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.
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