May 2011: The Stand

Books Read:
Coffey's Hands by Stephen King
Tender as Hellfire by Joe Meno
The Bad Death of Eduard deLacroix by Stephen King
The Stand by Stephen King

I only want to talk about The Stand this month as it took up the last two and a half weeks at least and I have a lot to say about it.

My copy is a used paperback with a great little reaction jotted on the inside cover. I love it. However, I did not realize that there was an extended edition until I had already started and it wasn't available at my library so I would have had to wait for a copy to come in and I was mostly ready to get going and take on the beast, if you will. At the start, 817 pages seemed like a daunting task and I didn't want to tackle the 1153 page uncut edition. I wonder if I will beat myself up over this choice forever and eventually give in and read the uncut edition.

I loved this book. King writes in such a way that 10 pages can feel like 40 but sometimes 40 can feel like 10. The first week was kind of rough. The book looked so big that I handled it much how I handle other tasks that seem daunting... Every time I caught sight of the book and thought that I should read a couple of pages I loaded up Facebook. It made the first week pretty slow but after that it seemed to stick.

The best part of this book is definitely the characters. King produces such a wide array of characters and they are all very well developed for their purpose. A lot of the bad guys seem more two dimensional than 3-D but it works for them. My boyfriend kept trying to convince me to watch the movie and at one point let it slip that Molly Ringwald plays Frannie. I never would have guessed that and it messed with my idea of Frannie for the rest of the book. However, I looked up the pictures of Harold Lauder and they were pretty right on.

Harold is a character that I want to talk a bit about. He reminded me of my ex who spent a lot of time feeling angry about things that had happened to him in high school. If he got off on a rant, he would grit his teeth and growl, "They'll pay! They'll all pay!" This was something that contributed to our eventual split. I was teased in school and instead of being angry and a little demented about the whole thing, I'm actually pretty thankful. I am who I am because of where I have been. I would totally end up on Mother Abigail's side.

I really think that King can be an actual literary author. This didn't feel like a novel of terror to me. Sure, there were some grisly parts (read: awesome but no decapitation) but this was about good vs. evil. Randall Flagg makes his appearance. Did you know he is in like 8 King books, and that doesn't include movies like Perfect Storm. Randall Flagg is ultimate evil. He is Legion, which is worth looking into when reading these deep Stephen King books.

My ruling on this one is that it was a great, if long, read. I loved the characters. (How is it that I wrote a whole blog without mentioning Nick or Stu or Ralph or Larry? I LOVED Larry!) There's even a cheat sheet to help you keep the characters straight online. I loved how the characters drove the plot. I loved imagining whether or not I could live in this world.

What a great way to spend 817 pages!