A couple days ago I finished rereading Stephen King’s The Stand for the fourth time, I think. If it’s not his best book it’s in the top two, and it has the added bonus of boasting the best film adaptation of any of King’s works. That’s not to say that the TV miniseries of The Stand is better than Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, of course, just that it’s a better adaptation. When your mind’s eye can take advantage of that spectacularly spot-on casting job, trotting out Gary Sinise and Ray Walston and Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis and Bill Fagerbakke and Adam Storke and Jamey Sheridan to deliver the lines, a lot of work is done for the book right there. Even in the cases where the casting isn’t nailed–Miguel Ferrer, Rob Lowe, Corin Nemec, Matt Frewer, and Molly Ringwald were all too old for their characters, for example–there’s still something right about it.
But I have found that the older I get, the more that certain flaws in King’s stuff that I didn’t notice when I first read it as a kid, or even later during re-reads in high school or college, stand out to me a bit more. In The Stand‘s case, as in It‘s case, they don’t ruin the book or anything, but they’re worth pointing out.
1) During the opening section of the book, where we’re introduced to most of the main players, the Frannie stuff is much, much weaker than the rest. From the “girl loses her virginity and gets knocked up in one fell swoop” angle on down, it’s a parade of young-adult novel clichés that makes Frannie come off like a histrionic dope. Also, everyone slaps each other. Fran slaps her boyfriend. Her boyfriend slaps her. Her Mom slaps her. Her Dad slaps her Mom. It’s almost like that Cheers routine with Sam and Diane. When you compare it to, say, how tight King’s depiction of the rise and fall of budding pop star Larry Underwood is, or how evocatively he sets the scene for Stu Redman, it suffers all the more.
2) Nick Andros disappears from the book after he meets Mother Abagail, at least as a focalizing character. Seriously, take a look and you’ll see that the entire segment of the novel set in the Boulder Free Zone is really the Stu Frannie Larry Nadine and Harold Show, with the entire story being told from their perspectives. It undercuts Mother Abagail’s protestations that she believed Nick would be the one to lead the forces of good, as well as the emotional impact of the shocking turn of events that befalls him.
3) I think something is lost in not showing the initial meeting between Stu, Frannie, Harold, and Glen’s party and Mother Abagail. That’s the hero, the heroine, the Basil Exposition, and the Gollum figure right there, and that’s an oversight. It may also be a way for King to dodge explaining how Mother Abagail didn’t catch on to Harold from the get-go.
4) I think the ending–the very ending, after Stu and Tom get back to Boulder–feels rushed. Who keeps Kojak, for example?
That stuff being said it really is a remarkable book. The unfolding of the superflu epidemic is just magisterially well done and very frightening, and quite brutal in its depiction of the government and military to boot. By rights the Flagg material should be vastly less interesting, but he’s a magnetic villain whose evil manifests itself in constantly startling and entertaining ways, like those constant litanies about how when birds hear him walking they fly into telephone poles, and if he walks through a building project guys hammer their thumbs, and if he looks at you funny your prostate goes bad. It’s like if John Cougar Mellencamp became some sort of mutant Hitler.