Just wrote a really nice review but accidentally deleted it. :(

Really thought I was going to pull through and wind up liking this book as it ended, but Roy failed to do anything but jerk her readers between grotesque violence and pallid boredom along the undercurrent of an incohesive story. Parts of it were quite beautiful, particularly how she puts metaphor to use, and I admire her writing style for that very reason, but it might be more suitable for poetry rather than a novel like this one. And for the life of me, I could not figure out how on earth these three elderly women tied in. They were there, sure. But they were halfway fleshed out as characters in a story about Nomi's abuse. If anything, it felt like Roy was using details about these characters for filler, which to me, is a hallmark of lackluster writing, rather than employing their detail as a mechanism to reveal otherwise hidden or obscured facets of the story. I think if it was longer, maybe doubled in size with more room to ebb and flow like a living organism, like the ocean she so emphatically describes in Sleeping on Jupiter, Roy could have pulled together something truly extraordinary. Instead, her characters fall flat, only stood up by their trauma and the things that happen to them.

The Stand is a five-star read all around, giving you a bit of everything that most well-read readers look for when diving into a story: perceptible world-building; both contradiction within and conflict between complex and well-devised characters; threads of stories knitted together in an ultimate, miraculous, tormented end; and enough detail to wholly swallow and partially regurgitate for your next readthrough. Some readers may shy away from King's practice of microscopically examining the outer and inner worlds of his characters, but I find it to be what draws me to The Stand again and again. Some readers may say these bits are boring, redundant, and unnecessary, but I believe that it is what brings such vitality to King's work and inherently shows his talent as a writer. The Stand would just be an adult's nightmare without all of those specificities. Instead, King writes as if the words were always within him... all he had to was breathe them on to a page. The details are what makes it feel effortless, for such a hunk of literature. I wouldn't have it any other way.