The Stand by Stephen King

 

Reviewed by Ben

 

I have not read many Stephen King books, so I am doing some catch-up. I just finished The Stand, King's epic good-versus-evil story, set in an America devastated by plague. I really enjoyed this book for its chilling description of the plague's spread, the haunting reminders of a civilization toppled in only a few months and the sympathetic depiction of evil (stay with me on that last point).

 

This book immediately gets down to the business of spreading deadly plague. King lays out all the system breakdowns and failures of procedure that allowed the lethal virus "Captain Trips" to escape a secret facility located inside a military base. Once outside, the sickness spreads as ordinary people go about their lives, an unseen guest tagging along when families go on vacation or parents take their children to birthday parties. I felt this part of the book was the most impactful, maybe because we have just gone through a pandemic ourselves. Another reason why this part of the book was scary is that the world being torn apart felt very real, just like the place in time where I spent my childhood. Reading about the commonplace events of a very familiar existence-birthday parties, family road trips-turned deadly carried a lot of weight with me.

 

Once the book is well underway and the old way of life has been wiped out by the virus, the plot focuses on the characters and their struggle for survival. However the reader still gets grim reminders of what has been lost: highways choked with stopped cars occupied by the dead, empty stores stocked with plentiful canned goods and drugs, an outdoor tourism town littered with sporting goods and camping equipment never claimed by the expected vacationers. King used these illustrations to impart the scale of destruction and loss from the virus.

 

Finally, as the story turns to the struggle between good and evil, Stephen King lays out an "evil" side with a sort of sympathy that makes the bad guys feel more real, or believable. While the leader is an actual demon, his followers are normal people drawn to him by the allure of organization and structure that is in short supply after the end of the world. In addition, the major characters on the bad guys' side are not bad in a cartoonish way. Their motivations are explained in a way the reader can sympathize with. For example, the devil's right hand man was a ne'er do well before the plague, destined to spend his life behind bars. He never had a chance, until the devil showed up to his cell door with the key to a new, meaningful life. The devil's weapons expert was previously an outcast from a broken home, an intellectually-challenged pyromaniac tormented by his peers' jokes. However evil's personification elevated him from a laughingstock to being an instrumental part in building a new world, who had friends and respect for the first time in his life. King's believable interpretation of evil makes the characters and the world of The Stand more real.

 

In summary, The Stand is an excellent, epic read that I recommend to anyone ready to settle in for a long story. The book is nearly 1,300 pages in length, so yes, it is indeed an odyssey. The only problem I had with this book was that, early in the second half, it gets bogged down in civics and society-building, which felt a little slow after the protagonists' journey across the ruined United States and brushes with death.

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly

 

Reviewed by Ambrea

 

Although I’ve dabbled in a few other genres, I recently veered back to epidemics.  (Look, I just can’t seem to help myself.)  This time, I picked up another book with a massive subtitle:  The Great Mortality by John Kelly.

 

Yes, I decided to tackle a book on the plague.

 

The modern world knows it as the Black Death, the bubonic plague, or yersinia pestis; however, in Asia and Europe during the fourteenth century, it was known simply as the “Great Mortality” or the “Year of Annihilation.”  It spread far and wide – and quickly.  As John Kelly points out, “Despite the enormous size of Eurasia and the slowness of medieval travel…the plague spread to almost every corner of the continent in a matter of decades.”  By 1347, it had arrived in Italy and, by 1350, it had reached as far as Portugal, Scotland, and Scandinavia.

 

Records, of course, are sparse during this time and records that have survived aren’t without error; however, Kelly does an admirable job of stitching together the various stories of victims and survivors to create a comprehensive narrative.  The Great Mortality often delves into primary resources, relating first-hand accounts, and it uses a variety of materials – ledgers, cemetery purchase records, wills, court documents – to explain just how terrible life really was during the Black Death.

 

Basically, here’s the gist of the whole book:  everything was awful and it was a horrible time to be alive – not that you’d live very long to experience it.  I can’t even verbalize how grateful I am to live in a world where hygiene is the norm and science has given us wonderful things like antibiotics, vaccines, and soap.

 

The Great Mortality is a very interesting and engaging book.  I enjoyed learning about the history and science of the bubonic plague, and I liked reading accounts from witnesses who did – and didn’t – survive.  I was fascinated (or, maybe, horrified?) to learn there are actually different kinds of bubonic plague and it can morph into pneumonic plague, which scholars and scientists suspect happened during the Black Death.

