1141

That's how many pages the edition of The Stand I read is. It is a very long book, and if it actually had any margins to speak of, and a print size which didn't require a magnifying glass to fully enjoy, it might well go up to 1,400 or 1,500 pages, no joke.

It took me a long time to finish it (I started it in August) because I would stop in between chapters to read other books. That's what I did from August to October, so, on November 3rd, I still had almost half of the book left. Then, an urge to be done with the thing possessed me (well, that, and the fact that events started to really unfold), and I read the second half of the book in five days of intensive reading. Go me!

The Stand, as you probably know, tells the story of a man-made virus that breaks out of the lab and wipes out 99% of the world's population. From there, a bunch of survivors start having two very different dreams: one that represents the Forces of Light, and another one that embodies the Foces of Darkness. Depending on their nature, people are attracted to one or the other, and then they start rebuilding organized society.

That is a simple outline of the story, and it leaves many, many details out (1,141 pages worth of detail, actually). The best thing of The Stand, Stephen King's best book according to his fans (I, of course, disagree), is the characters. They're very real and tremendously believable, and we get their backstories and an incredible amount of detail about them that makes the reader feel as if he truly knows these people. The worst thing of The Stand is that sometimes you get more backstory that you can stand (no pun intended), especially when it comes to characters you really don't care about all that much. Do we need sixty pages telling us how the Trashcan Man gets from one particular place to another? Not really. Do we need to know everything Mother Abagail went through as a young girl? I don't think so. Then again, backstories such as Stu Redman's or Nick Andros's are phenomenally compelling, so maybe it's just a matter of personal preference.

I read The Stand back in my high school days, and to this day I still remembered the names of some of the characters and some of their attributes, which goes to show what an incredible job Mr. King did with the book and the fictional people that populate it. Reading it again was a lot of fun, since many parts were better than I remembered, but some others were certainly more boring than I recalled. I had mental pictures of a few places the characters visit, and it was great to see those places again. It was as if I had found a snapshot I had taken long ago and then left in a box rarely opened. The sense of "I've been here before" was exhilarating, and getting to hang out again with Larry and Glen and Ralph and Frannie was awesome. The story itself, however, had a more religious tone than I remembered, and that I didn't enjoy all that much, even though it makes perfect sense in the enclosed universe of the novel.

To sum it up, I don't regret revisiting this book, because it is an amazing experience, but I do wish it was a bit shorter. I understand this is the complete and uncut version, since King had to cut around five hundred pages the first time the book went to print. However, and even though I don't think there are five hundred pages that need to go, I think at least a hundred and fifty of those pages (maybe two hundred) should have remained unpublished. On the bright side, you rarely come across such a well fleshed-out group of characters, and for that alone The Stand deserves all the praise it's gotten in the past. Stephen King's best book? I don't think so. An excellent book by an enormously gifted author? Definitely.