The Stand by Stephen King

In 1978, Stephen King first published The Stand, clocking in at some 800 pages. Some 13 years later, he re-released the book, "complete and uncut", with what was said to be material left on the editing room floor to comply with his editor's suggestion that a novelist who only had a couple of novels under his belt (at that time) would be ill-advised to have an 1100 page novel released.

I read the original published version of The Stand in 1984, while working as a security guard, with a lot of time on my hands between my rounds. I was impressed with it then, but not being the big Stephen King fan that make up the majority of his following, I saw no need to rehash the story again when the unabridged version came out in 1991.

However, while discussing the filmed version one day last week, I was informed of several things that intrigued me by a friend who was working from a reminiscence of the longer version. So I set out to re-read the book, something I usually never do. I have to say, I was impressed by it. As the author states in the introduction, if you read it before, you won't find the characters behaving differently, but you will find them doing a lot more things.

I found that I really liked the expansion of some of the sub-characters, going into a little more detail with how some of them arrived to their final destinations, be it Boulder, Colorado or Las Vegas, Nevada.

For those of you who have never heard of the book or seen the TV movie, here is the briefest of synopses. The government is working on a super-virus in a restricted area of the U.S. The virus gets leaked into a controlled area, but the base is immediately shut down as to prevent it from speading. Unfortunately one security guard does manage to get out.

This one security guard manages to spread this extremely communicable disease to others and like that commercial from days gone by, they spread it to friends and those freinds spread it to more friends until there is aultimately about a 99% death rate among the population. For some reason, the remaining 1% are immune, and begin having strange dreams about a dark man and an old black woman. These are the two marshalling forces that bring about a good vs. evil battle to which the finale is ultimately drawn.

I think I would have rated the original a 10 if I had been doing this blog back then. As it is I am giving this expanded version 8½ stars.