15. The Stand (Complete and Uncut Edition)

By Stephen King 

While retroactively posting, I was trying to remember what I was reading during October as it had no entry, then realized I was trying to read Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash.  When The Stand arrived at my door on November 3rd, I abandoned Snow Crash as I had an urge to read this post-apocalyptic pandemic classic.  As my first foray, I figured I’d go for the complete & uncut edition, which was basically an expansion of the 800+ page original novel.  

In the preface, King explained “I am republishing The Stand as it was originally written not to serve myself or any individual reader, but to serve a body of readers [fans] who have asked to have it.”

It took me about a month to read all 1153 pages (though some of the pages were virtual… read on).  And I can confirm that the uncut edition is meant for fans.  The paperback has the heft and feel of a brick.  I would sometimes take breaks, not because I needed to stop reading, but to rest my hands from holding the bloody thing.  The original edition would have served me fine, but as a completist, at least I can say that I read the whole thing as it was 'meant' to be read.

This link highlights the sections that were added in the uncut edition. 

This article sums it all up with these quotes that hit the nail on the head:

The Uncut edition.. manages to feel too long and too short at the same time. It’s shaky, shaggy, a woefully dated product of the ’70s, and totally problematic by 21st century standards of political correctness.

Within the entire Boulder Free Zone community — which eventually numbers in the thousands — Mother Abigail is the only person who is described as black. That’s right, kids: Stephen King’s utopic Free Zone society contains exactly one (1) black person. Other than that, the Free Zone is a diverse tapestry, featuring white people from Maine, white people from Texas, white people from New York, and white people from Ohio.

And yet it’s obvious why The Stand is so often name-checked as King’s crowning achievement…. Like many great “genre” writers, the majority of King’s work has focused on ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. And while his imaginative plots were the hooks that drew readers in, Stephen King fans have always connected with his books because of those ordinary people — protagonists as flawed and insecure as the rest of us, who are richly brought to life through their inner monologues and memories. It’s the interior, psychological world that gives King’s best works their jet-fuel.   

Now here are some of my thoughts.    

I can see how The Walking Dead graphic novels owed a huge debt to The Stand and made up for The Stand’s utter lack of diversity with its range of characters.  Without knowing much about The Stand, I was expecting an end times pre- + post-pandemic novel, and wasn’t expecting a metaphysical battle between good and evil thrown in there.  This post-apocalyptic spin on Christianity didn't work for me.

To quote the source itself:  “Bad shit keeps happening to us because we never learn the lesson. Even when the armies are destroyed, their toys are left behind, and we can’t resist picking them up again. The virus of evil and domination that exists in humanity’s heart can never be fully extinguished.”  

Human beings are perfectly capable of being batshit evil without any help from Satan.  The true horror is the cesspit of humanity itself  Which is why I felt that is was quite unnecessary to have The Dark Man. And if there's going to be a supernatural adversary make it a supernatural battle of epic proportions, which never happened.  Instead, a big bomb goes off and destroys all the bad guys in one swell swoop.  Anti-climactic, to say the least.

This is why the under-rated Z for Zachariah was able to convey similar themes much more effectively with 1/50 of pages and characters!  The two remaining survivors in America manage to play out the history of humanity without any need for supernatural elements.  But The Stand is still a great ride.  Yes, it’s bloated and dated, but it’s still a gripping epic'ish read - a contemporary fat fantasy novel.  Olman loved The Stand when he read the original version but has forgotten much of it.  What was memorable for him was the beginning how it describes how the virus spreads from one person to the rest of America.

Some other random thoughts:  

Dayna was the only woman who really kicked ass.  In fact, she’s the most kick-ass character, period.  She was first introduced as a prisoner held by marauding rapists who later bashed one of their skulls in.  She joined Stu’s crew who made it to Boulder and was later sent out to infiltrate Las Vegas.  So why wasn't Dayna a core character?  The only female core character was boring Fran, who didn’t do much except be:  pregnant, a moral compass, a girlfriend to Stu Redman, and a trigger for incelly Harry’s conversion to evil.   

Dayna had no back story, but she had the best action scene where she confronted, then outwitted, the Dark Man.  Even though this ended with a dramatic sacrifice, Dayna did it on her own terms.   Dayna’s death also had the most graphic and memorable illustration.  In the text, it wasn’t clear to me how she impaled herself on the broken window, but the illustration made it explicitly clear!

