The Stand

by Stephen King

Book Overview

The ultimate battle between good and evil...

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0451169530
• ISBN13: 9780451169532
• Release Date: May 1991
• Publisher: Signet Book
• Length: 1168 Pages
• Weight: 1.13 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.8" x 4.2" x 6.9"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Better than expected

I haven't completed this book yet but my first impression is this book is in better shape then expected. Minimal writing from previous owner, missing jacket but that's fine. No torn or dog-eared pages. Overall I'd give it a 4 out of 5 stars.

One of King’s bedt

A great book about good vs evil and the necessity for people to get along and help one another.

I love this book

I live the movie the stand I have watched it since I was young the book is a bit different but better and the condition of the book was great.

Not a hardcover

Just because a book is larger than your standard paperback doesn't automatically make it a hardcover. The book I ordered was classified as hardcover but it is nothing more than an oversized paperback. Shame on you.

Great story

Stephen King writes a fantastic tale of good vs evil. This story is riddled with choices and often times it comes down to morals. Right vs wrong. It's ironic how the story is so closely relatable to today's society. A horror story that invokes fear, but at the same time you are left questioning yourself. "Would I react the same way? If circumstances were the same? Different? Is ignorance bliss?" Great diversity in the cast of characters, some to love, some to hate.

Book Jacket Missing! :(

I ordered this specific book for the cover and it didn’t state that the cover was missing. Sorely disappointed!!

Good Book But Missing Page

The book is wonderful, but the last page of the book is missing.

Stephen King Fan

Received a very nice hardback copy of this book, dust jacket looks nice as well. Excited to give it to my son.

Long, but great read

This story was beautifully told, with changing perspectives and locations throughout the book, it’s like being along on the adventure with these characters. Very topical book, although fiction, as of the 2020s

I love The Stand!

There hasn’t been a single Stephen King book that I haven’t loved so far! This one got me through a very difficult time in my life and it was so nice to just disappear in the story and forget my problems. The news of Covid started happening right after I finished this book and that made things a bit more freaky! Hahaha This book is incredible and each character is so easy to fall in love with! There’s a reason his name is King!

I did not order this book from here.

I'm currently on page 107 of the stand complete and uncut edition. If you're thinking about buying this book, DO IT. For an almost 1200 page book, it is a page turner. You will not regret the story one bit.

So good

I loved this book, though I thought it would take me a million years to finish (two weeks actually) lol. But my interest in these characters has peaked and I’m starting the dark tower series next! The ending, I’m sure as everyone knows, was a bit lackluster, but the story and writing is wonderful otherwise. It’s not the most terrifying horror novel, but during these lovely pandemic times, it was a little extra spooky.

King's apocalyptic masterpiece of modern literature

The Stand, in my opinion, marks Stephen King's progression from horror to literature. Consistently voted fans' favorite King novel ever since its initial publication in 1978 (although I personally consider the novel It his finest work), The Stand delivers an archetypal conflict pitting good against evil against a backdrop of civilization itself. In this extraordinary novel, King fully unleashes the horrors previously contained in the microcosms of an extraordinary person (Carrie), a single town ('Salem's Lot), and a haunted hotel far removed from civilization (The Shining). This is how the world ends: with a human-engineered superflu which escapes containment in the form of a terrified guard who unwittingly spreads death over a wide swath of southwestern America in his bid to escape infection. Captain Trips, they call it - until they die, and people die in droves within a matter of days. In almost no time at all, well over 99% of the American population have suffered an agonizing death. Those that are left all alone begin to dream: comforting visions of an ancient black lady called Mother Abigail in Nebraska rising up alongside nightmares of a faceless man out west. Many find their way to Las Vegas to serve under Randall Flag, the Walking Dude of their night visions, but many others flock to Mother Abigail in Nebraska and eventually Boulder, Colorado. As the citizens of the Boulder Free Zone attempt to reform society and make a new life for themselves, they are forced to come to terms with the fact that they are caught up in a struggle defined by their spiritual leader in religious terms. They must destroy Flagg or be destroyed by him - in a word, they must make their stand. I could not begin to describe the dozens of richly drawn characters King gives life to in these pages. They are ordinary people called to do extraordinary things in a world reeking of death and fear. Some are not up to the challenge, and betrayal has awful consequences in this new reality - to the betrayer as well as the betrayed. These are real human beings, flaws and all; there is good to be found even among those serving the greatest of evils, and at the same time, the good guys don't always behave in ways you think they should. Nick Andros, Nadine Cross, Larry Underwood, Glen Bateman, Stu Redman, Harold Lauder, Mother Abigail, Tom Cullen, Randall Flagg, Trash Can Man - these are characters you will never forget. I must admit the climax of the great struggle just doesn't seem to be all it might be, but the first 1000 pages of this novel are so good that even Stephen King could hardly be expected to top what he had already accomplished in the framing of this ultimate conflict. I find it slightly odd that religion plays such a small part in this visionary apocalypse. As far as Mother Abigail and, eventually, the novel's heroes are concerned, this is a religious fight between the imps of Satan and the servants of God, but you won't find any theology apart

Classic King novel as the author intended it to be read....

