EW #42

Getting through this 48-hour long audiobook was an undertaking and while I didn't enjoy every moment reading this book, I'm grateful I finally got it done. The Stand is a 1000+ behemoth of a novel that has been highly praised by several of my friends who are avid King fans. Like it or not, this book is well-known and has had a significant cultural impact and I'm glad in the know.

Having read this book, and a few others of King's over the years, I have come to the reluctant conclusion that I think his works just aren't for me. On paper this story was something I would love. A post-apocalyptic, Pan-American epic, exploring a battle between Good and Evil and following a unlikely group of heroes in almost excoriating detail! If that sounds like the Lord of the Rings, it's because that's exactly what Stephen King intended it to be like. I love LOTR, I love post-apocalyptic stories, but I honestly did not enjoy this novel.

Stephen King's portrayal of women in his novels is at best offensive, and at worst so uncomfortable to read that I almost abandoned the novel several times. Fans of King's might say that King writes characters you love to hate - characters that beat, assault, and degrade women continuously throughout this novel. While those weren't pleasant to read, it went beyond a few evil characters doing evil things. Almost every time a female character is introduced, the first (and sometimes only) thing we learn about her is what she looks like: her hair color, her eye color, and without fail the size of her breasts or hips and whether or not our male narrator would like to have sex with her. Every time I would start to get into the story, King would introduce a woman and describe how her breasts jiggled with excitement and girlish glee as she bounded over to a male character and I would feel disgusted. Obviously I made that line up, but I almost wish I had taken the time to transcribe these lines just to document how outlandish they are. This is not even mentioning the fact that women's value post-pandemic is reduced entirely to being baby-making factories and the romantic partners of men. We can debate whether this is actually what would happen, but the at the end of the day, as a female reader, I am just not excited to immerse myself in a fantasy world where my life's work would be acting as a glorified incubator. It was just disappointing and not entertaining.

I don't even want to get into the at-times overt racism in this book. I mean, the black men in loincloths systematically murdering their white colleagues on live television? Insanity. King honestly sometimes seems to write his black characters as barely fleshed out stereotypes.

This book came out in the 1970s, so perhaps one can justify it as a sign of the times. But even ignoring all of the above, there are clear pacing issues. To me, this novel really started to get interesting in the 300 pages or so, then abruptly ends. After such expansive build up, the ending felt really unsatisfying. It came on so quickly and left me with so many questions. Randall Flagg was also inherently unsatisfying to me. Doing bad things because he was "Evil" is such a boring and dry characterization - especially considering the lengthy backstories Lloyd and Trashcan Man received. Again, as a lover of Tolkien, I'm not one to criticize novel length. Perhaps reading this post-pandemic, I felt I didn't really need a lot of the description of the character's fear at the unknown disease or how it was rapidly transmitted since we had all lived that in 2020. I wish less time had been focused on the characters backstories/the unfolding of the pandemic and more time on the battle of Good vs. Evil. It's almost like the book needed to either tell a simpler story, or double down and spin this into an even longer tale that spanned several novels. With the story as it is in the uncut version, I am left unsatisfied.