Rereading Stephen King: Week 6 – The Stand

The Guardian’s James Smythe continues with his quest to reead every published Stephen King book in chronological order. This week he tackles one of the big kahunas of Kings ouvre – The Stand,

I first remeber picking up a copy of The Stand after listening to Anthrax’s seminal thrash metal album – “Among The Living“. The title track essentially gives a brief run down of the plot and focuses on the villain of the piece, Randall Flagg. It didn’t take much further persuasion to get myself off down to Pitteuchar Library to request a copy. When I finally got it I was quickly consumed by King’s dark vision of a human race destroyed not by nuclear war but by something as simple as the flu. The picture King paints of a society collapsing is vivid and terrifying and out of the chaos emerges a large cast of characters struggling to cope in the post-plague world and drawn inexorably to either the forces of good in the shape of Mother Abigail or the forces of darkness in the shape of Randall Flagg. The scene is set for an epic struggle that will decide the fate of the human race.

Read what James has to say about the book here: Rereading Stephen King week 6

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