The stand

OK. So this is one of my most formative reading and re-reading experiences... 30 years ago. I hadn't read it in at least 20. Does it hold up?

...Kind of? Don't get me wrong, what I used to think was King's magnum opus is flawed as hell in a lot of ways. King's strength, in addition to all the horror stuff, was always empathy; his characters may not be enormously different from book to book, but they always worked. If The Stand really had been a 1990 novel it might have been a different book (for better or for worse), but in reality it is juvenalia - really impressive juvenalia, but still very obviously a 1975 novel by an aspiring writer, and then dug out of the desk and quickly dressed up for halloween 1990. For all that King tries to make it up-to-date, his America full of hippies, young Vietnam veterans, Nixon references and white blues singers is very obviously from another era. And that carries over to his character work; as much as he puts into most of his characters, he still has problems not writing women, POC, LGBT folk etc as anything but shallow stereotypes. Not insurmountable ones, especially in a cast of hundreds, but they're there. Good ol' boy from Texas? You get to be the hero. Demon from the depths of hell? You get a personality. Teenage girl? You get to be shrill. (And in fairness, King's own author avatar gets to be a pathetic wannabe villain, but at least one with depth.)

That said, the first 2/5ths or so of this book, where he kills off 99.4% of the US population, is still a stunning piece of work, no less so in the middle of an actual pandemic. Starting with a dozen or so characters and through them showing us society breaking down as things go from denial to panic to madness to silence, going into endless detail about all the mundanities of trying to survive in the middle of an apocalypse where there's nothing but your own and each other's demons to fight... It's so good it's almost a pity when the back half of the book turns into a big showdown between good and evil with more overt Christianity in it than King would ever have again. I say "almost" because it's still good (if obviously derivative of the hobbit books); Randall Flagg is one of his most memorable monsters, and the way he uses it to actually present a somewhat hopeful view of society, one where people don't necessarily want to be evil, and the lies they tell themselves to get through it only last so long, really works. In a way I find myself wishing this 1420-page book had another 200 pages of just random people in Boulder and Las Vegas finding their place in a new society.

Plus, y'know, it's probably one of the best bicycle novels written by an American who unironically uses the term "Detroit iron" for cars.

The Stand, in a weird way, is King's first stab at a Great American Novel, full of small towns and big cities, interstates and interior states (sorry)... And if its villain these days feels more like a populist politician convincing half the population they have to kill the other half in the face of a deadly pandemic, I'm not sure that makes this ol' 70s throwback any less timely. So I have to knock this down from the five stars my nostalgia gave it, but my inner teenager would kill me if I knock it down any further.