By Wouldn’t we be better off without all this gosh darn technology?
About the Book
Title: The Stand
Author: Stephen King
Published: 1978
Genre: horror, post-apocalyptic, fantasy
My Rating: 4/5 stars
The Premise
Synopsis (from Goodreads):
“First came the days of the plague. Then came the dreams. Dark dreams that warned of the coming of the dark man. The apostate of death, his worn-down boot heels tramping the night roads. The warlord of the charnel house and Prince of Evil. His time is at hand. His empire grows in the west and the Apocalypse looms.”
My Thoughts
WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE PLOT OF THE STAND.
The Stand is so damn LONG that it feels like multiple different novels amalgamated into one. The version I read happened to be the extended version, which was over a thousand pages, I believe.
A malfunction in a military lab releases a bioengineered superbug onto the world– Captain Tripps, the flu to end all flus. Despite frantic cover-ups and quarantine edicts, it takes a mere 3 weeks for over 99% of the human population to succumb to the flu.
“That wasn’t any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery.”
The most engaging part of this book was definitely the beginning for me. The descent from normal life to Armageddon was told in a startlingly realistic way. You could probably convince me this really happened if I didn’t see the evidence to the contrary all around me. What I mean is, I could definitely see this happening in real life. I could not put the book down, needing to find out how the characters would cope with the loss of their entire society and everything in life they previously took for granted. I definitely won’t see the Lincoln Tunnel the same way, either.
We are introduced to the main cast of flu survivors in the midst of their pre-pandemic lives, waiting with bated breath and the anxiety of dramatic irony for their entire world to crumble. There is Frannie, dealing with the shock of an unplanned pregnancy; Larry, a musician in some trouble after massively over-spending on a bender; and Nick, a deaf-mute who finds himself befriended by a local sheriff after being beat up by a group of men, among others. There are seriously so many different characters in The Stand, some of which we travel alongside from the beginning, and some who join the fray later in the story.
After the flu sweeps the country, a few shell-shocked survivors begin to inch their way across the continent, drawn by a mysterious shared dream about an old woman named Mother Abagail, and a disturbing “Dark Man”, Randall Flagg. Gradually the individual survivors form groups and new characters are introduced along the way, from Glen, a sociology professor, to Harold, an arrogant but intelligent teenager, to Tom Cullen, a man with an intellectual disability but a heart of gold. Soon, they find themselves on a pilgrimage of sorts to Boulder, Colorado, where they will begin a rudimentary society.
Rebuilding Society
One of the most fascinating parts of The Stand for me was its exploration of how a new society could rise from the ashes of our current one. It was very interesting and sobering to see the characters grappling with everything they had previously taken for granted, from doctors to electricity, and figuring out how to govern themselves.
While the Boulder crew is getting things up and running, however, Randall Flagg is busy gathering his own disciples in Las Vegas, forming an authoritarian but well-disciplined alternative. Compared to the Boulder settlement, they get themselves up and running again fairly quickly, but step out of line and you just might end up crucified (yes really)–and Flagg’s lust for power and demonic psychological control does not limit itself to his territory.
“Show me a man or a woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call ‘society’. Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.”
Randall Flagg and Mother Abagail: Dualism and Technology in The Stand
As the story progressed towards the Randall Flagg vs. Mother Abagail plotline, I started to lose some interest. I usually am not a fan of cut-and-dried Good vs. Evil narratives. Randall Flagg is the Devil, he’s Evil personified, he’s that one demon from the Bible that Jesus murdered a bunch of pigs with (it mentioned this in the book), and guess what, he’s also technology, he’s authority and civilization. (I was getting some serious anprim undertones from the book)
Wouldn’t we be better off without all this gosh darn technology?
At the end of the book, Flagg is rebirthed as another RF-initialed person, stumbling across some humans who have not developed a traditional civilization yet and eagerly volunteers to guide them– starting over the cycle of human cruelty and evil fueled by our big brains and love of technology.
Meanwhile, Mother Abagail is a prophet of God. The characters are guided by dreams and visions in which she plays a large part, structuring their lives and motivations around her.
This very dualistic setup detracted from the story in my opinion, but maybe that’s just because I don’t believe in the existence of Good and Bad people, per se.
Also, the book was just too long. Sorry! There was not enough story to fill out however many pages this tome was–and that became increasingly clear as the pages began to be spent describing endless committee meetings and redundant statements. By ~70% through I was practically begging the story to turn back to Flagg even if my favorite characters died, because I was tired of reading about their boring meetings and plot threads that seemed to go nowhere. This needed an editor. I was relieved when Trashcan Man finally brought in the nuke so that the story would wrap up, but then there were like a hundred more pages afterwards.
r/MenWritingWomen Shoutout
One of my biggest dislikes of this book, and of Stephen King more generally, is how he writes women. While Frannie grew on me as the novel progressed, she and most of the other female characters were hardly in any non-sexual scenes. Seriously. Frannie’s main conflict at the beginning is the fact that she’s pregnant. Then she’s being protected by male chauvinist Harold who wants to sleep with her. Then she meets Stu and he immediately wants to sleep with her and they start a relationship, and while their relationship was sweet, there wasn’t a whole lot else to her arc. Nadine and Julie Lawry were absolutely the worst offenders here, though. Nadine’s whole schtick was that she was the promised bride of Flagg, like some whacked out version of the Virgin Mary. And Julie was an Evil™ sex pest who was… oh, she was seventeen. Ick….
I also propose a drinking game for any Stephen King book: take a shot every time he describes a female character’s body in a random and creepy way, take two shots if it pertains to her breasts. You will get alcohol poisoning.
There were also a lot of weird racial undertones in this book, but I don’t feel as qualified to speak on that.
Despite these flaws, though, I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy this book. Have you read The Stand? What did you think of it? Let me know in the comments.
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