Some other sections in the novel seemed to have missed editorial eyes.  Just small details like when the Judge is in the middle of nowhere after travelling for several days and he stops at a café “for a sandwich and coffee”.  Huh?  I can see how he could have boiled water and made coffee himself in an abandoned café, but where did he get the bread???

But I did like this passage with the Judge on his spying mission:

            By Rawlins, heʼd had enough. He turned northwest on I-287, skirted the Great Divide Basin, and had camped two days later in Wyomingʼs northwest corner, east of Yellowstone. Up here, the roads were almost completely empty. Crossing Wyoming and eastern Idaho had been a frightening, dreamlike experience. He would not have thought that the feeling of death could have set so heavily on such an empty land, nor on his own soul. But it was there—a malign stillness under all that big western sky, where once the deer and the Winnebagos had roamed. It was there in the telephone poles that had fallen over and not been repaired; it was there in the cold, waiting stillness of the small towns he drove his Scout through: Lamont, Muddy Gap, Jeffrey City, Lander, Crowheart.

        His loneliness grew with his realization of the emptiness, with his internalization of the death feeling. He grew more and more certain that he was never going to see the Boulder Free Zone again, or the people who lived there—Frannie, Lucy, the Lauder boy, Nick Andros. He began to think he knew how Cain must have felt when God exiled him to the land of Nod.

        Only that land had been to the east of Eden.

        The Judge was now in the West.

The ending of The Stand was somewhat disappointing and unsatisfying.  I liked the section in which Stu, Tom Cullen and Kojak the dog made their arduous winter journey back home, but the return to Boulder definitely felt rushed.  It was mentioned that Fran had moved in with Lucy Swann (Larry Underwood's gf-widow/future baby mama), but what about ex-feral boy Joe/Leo?  He was only mentioned briefly but nothing was mentioned about who was caring for him?  And nothing on his reaction to Larry being gone?  What’s the point of an expanded edition and devoting so much time to ‘character development’ when not everyone’s ending gets resolved?

And then some months after their baby is born, Stu and Fran move out East to Maine.  There was no goodbye to Tom.  I guess the Christmas scene was enough?  But Stu and Tom went through so much together during those two months, I was surprised that King didn’t devote even a short farewell exchange between them. 

But I think there’s a more practical reason why editors wanted to slim it down – less possibility of printing mistakes!!!   Here is the second part of this review that explains why.    

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On Friday the 13^th, there was a swatting incident at Ubisoft that began as a ‘hostage’ situation.  When Olman came home from grocery shopping, I told him what was happening and he mentioned how he saw cops and police vehicles blocking St-Viateur.   Later that evening, I was reading The Stand, and at page 418, I realized I was reading the same passage again on the next page.  The bloody book was missing pages 419 to 450!

This was the second time a printing error happened to a book I was reading, the first being Far From the Madding Crowd.

What are the chances of that?  Let’s compare with Olman, who has read at least 10x more books than I even had, has never experienced printing mistakes with any of the books he has read!

Not only that, I groaned aloud when I realized later in my reading that my POS copy of The Stand was missing yet another chunk – pages 687 to 718.  This time, I didn’t notice until p.750 when it repeated 719 again. 

I remembered wondering why King never wrote about Larry finally meeting incelly Harry in person.  Pissed me off!

Unlike Madding, which was bought secondhand, The Stand was purchased new, so I was able to submit a refund to Amazon as I didn’t want a replacement for this thick brick of a paperback.  So it worked out as a mixed blessing in the end.   OIman easily found me a PDF, so I was able to read the missing pages and then resume my reading with the paperback.

I had until Feb 2021 to send the book back so I had no problems finishing it by then.  Another reason to finish it was that I had finally received The Queen’s Gambit from Drawn & Quarterly about a week prior.  I so wanted to get that out of the way so I could embark on the Netflix mini series that everyone’s been raving about.

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April 01, 2021 - I finished the new series based on The Stand on Prime.  I heard that the series was a real disappointment for fans of the book.  Since I'm not a fan, I thought it did a decent job, thought there were some serious flaws.

Here's my Letterboxd review.