Claire Wood

I will start by saying The Stand is long, super long. And thus is a time committment. And honestly I'm not sure it's worth the time committment. To my knowledge King writes a lot on the fly and doesn't really have a plan while he's writing. This shines through in this book. It meanders, the characters become less and less interesting and the plot points set up earlier on in the book are solved abruptly and without fanfare. Which is fine from time to time but not for everything. The beginning was good and my favourite part of the book. It sets up the situation well and the characters well and you feel some sort of attachment to them. There is one chapter in particular that describes the chain of infection that was absolutely superb. Then it just gets long and windy and beats about the bush a lot. By the ending I really didn't care for most of the characters. There isn't much interesting about them. Randall Flagg is absent for a lot of the story and as a villain he doesn't do a lot. The ever present threat isn't enough to make you scared of him. Despite knowing him from Kings other works, he's not a great villain in The Stand. When he does show up he does absolutely heinous things to those around him however but in the end he is never really a threat to the survivors in Boulder. Finally it's really worth saying that the language used in this book is incredibly outdated. And excessive. King repeatedly uses racist language to describe black characters and honestly it is truly uncomfortable. I get that this book was written over 40 years ago however it is truly excessive and uncomfortable to read. I read the amended version that was released 10 years later I believe and I really wish he'd have toned that down entirely because it was an uncomfortable experience. Overall I found the book to be about 500 pages to long, the total page count is just over 1300 pages and so much of that I thought could have been removed.