the stand

I remembered the other continuance, though in retrospect, I'm not sure it's a continuance. Did I tell you I was going to reread The Stand? If so, well, continuance! Bingo! If not, pretend I did, and still bingo!

I read this book when it first came out, which wikipedia tells me was 1978. I wasn't of the financial means to buy hardcover books in 1978 and I believe my branch library was temporarily (though later permanently) shuttered then, so I must have read it when it came out in paperback. So we'll say 1979. Sounds about right. I also watched the miniseries based on it, which wikipedia tells me was aired in 1994. Let us just say that I was going to be fine in rereading it, because I only had a very vague recollection of any plot details. In fact, I will tell you that while rereading it, there was one character I was absolutely sure I remembered as being the ultimate hero in the book, and he was killed off well before the denouement. So, yeah! Just like reading a book I'd never read before.

And actually, in truth, it *was* a book I'd never read before, because the only version available for the kindle was the 1990 author's edition, in which, because Mr King was now so rich and famous he could do what the fuck he wanted, massive amounts of material that were cut from the original edition (because the bean counters thought the book was too long) were restored. The beauty of the kindle (besides being able to read "erotica" without public embarrassment and avoiding tendinitis) is that you can't really see how long these tendinitis-inducing books are, and thus are not daunted. No page numbers. No visual cue of a hardcover book that'd take up three inches on the ol' bookcase. Just a line on your home page that's longer than the lines for some of your other books. If this restored version is actually 1300 pages, you can't prove it by me. But it took me like a good ten days to read.

The Stand is considered by many people to be Stephen King's best book and/or an enduring classic. He mentions this in his foreword to the author's edition and says that, y'know, it's not his favorite book that he's written. I gotta agree with him. It certainly isn't the scariest of all his books, nor is it the best plotted. What surprised me reading it this time around is how good it is in certain key areas that apparently he got worse in as his writing career progressed. For instance, I always say that one of my major problems with his work is that his female characters suck. They tend to be far more one dimensional than his male characters and, as a chick, often read to me as if *he* thinks he understands how women think and react, which 1.) we don't all think and react the same way and 2.) he doesn't. He also tends to write women as victims of physical or sexual abuse and furthermore as abuse victims whose abuse colors their entire lives and psychology. I find it somewhat annoying. For just as, say, male combat victims don't all respond to the trauma they've sustained in the same way, female rape victims don't either. So it was with great pleasure that I found in The Stand several better rounded female characters, including two major ones, who had histories of (relatively, at least) healthy family and romantic relationships. It brings up the question of why an author's characterizations would get worse instead of better, and I can only attribute it to getting stuck in the mode of writing the same character over and over again.

N E Way, I was glad to reread this book, because the postapocalypic "disease has wiped out almost everyone and the survivors are fighting for their lives" genre is very big in books and movies now, though these days the virus generally turns you into a zombie of some sort, since zombies are big now. Nice to read one of the original bestsellers in the genre and see how it's influenced what came after.

xoxo