The Stand - Stephen King (book review)

April 22, 2008

Posted in: Books, Reviews

Tags: horror, macabre, medicine, review, stephen king, The Stand, tobacco

So I finally finished it, the audio book that took forever.

I have to say, I was rather unimpressed. I can’t tell you why exactly, if it had to do with the pitiful miniseries or because ti took so long (I’m going to lean towards that though). But I just wasn’t very thrilled at the end.

I’m trying to remember why I liked it before, and why others seem to think it was such a great book. It seemed a little anticlimactic in the end, and seemed a little thin on the macabre.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about characters, because he [Stephen King] does a great job of introducing and developing the characters in the book, in fact I’m afriad I’m not going to spend much time at all on it.

Maybe if Randal Flagg had been a bit more scary, or powerful it might have been a better book, but to me he seemed to be a neutered cry baby who just couldn’t quite make it. But, it seems as though this wasn’t the only time Stephen King neutered the bad guy (I won’t give it away, but I’m sure any die hard fan would know a couple).

I guess a bigger problem for me was drifting off into thinking what happens after the fact, and how much worse off we would be now if it happened. How much knowledge would be lost, and how you go from knowing more electronic based lifestyles to trying to figure out how to make paint. Who would make medicine, or grow tobacco. You see where I’m going here.

But then again this is one of my problems. When a movies over, I sit there and ask, what happens next? I don’t know why, but I want to know. This book leaves a lot of things unanswered, and it’s not the books fault or the writers fault. It’s just that I wasn’t interested enough in the book to care for the current time line  to keep me from thinking of the future time line. I mean who is going to teach other people to become a doctor, and now with more people dead (albeit, higher educated people) what then? It’s the burden I must carry.

The book isn’t all it’s cracked up to be from a horror stand point, it’s a let down in the end with a rather boring climax. Maybe I’m too old to read it? But even for someone younger in this day and age, they’d probably find it a bit tame too. There’s lots of f bombs, and some graphic sexual references so I’d watch it for the younger crowd.

Posted in Books, Reviews