his shoes and clothes. He will find himself later on a quasi-deserted island, adopted by « savage » natives as some kind of God, thus starting his come-back. Then, the end is the possibility (that will only last as long as it will take the Dark Man to come back) for the good ones to feel free to go to various parts of the country, to become modern pioneers, to reconquer the world and reconstruct society nearly from scratch, with a symbolical birth from the female student in Boulder at a time that looks like Christmas. Life is possible again. What is essential here is that humanity in the midst of the worst catastrophy, goes back to the American democratic model, but also to the fascistic model. That is a typical case of the memory Stephen King has of both sides of history, the good one and the bad one, good and evil. But we note that humanity is saved by an old woman, a black woman, a Christian woman. She is the prophet of rebirth. This speaks to the minds of modern Americans engulfed as they are in long fights for civil rights (for the Blacks, the Indians or all ethnic minorities), for liberation of other groups such as women or gay people. We note that there is no gay element in any book by Stephen King, at least any obvious element that I have noticed, even if some relations between some men remind us of Whitman's « comradeship » or « camaraderie » between and among frontier men. Every element, like in all books by Stephen King, is symbolical. The new saviours are a deaf-mute man, a physically handicapped man (like in The Cycle of the Werewolf, also known as Silver Bullet, or in The Dark Tower, where the physically handicapped person is a black woman) and a mentally-handicapped man (such characters appear in other books too). In a way, a handicap is a key to the rebirth, the resurrection, the renaissance, the redeeming, the epiphany of humanity. Then we have an intellectual (like in The Dark Half - a writer, Salem's Lot - a writer, Pet Semetary - a doctor, by far more ambiguous, Misery - a writer, etc), a rock-star (This is less common, but references to rock music are extremely common in Stephen King's books, such as Christine), a working-class man (a common character indeed with the special case of Graveyard Shift), a female student (the role of girls and women is not marginal at all in Stephen King's books : The firestarter, Christine, Carrie, Cujo, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Rose Madder, Dolores Claiborne, or even Misery). We could also point out the importance of kids as redeeming characters in these books. We work here on an alliance of the mind, the arts, industrial work, intellectual work, thinking. We could go into finer details in that symbolism. These symbolical elements come back again and again in Stephen King's novels. Humanity is always jeopardized by bad evil dark forces coming from men and women themselves, but led by men. But humanity always produces the individuals and the forces that can regenerate the world, though this regeneration is always temporary and requires some kind of faith, some kind of belief in the supernatural, in some other world, even if it is only literature. In fact Stephen King systematically explores all those worlds that lie beyond the limits of normalcy. But this regeneration is always temporary because humanity produces evil forces that can be easily manipulated by the Dark Man, « the Devil's pawn » as he is called in The Stand. The cycle of good and evil is always recurring. Even though Las Vegas has been totally destroyed, the Dark Man finds some new affiliates who will enable him to come back and exploit the darker side of human beings. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Universities of Paris IX and II
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Summary of The Stand: Expanded Edition: For the First Time Complete and Uncut (Signet)
The ultimate battle between good and evil...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
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