• THE STAND
• by Stephen King
• rated by PBS readers as #24]
• 1153 pages – I kid you not.

I sort of remember when the idea of reading The Stand next came to me. I was talking with my hairdresser. Not so many stories start that way anymore, but they should!

By my calculations, I was due to go for another of the huge books. But which one? Veronica, my hairdresser, is younger than me, bless her heart. She is also into a lot of these books that I’ve never even thought of reading. She likes Stephen King, Wheel of Time, Narnia, Game of Thrones, bless her heart.

But I have got to read them, so I was bringing up some of the titles. When I mentioned The Stand, she said it was a really good read and one of King’s best.

Which brings me to a strange demographic. I believe I am in a very small group of people who read voraciously and have never read a Stephen King book. His legions of followers read his every opus, making every single book he has written into a bestseller. I’ve seen movies of his books and they have been good. But I sort of associate the tales he tells to always be like “Children of the Corn.”

I didn’t even pick this title but I felt pretty led to try it. Especially since the dog dying children’s book had taken me way too long. And Dean Koontz helped.

Koontz’s book, Watchers, was the first of his I had ever read and yet, reading it for this project, it strangely turned into one of the best books I’ve ever read. So it seemed to be time for me to meet his brother in the macabre, Stephen King, properly, on his field of play.

It may have been a mistake, I thought, when I realized I had the newly released uncut version of this thing, weighing in at 1153 pages. Even if I read 20 pages a day, it would take me almost 3 months to get through it!

But forty pages in, I’m starting to get it. He is already hooking me. Master storytellers don’t get called that for nothing.

If I’m drooling out of the side of my mouth involuntarily after another 1100 pages, you can remind me that I thought this was a good idea!

200 PAGES IN –

This is amazingly great storytelling. King does an astonishing thing here. The first part of the book – I mean, who knows where we’ll end up in a thousand or so pages! – is about a plague. Strangely, it is a rather fun thing to read about during Covid, since it is an almost immediate death sentence in this book. At least we don’t have that! But I’m rambling. This is beside the point.

The point is that King proves his mastery by introducing characters to you in rapid succession. In 200 pages, we have already met easily 60 recognizable characters. And with only one exception, you meet them, you like them, they cough once and then they die.

This is true horror. Who cares if someone dies if you aren’t connected to them? And King connects us to each of them, giving life details in a few pages equal to what another writer would give in discussing their lead character. And here is the miracle.

You like and feel connected to all of them.

Who does that? Who can do that? I have read countless books where I didn’t feel close to even the lead character! His ability to carve out complicated, distinct and likeable characters, only to off them in a couple of pages is master level dazzling.

This will take me a couple of months to write. But again, I am again being tugged by my young self, who used to LOVE reading a huge book. This blog experience is about many things but a simple one shows up over and over again. A book’s length is completely not the point. The point is – does it keep you interested? If it does, then bring it on.

I look forward to the adventure. Gone with the Wind, eat your heart out! I’m in Stephen King territory now!

A few side notes… This is the second largest book on my list, second only to the dreaded War & Peace and hundreds of pages longer than all but three books. He and Koontz are about 2/3 of all the books offered for sale at the airports. I of course realize that there’s a reason why they are that big.

His resume is great. He has written over 50 books and every one of them is a best seller. Mike drop! Can you even fucking imagine that?

About here, I’m thinking that King must have been in danger of being wrongly diagnosed as a special needs kid. as he naturally thinks so outside the box! The sheer imagination he has is startling! I’m at 200 of 1100 pages and the world is about to end. Where the hell we’re going from there, I have no idea!

ABOUT 500 PAGES IN…

I don’t care what anyone says, it is disheartening, to say the least, to be 500 pages into a book and not be halfway through it!

I said it was going to take me a few months to read almost 1200 pages, all the while secretly hoping that I’d beat that by a mile. Well, joke’s on me. It’s been over a month and I’m not even half done.

As to the meat of the book – perhaps a rather ghoulish metaphor to be uttered while reading a Stephen King book! – I’d have to say I’m no longer in love but I’m in.

The thing is – he invents this plague that kills, like 99% of the country. Probably the world, but we’re not really concerned with that. And that part, for several hundred pages, as I mentioned earlier is bravura storytelling. He runs through all these vignettes so quickly and specifically…

And now, we have gone through hundreds of pages of these smaller groups of people finding each other. He has left a lot of space between them, as would be accurate, but after the boffo beginning, a little dull.

The only book I have to compare it to is the Dean Koontz book, Watchers. But the brilliance of that is that as you are getting to know this sweet man, woman and dog, they don’t know what you know – that there is a monster that wants to kill them heading for them! So every second of quietude has impending menace to it. Like the people talking quietly in a room in Jurassic Park just minutes before a dinosaur swipes off the roof and has them for lunch. That kind of impending menace!

With this book, a few people are roaming around the country. FOR. BLOODY. EVER. And it’s not that there isn’t impending menace, but it isn’t ratcheted up to a Jaws kind of menace.

