It is fashionable in the world of literary fiction to denigrate Stephen King.   Some would suggest his vast appeal is driven by a bovine yearning on the part of adult children, a hankering after the supernatural and things that go bump in the night.  There are those authors who would have us cast out popular fiction, would have us believe that unless a book is a tiresome tome, struggling under the weight of its own verbosity, it is not worth reading.

To those authors, this reviewer would hold up Stephen King’s The Stand, and ask who among their number could produce a work of such magnificence.  Literary fiction purports to concern itself with style, depth and character development as opposed to narrative; The Stand covers all of the above, peering into the soul of humanity through the prism of a truly flawless plot.

The story begins as Charles D. Campion flees a US military installation late at night, hoping to escape the base as it locks down in an attempt to isolate an extremely deadly virus.  He succeeds, and in doing so sets the apocalypse in motion.  Thereafter the tale is divided into three parts; the telling of the apocalypse, the cross-country treks of the various survivors, and finally a climactic confrontation between good and evil.

King is arguably the best writer of commercial fiction over the last thirty years, and The Stand is the best of King.  In this uncut edition, his attention to character development is unleashed with staggering force.  There is Larry Underwood, an up-and-coming music star, a good man but stubborn and self-indulgent, haunted as the book progresses by his own misdeeds.  Harold Lauder, an unpopular and obnoxious youth, is intelligent but mistrustful.  These and the rest of a substantial cast of characters are as full and three-dimensional as The Shining’s Jack Torrance; their demons are laid bare, sliced open and probed on the mortician’s slab of King’s writing.

The Stand however, is not just an ensemble piece, but an examination of an entire society.  Through the medium of an all-too plausible apocalypse, King explores small town mentality, parochial and devoid of ambition.  He casts eyes over the ennui of urban living, the last futile denials of a government in its death throes, the complicity of federal institutions.  King invites us to watch as the systemic pillars of civilisation collapse.  Corpses are dumped in the harbour en masse under cover of darkness; student protests are crushed with violent opposition; the government’s last concern in the face of inevitable destruction is for its own credibility.  The Stand is an utterly credible eyewitness account of the end of history.
King has over the years been pigeon-holed as a horror writer.  In The Stand, he brushes off this cloak with ease.  There is abundant horror, particularly in the dream sequences of the mid-section, but King elicits every conceivable emotion from the reader.  There is deep pathos, twisted jealousy, animal lust, the blossoming of love, even moments of humour.  By Johnsonian reasoning, to be tired of The Stand is to be tired of life.

The Stand is the greatest work of a generation‘s greatest author.  It is by far the most expansive of his novels, a tale of dark Christianity, set in one of the richest and fullest universes ever conceived in fiction.  It infected the mind of this reviewer with sufficient force to provoke strange dreams for months after reading.  While reluctance to tackle a 1,400 page book is understandable, The Stand repays the reader’s investment a thousand fold.  When King finally hangs up his typewriter, it will undoubtedly be The Stand that is held up as the pinnacle of his achievements.  It is a book that provokes emphatic, evangelical recommendations from those who have read it.  Make no mistake, this is one of the greatest books of the twentieth century.

Bookmark to