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ninety6tearsAt long last, after a shameful number of stops and starts, I have read The Stand by Stephen King.
Because the number of things that could be discussed about this book is a very long list, I find it an exceptionally difficult novel to summate my feelings about. I finished it a few days ago and had some issues with it but my opinion of it has significantly warmed up with reflection. God, I hope somebody out there gives a crap because I've got a few loads to say about this novel and it only somewhat pares it down that I'm leaving out all the spoilery stuff I could say.
I got the expanded and uncut edition, which is hundreds of pages longer than the original cut and sort of the standard edition now, and with good reason: Some people prefer the original, but it's unfair to say that the newer version is a money-milker since the reason for the initial omissions was not editorial. Stevey was still in his twenties when he wrote this thing and not nearly as big a deal as he is today, and the publishers didn't think people would drop the money on such a long book by an author they weren't familiar with. I didn't feel it was too long a read, but then I'm a patient reader.
If anything, I would have wanted more time spent on some of the characters; there were only a couple important ones who came out feeling a bit thin to me, but the actual relationships between some of them were unevenly developed. I have long held the unpopular opinion that love triangles shouldn't have to be dreaded as a plot element, provided they're handled well, but they're usually not: I could sing hallelujah for the example of one here that actually plays out with very believable and resonant characterization, if only one of the relationships wasn't pretty much given the absolute bare minimum of pages it needed.Meanwhile the precious alpha couple get quite a bit more, despite the fact that they don't really grow together in any way, they're just the mainest of main characters. In addition, I just wouldn't have minded a little more buddy time; after spending pages and pages anticipating when certain characters will eventually meet, it disappointed me a little that some of the introductions were paraphrased. (At least we got that funny first meeting of Fran and Larry and a couple snarky bits of their friendship.)
It's a common complaint, I'm learning, that Stephen King does not really excel at endings. This is my first King novel, and in this case I'll halfway agree, there is a significant feel of anticlimax towards the end. But I'm very much a journey-matters-more-than-the-destination kind of reader and I may have been fine with it if I'd known to stake my hopes on this book really being about the smaller moments and largely hinged on the personal decisions. In retrospect, that's where I think the story packs its most powerful punch: There are very literal forces of good and evil that can lend a more epic feel to the smallest choice a character makes, and a couple of the more memorable characters are on that fragile pendulum between good and bad.
If you're specifically into apocalypse stories you'll get your money's worth of the country turned into chilly unpopulated ghost regions, but there's a little more to it than that. What's amusing is that I thought the book was going to be on the realistic side of sci-fi up until the Mother Abagail dreams came on and then I was raising an eyebrow. The spiritual themes, unfortunately, will be pretty alienating to a lot of readers and were not my favorite thing. I have no problem at all with some godly intervention in my SF/F but I think it's a mistake to make it not just a mysterious godly force but explicitly the God. Not to mention that readers may be distracted by the irony of a Christian writer writing about characters coming to terms with not being able to question or understand God's will, all the while hypothetically presuming to know what God would or would not demand. I just didn't like how I was a little distracted trying to diagnose how fundamental a Bible follower King himself must be where I shouldn't have been thinking of the author at all. There was also a rather BSG-ish anti-technology message that felt about as heavy-handed here as it did there, but I'm okay with a bit of overstatement in a book which may itself be seen as a pile of parables based on a battle between good and evil that hasn't happened, or depending on how far you take it in metaphor, is always happening. And there were a couple subversions of religious tropes that didn't get by me, for example the fact that the only virginal woman in the story is actually inviting evil in by remaining "pure" and pushing away the people who get closest to her.
Favorite characters?
LARRY UNDERWOOD. LAWSON FUCKING UNDERWOOD. Okay, early on in the book I hardly expected him to be one of my favorites but he held my interest: The way his mother looked right through him instead of idealizing him was kind of sad and a couple of the scenes conveying his jerkass side were so funny it kind of disarmed me into already loving him a little. I always have a "Would like to have a beer with" favorite and then a "most well-written" favorite and by the end Larry is most definitely the latter. His is one of the best redemption stories of any kind that comes to my mind, and actually more so because he was never a bad guy (though the overall themes suggest he is definitely capable of evil), he just most definitely was not good, he was a "taker," he was flaky and selfish and couldn't be bothered to be patient with others; there aren't any of the typical explanations for his behavior in how he was raised, either, just this sense that "something was left out of him" that he begins to be uneasily aware of. And at a time in his life when it is extremely difficult for someone to decide to be a better person, that's what he does. And the thing that makes my heart sing about this character is that the changes are charted so much more in how he feels about himself than in how other people react to him; even when he does the right thing, the struggle never ends for him--he blames and berates and second-guesses himself, he develops this need to dichotomize his identity and he continues to think he'll never be anyone's best bet. I kind of wanted there to be more of an emotional payoff to his story in the end, but it was really just that I wanted more of him.
