A phantasmagoric fable, an American myth, a Christian allegory, apocalyptic science fiction, fantasy, horror, a cautionary tale about technology, a sociological and political thought experiment, a dramatization of the battle between the dualities of human nature: reason and magic, good and evil, selfishness and selflessness, fear and hope, cowardice and bravery, love and hate... The Stand is all of these things and more.
It's not perfect. It's a behemoth of a book (my copy weighs in at 1439 pages), and it occasionally drags on. It's plagued by subtle sexism and casual racism (more on that later). It features one of the most magical of "Magical Negroes" (using that phrase in the sense of the literary trope). Some characters get elaborate backstories, while others get almost none. I would've liked more time in Las Vegas.
But for all that, The Stand is a masterpiece rightly considered one of King's best.
It's impossible to do justice to a book like The Stand in one review, but not just because it's really, really long. All of those things I mentioned at the beginning are going on, usually at the same time. I'll forego the deeper mythological and Christian aspects of the book. Those are probably dealt with better by others.
Let's move on to the problematic aspects of the book. I sometimes wonder if King is capable of writing a book without the n-word. A white character is described as having "Chinese eyes" to make him seem odd. Apparently very few people of color survived the apocalypse at all. Women often end up doing household chores while men go out and do things, and most of the leaders are men. This is not always the case, and I've certainly read worse. There are some interesting exceptions, especially a lot of what Fran does, but at one point King has characters go on about how much women will suffer in the apocalypse in a way that's maybe not so much inaccurate, but not as well thought out as other aspects of the book.
Mother Abigail is the apotheosis of the "Magical Negro" trope. While she is an interesting character and stands in for the "mystical" and "religious" side as opposed to the rational and scientific, she and her magical powers exist entirely for the sake of the white characters. It's also worth noting that the rational and scientific side of goodness is taken up by white men in contrast to Mother Abigail's superstition, which of course turns out to be real in the novel. Anyway, you can read Nnedi Okorafor's much more nuanced treatment of King's Magical Negroes in this book and others (especially John Coffey in The Green Mile).
It might sound like I'm being pretty hard on a novel I claim to love. But I think it makes perfect sense to criticize and love something simultaneously. King is one of my favorite authors these days and I don't think he's deliberately malicious, but his work has some shortcomings.
Another thing I wondered about was that the characters are given a chance to start over and they basically end up reinstituting a lot of the America that was just destroyed. At one point the good folks of Boulder sing the national anthem, crying for the country they've lost. A cynical reading might say King is suffering from some sort of jingoistic patriotism, but I think they are clinging to a memory of a time when things weren't so bad.
The novel does make for some interesting thought experiments. Some of the characters do worry about revisiting all the same old mistakes: pollution, injustice, war, etc. It's interesting to see how leaders emerge. I can never tell in apocalyptic stories if this is something deep about human nature, or just a convenient literary device. Maybe both? It's interesting to see how things run in Boulder versus Las Vegas. I think if King wrote this these days, he'd make plenty of Flagg fans in Vegas vowing to Make Vegas Great Again. But maybe the message is that in the end, ruling by fear and intimidation never really works.
I also wanted to say a bit about Harold, who aside from Fran, Nick, and Larry, is probably one of the most interesting characters. I honestly can't remember how I reacted to Harold when I first read The Stand as a pudgy, weird 17-year-old. But as a pudgy, weird guy in my 40's I see Harold as a kind of guy I could have become and the kind of guy that seems to be at the root of all of today's toxic fandoms, incel misogyny, and alt-right awfulness. The fact that King wrote most of this in the 70's maybe shows that this type of guy has been around for a while. But now they have the internet.
Of course, King's skill as an author gets us into Harold's perspective without in any way endorsing it. I think because I could have become Harold and didn't (for lots of reasons, most of which I can't really take credit for), I worry a lot about what went wrong with our Harolds today, how we should deal with them, and perhaps most importantly how we can better steer young white men away from becoming Harolds in the future. Harold shows us that evil is not limited to magical Walt- er, Walkin' Dudes named Randall Flagg.
But for all the evil in the world (and there is plenty of it), King's deeper optimism wins out. There is a road to a happy ending, but it is paved with suffering and death. I think The Stand might be the best example of this aspect of King's work. If I can dabble in a bit of the mythological angle I said I would avoid earlier, King's vision is of a universe that's hardly puppy dogs and rainbows. Many will die. Many will suffer worse fates. But in the end something like good will shine through. And that, more than scares or complex characters, is what I think explains the deep and persisting appeal of King's literary creations, The Stand being one of the best of them.
See also my Goodreads review.
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