The Stand
I picked up The Stand by Stephen King on audio book. It is the literary work of what happens when a super flu decimates the human population and how the forces of good an evil are pitted against one another for the remaining souls in America.
Across the board I would say this wasn’t my favorite Stephen King book. There were sections that I found captivating, like how the super flu systematically wipes out American society and what the survivors do to gather themselves together. There are a lot of other spaces where I thought the book was slow moving and disjointed from a flowing storyline. It really seemed as if there were two separate plots that just got meshed together. There is the angle of how the devastation from the flu takes society down to it’s bare threads and then builds itself back up slowly. I thought this was a really interesting reflection on what we should do away with if we are given the chance to recreate the rules, and what is imperative enough to happen over and over again regardless of circumstance. But this is overshadowed by the second storyline, which makes all the survivors choose a camp between light and darkness, where there is a final battle for control over the continent. Will God or the Devil win? This final battle was also a complaint for me. It takes only a few seconds, is anticlimactic, and is never really talked about for the remainder of the book.
Overall I would say this book left me a little confused, and solidifies my opinion that King’s writing had really ripened in his later works. For some reason this book reminded me a little of his Under the Dome novel. So I would say read this one if you’re an avid King fan and can’t get enough, otherwise I would recommend Under the Dome instead.
Malia's Pizza Rating
The Moon Pizza. M-O-O-N, that spells pizza.