 

Overall, I think it’s a pretty great book for learning about a truly terrible time with history.  It’s packed with resources and interesting history, but it isn’t difficult to read.  It does feel like it’s viewed through a very European lens; however, since much of the book took place in Europe, I let it slide a bit.  It does have a tendency to bounce around through time and space, but it isn’t particularly detrimental to the narrative.

 

It also has footnotes.*

 

*Fun fact:  I love a good footnote.

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

Reviewed by Jeanne

In the near future, student historians will have an opportunity to do more than just research a topic from records, videos, or interviews. They can actually go back in time and experience an event or time period first hand.  Of course, going back in time can be a risky business.  Some time periods are inherently more dangerous than others, so certain eras have been off limits.  Now Kivrin Engle is preparing to be the first person to venture back into one of those time periods:  the Middle Ages, much to Mr. Dunworthy’s disapproval. He’s deeply concerned for her safety, but his objections are overridden by an ambitious colleague and Kivrin is transported.  Some hours later, the tech who handled the transport rushes to find Mr. Dunworthy but collapses before he can explain what the problem is. It turns out that he’s very ill and the area is quarantined.  As Dunworthy desperately tries to find someone to check Kivrin’s location, the young student finds herself in a past she’s not as well prepared to face as she had thought. 

The fourteenth century to which Kivrin travels is no land of knights and ladies and courtly love, but a primitive land where the stench of unwashed bodies and a lack of plumbing is enough to make one gag. It’s winter, bitter cold, and despite her hours of study in Middle English, she can’t understand what people are saying—nor they her.  Fortunately, she has a translator implant that kicks in at last, but she’s ill and disoriented, and not sure where she’s supposed to go to be picked up to return to her own time.

She doesn’t know that returning may not be an option.

Most know that I’m a person who likes to read series in order, but I have to confess I failed miserably in this instance.  Like Willis’ scholars, I’ve time hopped all over, and am only now reading the first novel in the Oxford Time Travel series.  Doomsday Book was first published in 1992, and so some of the future appears a bit dated already: no cell phones, for example. This is a minor quibble, however, because where Willis truly excels is in her portrayal of the past. She also is a pro at poking holes in our own expectations of past and future, and does so with touches of both humor and humanity.  The characters are ones we care about and can relate to. 

It’s Willis’ ability to make us feel as if we are actually glimpsing another time and her observations about the human spirit that make her writing so compelling.  Without giving away too much of the plot, I will say that at first I was disappointed that so many chapters were devoted to what was going on with the future team instead of letting the reader in on what was happening with Kivrin in the past, but the two story lines form an interesting commentary on stress and human behavior. 

I wasn’t surprised to find that this book had won the Nebula Award and was co-winner of a Hugo.  In the UK, it’s been reprinted as part of a Science Fiction Masterworks series, but as others have pointed out it works as well as an historical novel.  No matter the category, this is a superior novel that I highly recommend.  As it is, I am still shivering from the descriptions of a fourteenth century winter.

But the real appeal for me is the way Willis upends our expectations.  Like the students, most readers go into an historical book with certain beliefs and preconceived notions. We think we know about life in specific time periods, but much of the fiction and film feature, to paraphrase my college anthropology professor, twenty first century people in historical garb.  In Willis’ story, only Kivrin is aghast that a girl of about twelve is to be married off to a man of 50; only Kivrin is aware of the lack of hygiene, the amount of dirt on people’s hands as they touch food or wounds; only Kivrin questions the status of servants. Her job is simply to observe, not comment or change.  Time and again, she’s tripped up by small things, such as wanting to question her rescuer before realizing that it’s considered almost wanton behavior for an unmarried woman of her station to seek to speak to man privately. Yet with all that is strange, basic human nature is shown to be largely unchanged.  Another hallmark of a Willis tale is the way that the students’ views evolve:  they go to study the “contemps” of an era, abstract ideas of behavior and thought, and they gradually discover they are, after all, individual human beings. They also come to the realization that some of their judgments are based on very different circumstances.  It can be very humbling.

Willis entertains me, educates me, and makes me think.  That’s the mark of a good writer and a good book.