The Stand, Stephen King's apocalyptic novel that mixes science fiction with horror (think of it as a realistic merging of The Andromeda Strain and The Final Conflict), was a runaway best-seller when it first hit bookstores in the late 1970s and is still regarded as one of King's best works, at least by his millions of fans. Its scenario of an accidental outbreak of a government-created strain of the flu -- which has a mortality rate of over 90 percent -- that wipes out most of mankind and sets the stage for a final showdown between good and evil makes for compelling reading.What many readers did not know was that King was asked by the accounting department of his publisher to trim his already huge novel by several hundred pages to keep costs down and to make the hardcover's price affordable ($12.95 in 1978). Given the choice of doing the edits himself or letting the in-house editors do the cutting, King chose the former. As a result, most -- but not all -- the characters and situations appeared reasonably whole, although King remarks in the Preface that pyromaniac Trashcan Man's westward trek from the Midwest to Nevada has the most scars from the literary surgery he performed.By 1989, though, King had enough clout -- and reader support -- to get Doubleday to publish The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition. Released in hardcover in 1990, the book sold very well and was later adapted by King as a miniseries for ABC-TV.So what are the differences between the two versions of The Stand, besides the heavier weight and higher price? (Remember that $12.95 retail price from 1978? In 1990 this had nearly doubled to $24.95!) Well, the novel's tale remains the same -- nefarious U.S. military creates a deadly strain of the flu...flu accidentally (and later not so accidentally) infects most of humanity...then the survivors split into two camps, one led by the evil Randall Flagg, the other headed by an elderly woman known as Mother Abigail, thus setting up the ultimate battle between darkness and light. But in this novel, the magic is in the details. The long and fiery journey of the Trashcan Man across the United States is now more complete, and a frightening character who was completely excised from the original novel in '78 is now restored in a literary equivalent of the Extended Editions of The Lord of the Rings DVDs. Another bonus: Illustrator Bernie Wrightson, who has contributed his drawings and artwork to King's Creepshow, Cycle of the Werewolf and one of the Dark Tower books, has added several illustrations to this edition. There are just a few and they are sprinkled sparingly, but they add a powerful jolt of visual effects to King's already vivid prose.King acknowledges his penchant for writing big, sometimes rambling novels, and The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition is surely big and rambling. Yet the cast of characters -- Stu Redman, Frannie Goldsmith, Larry Underwood, Harold Lauder (whose descent from merely obnoxious teen to jealo

A Recommendation

THE STAND was the first Stephen King novel I read (I think it was in 1985). The similarities to biblical prophecy in this marvelous story are hard to miss for even the the novice student of the book of Revelation. That fact played a large role in my interest in The Stand. The book is so enthralling that even when I became aware that King had veered a long way from the scriptural story, I didn't really care. And after all, no other writer had managed to figure out what all those seals, and trumpets, and vials of the Apocalypse were either.Continuing my interest in the subject, I have read a number of other books in the same general vein. Or perhaps I should say that I started to read several. The problem is that every writer that tries to stick with the original concept of end-times prophecy is also out to force a load of preaching down your throat. Their stories are less coherent that comic books and they seem to think their relationship with God makes up for the fact that they can't write.I have very recently found an exception to this rule and I wanted to recommend it. It's THE CHRIST CLONE TRILOGY by James BeauSeigneur. BeauSeigneur does an incredible job of story telling while sticking very exactly to biblical prophecy. He even blends in prophecies from several other religions! An interesting difference is that in THE CHRIST CLONE TRILOGY the antichrist/Flagg character plays his role and tell his lies so well that you can't help but sorta be pulling for him even though you know he's the bad guy. Or is he?

Up there with Absalom, Absalom! and Tom Sawyer.

The Stand sits alone atop the hierarchy of King novels. In fact, it sits near the top of the hierarchy of all novels. Its 1200 page length could be considered a blessing except for the fact that even 1200 pages might not be enough. King has created one of the most fascinating scenarios and some of the most interesting characters ever to appear in literature, so every page is worthwhile. King's writing style is straightforward. He does not employ the range of literary techniques you will find in a work of Faulkner (but then again, who does?) or Twain, but that does not detract in the least from his ability to develop his characters to an extraordinary extent and weave them into a fascinating story.The plot has been summarized in numerous other reviews, so I will not spend a lot of time on that. Essentially, a government created virus escapes, people begin to get sick, gradually the American populace realizes that they are all going to die- and for the most part, they do, the survivors sort themselves out into two camps, and we conclude with a showdown between good and evil.The fascinating thing about this book, and what makes it so good, is that King takes the above story line, which is hugely ambitious, and instead of trying to streamline things, he instead embraces every detail. This book focuses on each moment as if what were occurring at that moment were the subject of the entire book. King pursues every possible story thread to the fullest, and in doing so creates a sense of vividness unmatched in any other work. King has fleshed out the backgrounds of even the most peripheral characters to a greater degree than other authors sometimes are able to do with even their main characters. Being not a science fiction fan myself, I can also offer this to potential readers- this book, while at times embracing the supernatural and religious, does keep its feet firmly planted in reality. The first part of the book in which the virus escapes and the populace succumbs is almost entirely devoid of any purely supernatural/science fiction elements and rather deals mostly with sociology (and is truly fascinating). And King does not leave 99.94% of the populace dead without examining some of the non-supernatural consequences, such as the lack of law, the absence of things such as electricity and hospitals, the fact that there are millions of dead bodies rotting across the U.S., and the question of whether offspring of survivors will be immune to the disease. Even after the two groups have split up for this oft-mentioned showdown, sociological elements prevail. In fact, a great deal of conflict occurs in the second half of the book as peoples' everyday sensibilities lead them to attempt to organize and re-formulate a society while at the same time trying to come to grips with a situation (the threat of the Dark Man, the Walkin' Dude, Randall Flagg) which they cannot understand and can only overcome by reliance on faith. One final thought on the u