The Stand by Stephen King - WITH spoilers but ONLY up to where I’m reading 🤣🤣

[Taq]

I downloaded the book after recommendations here and I’ve got 8 hours left (out of 48!!!) to listen to.

It’s amazing but I can’t stand the emotional rollercoaster! I’ve just got to the part where that Julie girl recognises Tom Cullen in Vegas. If anything happens to Tom I might actually cry, I still can’t believe Nick and Mother Abigail died!
I am SO close to googling what happens to Tom but I wont.

Awful Harold and Nadine are on the way West, and so are the 4 from the committee (without Fran thank goodness).

I’m quite glad that there won’t be any committee meetings for a while, they were a bit too much like being at an actual committee meeting.

Anyway I just had to talk about it 🤣

More common than you might think, people always assume it is a man on a bike. I got my licence in about 92, I'd wanted to ride since I was 16 but life got in the way.

Bike clubs have always had females and I think it depends to a certain extent where you are from, if you live on a farm in the UK you may well learn to drive a tractor in Australia you are more likely to use a bike because the farms are vast.

Ah, my people!

Another one here who first read The Stand as a teenager. We were staying in a holiday cottage with this lovely sunny attic room and I basically lived up there reading The Stand and listening to Ash’s 1977 (it’s quite a good companion soundtrack). Also absolutely love the miniseries. I was madly in love with Larry as a teenager - the bad boy turned good.

OP I agree with a PP who thought you might enjoy Desperation as a next read. I liked Needful Things personally, I found it quite funny and it was cleverly planned out. Gerald’s Game is horrifying.

Great thread.

I bought the Audible book and am loving it. Amazed that as a chapter unfolds my memory supplies phrases and sentences from years ago.

The observations about women characters remind me that while I think King never makes women/girls feeble/inconsiderable/lightweight, he is far better at conveying the male experience.

EF Benson's Lucia novels have women of consistent weight and force (within the context of comedy).

Did anyone else have the experience of being freaked out by crows when reading this book? I remember reading it in the garden once, and looked up and there was a crow on the wall, I felt like it was almost watching me - creepy!

Anyway, on the back of this thread I have dug out my dusty old copy and realised it's the 'complete and uncut' addition, 1400 pages 😁

Desperation is great, The Regulators, published under Richard Bachman, is linked in a fun way, so I'd probably read them close together.

Yes to Desperation and The Regulators. Adds them to my re-read list.

LOL yes, for years!! I absolutely bloody hated crows. None if my friends understood because they had no idea what the Stand was about.

I remember having lots of crazy nightmares from reading the Regulators. Tak.😱

Tommyknockers is a good one as well, reminds me a little of Needful things, although not so well constructed.

It wasn't my favourite overall but Rose Madder has one of the most scary villains. Not even a supernatural baddie, just a horrible and completely relentless abuser.

The Boulder community was a bit of a hippie clusterfuck, volunteering based commune. Plenty of free will, but towards the end you could see where that was starting to lead to unrest and vigilantism.

Interesting. That idea was revisited years later with the nomadic, semi-supernatural RV community The True Knot in Doctor Sleep. As their source of sustenance dries up, so does the system and structure they've established.

One of my fave books and you're so lucky reading it for the first time!
I don't understand why Ralph is with the others, we didn't get his backstory, so I never felt as connected to him as I did Stu, Glen and Larry.
It's so sad when Nick dies. And I thought Fran had died too for a moment.
I love all the characters so much, from Stu to Lloyd.
Have you followed Dayna yet?

Larry, Glen and the rest needed to be with Randall Flagg at the end because their collective 'goodness' weakened his powers and concentration. Stephen King used a similar trope in The Green Mile when only the prison wardens physically near to Coffey were able to resist the evil that had possessed the Warden's wife.

I think that the Boulder Vs Las Vegas dynamic was essentially Democracy Vs Communism.

But the Warden's wife had brain cancer/tumour. Is something else suggested in the story?

Upthread a poster said some backstory on Randall Flagg would have been good, but I think that for the purposes of this novel, any suggestion of having a reason for evil comes close to excuse, the spiritual version of poor parenting. As a consequence he's just evil, the way the frankly silly spider of "It" is just bad because it's bad.

Usually baddies with a backstory are overreachers who are slapped down/cast out for their cheek, e.g. Satan or Sauron. Now I think of it, Andy Hamilton's "Old Harry's Game" has God as a bit unreasonable.

If anyone uses YouTube, there are channels that narrate early Stephen King stories.

Night Surf, a prequel to The Stand ia one of them.

Stephen King Book Club is one channel.

I'm about half way through the audio book and some things really impinge on my reception of the narrative that didn't when reading it years ago.

The focus on women's breasts. Bloody unbelievable. I'd need to go back and separate where it's the narrator saying it or one of the characters. Fuck it, it's still King writing it and it grates.

Harold Lauder is a prototype, box-ticking incel.

Yes, King's tendancy towards "bouncing boobily down the stairs" squicks me out. It's why I would say I like some of his novels, but would hesitate to call him a truly great writer. Well, it's one of the reasons

The Stand is my absolute favourite and would be in my top ten of all the books I've read.

I also loved The Shining which frightened me as a young teenager, so much scarier than the film.

Like lots more but found Tommyknockers and Needful Things unpleasant.
Really couldn't like 11/22/63 and didn't finish.

Yes she did have a brain tumor but I'm sure that King hints at a supernatural element, too? Almost as though the tumor was an entity in itself.

If you loved The Stand I urge you to read Swan Song by Robert R. MCCammon!

Great thread, thank you OP.

Making me want to reread. What do people think of the most recent TV adaptation? I thought it was good, and well cast but (as is usual with King) has a terrible ending! It's like he just cannot finish anything, just drags it out painfully 😂