runaway Chevy crashes at a Texaco station 110 miles from Houston. The occupants have fled a secret government base conducting experiments in germ warfare, to escape a deadly outbreak ... but they're already infected. The disease, soon to be known as Captain Trips, exterminates more than 99 percent of humanity in a matter of weeks. What's left is a small number of survivors, themselves immune to the effects of the plague, who now wander a suddenly depopulated America, wondering if they're the last ones left, giddy with excitement and relief when they encounter others.
Among the survivors are Stu Redman, the Texas man who witnessed the crash ... Larry Underwood, an up-and-coming rock singer who was handling his first taste of fame, very badly, just as the bodies started to fall ... Nick Andros, a deaf-mute who, in the days after the plague, befriends a gentle mentally retarded man named Tom Cullen ... Frannie Goldsmith, a teenage girl whose unwanted pregnancy becomes even more significant in a world that might not have a future ... Harold Lauder, a young wannabe writer in love with her ... Lloyd Henreid, a spree killer slowly starving to death in an abandoned prison ... a dog named Kojak ... and The Trashcan Man, a pyromaniac who upon the death of civilization finds himself free to wander the landscape torching entire cities.
As all these people wander the deserted streets and countrysides, searching for fellow survivors, they find themselves summoned by strange dreams to join one of two gathering camps. The good people find themselves drawn to the side of an elderly black woman named Mother Abigail, who has been blessed with the clairvoyant gift known as the Shining; the corrupt are drawn to the embodiment of supernatural evil in the form of a grinning wanderer known as Randall Flagg, the Dark Man. Flagg intends to start a new age of darkness ... and since he's far better at gathering weaponry and the killers prepared to use it, he starts the game with a significant strategic advantage.
Mother Abigail's forces settle in Boulder, while Flagg's people settle in Las Vegas. And even as her people put off the final confrontation as long as possible, a pair of traitors plot to draw first blood. ...
The master's most sprawling horror epic
The Stand, first published in 1978, was Stephen King's fourth novel under his own name. He was already a best-selling author, but had yet to become an international phenomenon capable of dictating his own terms, so his publishers were able to demand that he reduce the length of his longest book by almost 500 pages. Even with the cuts, what remained was his most epic novel—a contemporary fantasy with dozens of important characters, a scope as wide as the American landscape and a network of interlocking storylines that more than supported the book's heft. King has written other good books in the remarkable career that followed; he's written some significantly better ones. But he would never again attempt anything of the same apocalyptic scope, except arguably in the Gunslinger books; even his books of comparable length (some woefully overlong for their relatively simple stories) are all set on much smaller canvases, with much smaller casts of characters.
Some of it holds up very well. The scenes involving the spread of the plague have a momentum that is both relentless and terrifying. The friendship between Nick Andros and Tom Cullen is still one of the most vividly drawn in any of King's books. The major character who turns traitor is still one of his best tragic villains; King gives the son of a bitch several chances to turn away from his murderous path, and makes us feel the tragedy of his poor choices so well that we actually mourn when he finds the end he deserves. The untimely death of one of the book's most sympathetic characters retains its capacity to shock. As for Randall Flagg, he's still a fascinating creation: arrogant, shortsighted, damn near omnipotent—and so self-destructively overconfident that he sabotages his growing empire even as he tries to build it. On the flip side, some of the book is as clunky now as it ever was. It has a Luddite streak that's downright unpleasant, and though King was trying for a biblical tone, it remains annoying that King's heroes prove unable to defeat the forces of evil without divine interference. It would have been nice if Flagg's downfall had been more their doing, and less something they just happened to be in the right neighborhood to witness.
The "restored" sections are controversial. Some of the book's admirers believe that it was more than long enough in its edited form. Some believe the additions add nothing. They're mistaken in this; the additions flesh out the horror of the opening plague and deepen the sense of an America reduced to wasteland. The best of the additions may be the restored Chapter 38, a darkly horrific series of vignettes involving various plague survivors who succumb to, for lack of a better phrase, stupid deaths before they can join up with the rest of humanity's survivors. One woman burns her house down smoking in bed; another accidentally locks herself in a walk-in freezer. It's a grace note, having nothing to do with the outcome of the book, but it enhances the mordant depth of the novel's worldwide disaster.
At either length, The Stand retains its important position in the work of the world's premier horror novelist. Its influence led to many other horror novels of similar scope. The best of these, including Robert R. McCammon's Swan Song and Dan Simmons' Carrion Comfort, approach its power on the printed page. But there has been nothing, not even in King's own career, to equal the impact it has had on readers.