I mean, we are talking about the King of Horror here. So we know that people will get dismembered and heads will roll. But we may indeed have many more truck stops to read through before we get there. King has roughly another month of my life, with the length of this thing, before he has to get busy.

But, last word. He is considered by millions to be the best of the best and this is the one they chose as his best work. So I’m sure that my next installment will no doubt include a huge turnaround! God willing….

OVER HALF WAY…

I am around 660 pages in now. Over half way. Only 500 pages to go! I know. Not too exciting to any of you but it is progress of a sort.

I am oddly buoyed by the fact that I am going on a vacation in about three weeks. When I do that, I promise myself that I can let go of blog books on the trip if I want to. In Maine, I read those two little ones but that felt different.

The thing I know for damned sure is that I want to be rid of this thing by the time I go. It is too big a book, for one thing. I don’t want to take it. Plus, I’m going to Hawaii and this is a horror story. The idea of reading horror in Hawaii is roughly the equivalent of spitting in the wind.

So all of that is making me push to get through it. Just to show you how slowly I read, pushing it, in this case, is making sure I read 20 pages a day. 100 pages a day is easily possible if the going is good and I love it. But this isn’t that.

I think I’m feeling a little disappointed right now. The opening plague was electrifyingly fast and King’s ability to speed through that and make you care was a master class on amazing writing. Now I’m in the middle 500-page wasteland.

The people left in the country are all dreaming the same dreams as they wander and try to unite with the other survivors. There is a dark man who is clearly the devil incarnate that everyone dreams of. No one can see his face but they know that his eyes are red and he is evil. There is also an old black woman – 108 years old – that they dream of and she is the force of good.

So now we know that we are waiting around for the big confrontation between good and evil. Good is in Boulder; Bad is in Vegas. They are close.

There is nothing inherently wrong in this being a good versus evil story. But that doesn’t feel particularly new. The beginning felt revelatory and new. This doesn’t. And it is hard, stuck in there around 600 pages, to not want to scream – let’s get on with it!

But on I go. King surprised me up front and there is every chance that this will unfold in a surprising and fabulous way.  So I’m ready. And it isn’t dull. He is way too good for that.

One thing I want to add here – there is no writer alive that deserves more, based on his sheer success, to write books in whatever way he wants. If he wants this story to be 1200 pages, that is obviously his choice and something he deserves to do. But I really question the need for this length. Okay! That’s all for now!

800 PAGES IN.

Okay, I’m bored. Not a lot but officially. I know good has to fight evil. I get it. But why must it take over 500 pages to build up to it? And he isn’t really building up to it. He likes to shock. So it isn’t really building. The good guys are building their little city.

No doubt that they are going to get shocked. No doubt about it. But doesn’t shock work better if it comes a little quicker? For pity sakes! Kill them all and get it over with!

That isn’t exactly right. I do care about some of them. But I do actually have a real life as well! A life that can continue more fully once we have the official death count and this little gigantic opus is done.

920 PAGES IN.

You know, it’s interesting. As an interloper in this medium – horror, that is – I sometimes feel like this experience of reading The Stand raises as many questions as it solves.

Probably the most basic one is this. For a couple hundred pages, we witness two of the main characters’ descent into darkness and madness – for my money, a lovely combination.

And I question who is drawn to this backdrop? And I am suddenly sure that every interview, or at least every other interview with Stephen King addresses this. He is undoubtedly asked if he worries that he is making darkness more valid to all of the whack jobs out there?

I’m equally sure that King says something to the effect that he is an entertainer and a storyteller and he isn’t forcing anyone to read his dark landscapes; that whack jobs would be whack jobs with or without him.

But again, as this interloper, I have a hard time not convinced that a whack job, with a veritable lifetime’s

worth of Stephen King novels to move between, would not be emboldened by this.

At no point has this become unreadable and I will finish it, with respect for his skills. But why anyone is drawn to and luxuriates in this landscape is, truthfully, beyond me.

DONE.

I read the last hundred pages over an evening. It was the evening of my health scare – March 29^th. I have no idea when, in the midst of my fears, I chose to finish this.

No, that’s not true. I do know. This opus was the standing insurmountable thing for the last weeks, till today. So I felt like, in finishing it, I could feel like I had surmounted at least this.

I’ve said it all in the previous pages. I was more than engaged for almost 1200 pages. That makes King an amazing storyteller.

I’ll never forget this book.

But, for want of lightness and beauty in the world, I will try to forget it.

Does this list have any funny books on it? I kind of doubt it. If Vonnegut was the funniest, well, maybe I’ll read some other stuff for a while. This is a book to be gotten over. That is both its legacy and its curse.

Will I ever reach for another Stephen King book?

No. I already gave at the office.

PS I wrote this long enough back that we are out of Covid and my hairdresser has since become a real estate agent!

PPSS Since it’s been awhile, I will say that the story has stuck with me. That’s a lot.