My other favorites: Nick Andros (I would learn sign language to have a beer with him), who was just heart-cooingly such a good guy and very compassionate but also surprisingly capable of ruthlessness even when it broke his own heart...so much fucking love; and Dayna Jurgens, who wasn't much of a major player but probably had more brass than anyone else in the whole book.
It may be worth noting that the unique bromance between Nick Andros and Tom Cullen seemed fated to be one of my favorite things about the story, because it was the reason the book was recommended to me in the first place, in a writing workshop when I was cranking out the section of my novel that involves a deepening friendship between two people who have no ideal mechanism for non-verbal communication. Those two just fucking killed me and that's all I can say about it.
Like I said it's difficult to judge the novel generally, but over time I may actually consider it one of my favorites. I would love to read it again and I'm not much of a re-reader.
I have watched most of the miniseries, and it's...okay. It didn't actually condense things as much as I expected but Nadine Cross is totally bastardized and oversimplified (not to mention treated as interchangeable with a character that they cut out completely), and (LOL) I couldn't help being seriously disappointed that "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" was a pretty lame song. What's funny is that different editions have changed the genre of Larry's music in an attempt to not seem dated, so maybe there is no solid canon on what the song should sound like; I kind of imagined the events happening in the late 70s because then nothing could seem dated (not to mention the slightly sexist and very racist tropes bothered me less if I wasn't trying to pretend the book came out in the 90s) and since Larry picks out some bluesy stuff when he finds that guitar, the idea of him as sort of an Eric Clapton appealed to me (King thinks of him as very Bruce Springsteen).
And I have to say, it had never occurred to me whether or not Rob Lowe is attractive, but putting him in a serious role kind of works and he makes a seriously crushable Nick Andros, if not the one that I imagined.
Also, there is a comics adaptation, but after running across a Tumblr post lamenting how a lot of Larry's story is twisted (in a way that would break my heart in regards to a certain pairing) I don't know if it would be worth checking out.
Because the number of things that could be discussed about this book is a very long list, I find it an exceptionally difficult novel to summate my feelings about. I finished it a few days ago and had some issues with it but my opinion of it has significantly warmed up with reflection. God, I hope somebody out there gives a crap because I've got a few loads to say about this novel and it only somewhat pares it down that I'm leaving out all the spoilery stuff I could say.
I got the expanded and uncut edition, which is hundreds of pages longer than the original cut and sort of the standard edition now, and with good reason: Some people prefer the original, but it's unfair to say that the newer version is a money-milker since the reason for the initial omissions was not editorial. Stevey was still in his twenties when he wrote this thing and not nearly as big a deal as he is today, and the publishers didn't think people would drop the money on such a long book by an author they weren't familiar with. I didn't feel it was too long a read, but then I'm a patient reader.
If anything, I would have wanted more time spent on some of the characters; there were only a couple important ones who came out feeling a bit thin to me, but the actual relationships between some of them were unevenly developed. I have long held the unpopular opinion that love triangles shouldn't have to be dreaded as a plot element, provided they're handled well, but they're usually not: I could sing hallelujah for the example of one here that actually plays out with very believable and resonant characterization, if only one of the relationships wasn't pretty much given the absolute bare minimum of pages it needed.
It's a common complaint, I'm learning, that Stephen King does not really excel at endings. This is my first King novel, and in this case I'll halfway agree, there is a significant feel of anticlimax towards the end. But I'm very much a journey-matters-more-than-the-destination kind of reader and I may have been fine with it if I'd known to stake my hopes on this book really being about the smaller moments and largely hinged on the personal decisions. In retrospect, that's where I think the story packs its most powerful punch: There are very literal forces of good and evil that can lend a more epic feel to the smallest choice a character makes, and a couple of the more memorable characters are on that fragile pendulum between good and bad.
If you're specifically into apocalypse stories you'll get your money's worth of the country turned into chilly unpopulated ghost regions, but there's a little more to it than that. What's amusing is that I thought the book was going to be on the realistic side of sci-fi up until the Mother Abagail dreams came on and then I was raising an eyebrow. The spiritual themes, unfortunately, will be pretty alienating to a lot of readers and were not my favorite thing. I have no problem at all with some godly intervention in my SF/F but I think it's a mistake to make it not just a mysterious godly force but explicitly the God. Not to mention that readers may be distracted by the irony of a Christian writer writing about characters coming to terms with not being able to question or understand God's will, all the while hypothetically presuming to know what God would or would not demand. I just didn't like how I was a little distracted trying to diagnose how fundamental a Bible follower King himself must be where I shouldn't have been thinking of the author at all. There was also a rather BSG-ish anti-technology message that felt about as heavy-handed here as it did there, but I'm okay with a bit of overstatement in a book which may itself be seen as a pile of parables based on a battle between good and evil that hasn't happened, or depending on how far you take it in metaphor, is always happening. And there were a couple subversions of religious tropes that didn't get by me, for example the fact that the only virginal woman in the story is actually inviting evil in by remaining "pure" and pushing away the people who get closest to her.
Favorite characters?
LARRY UNDERWOOD. LAWSON FUCKING UNDERWOOD. Okay, early on in the book I hardly expected him to be one of my favorites but he held my interest: The way his mother looked right through him instead of idealizing him was kind of sad and a couple of the scenes conveying his jerkass side were so funny it kind of disarmed me into already loving him a little. I always have a "Would like to have a beer with" favorite and then a "most well-written" favorite and by the end Larry is most definitely the latter. His is one of the best redemption stories of any kind that comes to my mind, and actually more so because he was never a bad guy (though the overall themes suggest he is definitely capable of evil), he just most definitely was not good, he was a "taker," he was flaky and selfish and couldn't be bothered to be patient with others; there aren't any of the typical explanations for his behavior in how he was raised, either, just this sense that "something was left out of him" that he begins to be uneasily aware of. And at a time in his life when it is extremely difficult for someone to decide to be a better person, that's what he does. And the thing that makes my heart sing about this character is that the changes are charted so much more in how he feels about himself than in how other people react to him; even when he does the right thing, the struggle never ends for him--he blames and berates and second-guesses himself, he develops this need to dichotomize his identity and he continues to think he'll never be anyone's best bet. I kind of wanted there to be more of an emotional payoff to his story in the end, but it was really just that I wanted more of him.
My other favorites: Nick Andros (I would learn sign language to have a beer with him), who was just heart-cooingly such a good guy and very compassionate but also surprisingly capable of ruthlessness even when it broke his own heart...so much fucking love; and Dayna Jurgens, who wasn't much of a major player but probably had more brass than anyone else in the whole book.
It may be worth noting that the unique bromance between Nick Andros and Tom Cullen seemed fated to be one of my favorite things about the story, because it was the reason the book was recommended to me in the first place, in a writing workshop when I was cranking out the section of my novel that involves a deepening friendship between two people who have no ideal mechanism for non-verbal communication. Those two just fucking killed me and that's all I can say about it.
Like I said it's difficult to judge the novel generally, but over time I may actually consider it one of my favorites. I would love to read it again and I'm not much of a re-reader.
I have watched most of the miniseries, and it's...okay. It didn't actually condense things as much as I expected but Nadine Cross is totally bastardized and oversimplified (not to mention treated as interchangeable with a character that they cut out completely), and (LOL) I couldn't help being seriously disappointed that "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" was a pretty lame song. What's funny is that different editions have changed the genre of Larry's music in an attempt to not seem dated, so maybe there is no solid canon on what the song should sound like; I kind of imagined the events happening in the late 70s because then nothing could seem dated (not to mention the slightly sexist and very racist tropes bothered me less if I wasn't trying to pretend the book came out in the 90s) and since Larry picks out some bluesy stuff when he finds that guitar, the idea of him as sort of an Eric Clapton appealed to me (King thinks of him as very Bruce Springsteen).
And I have to say, it had never occurred to me whether or not Rob Lowe is attractive, but putting him in a serious role kind of works and he makes a seriously crushable Nick Andros, if not the one that I imagined.
Also, there is a comics adaptation, but after running across a Tumblr post lamenting how a lot of Larry's story is twisted (in a way that would break my heart in regards to a certain pairing) I don't know if it would be worth checking out.
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no subject
Date: 2012-12-06 02:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-07 05:13 am (UTC)Anyway, I'd be interested to get your thoughts if you do read it. The ending was pretty frustrating for me but there's so much to get out of a book that's so long, it was hard to hold it against it? My other annoyance was with an (IMO) not so strong female character, but I decided against getting my rant on about her because in the long run it felt like kind of a small thing.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-07 08:06 pm (UTC)I’ve heard King’s writing is pretty brutal, and that’s one of the reasons I really want to give him a shot. And I’ve also heard about the frustrating last 300 pages or so of mystical horror in The Stand, so maybe now that I am warned it will hopefully bother me less –plus, I am always all about the journey, and that usually helps with sort of disappointing endings. It’s interesting that you mention this not so great female character though, because heroines are one of my fixations and I am not sure how King’s handles them. I’ve heard mixed things about it and that worries me a little, but I guess I’ll have to try and see.
PS. I see you got a Stand icon. Cool! (This reminds me I still need to find one for Tana's stuff).
PS 2. "Picked my interest"?.WTF. Ugh. Yikes. I kind of hate it when I reread my comments and find this kind of mistakes. LOL
no subject
Date: 2012-12-07 09:05 pm (UTC)Unfortunately it really felt to me like there was a lack of good female characters, but this may have been blown out of proportion in my mind because the one I disliked was probably the most prominent of them (if I think about it, out of my top five characters two of them are women, it's just that those women only get to do so much). There's some brutal acknowledgment of how much violence would be going around after any kind of law enforcement is dumped out of the world (though the worst of this is only in the expanded edition, I think) and of course this is hard on the women, but a lot of them are characterized as survivors more than as damsels in distress.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-08 02:19 pm (UTC)Just got hold of a copy of The Stand (the extended edition) this morning! Though I’ll probably wait a couple of months to start it.