The Stand

The Stand

 By Stephen King

After a long, intense reading, I have finished the uncut version of The Stand by Stephen King. But before I get to what I thought of the book and the roller-coaster of reading it, I have to take a moment and angst about something…and I do mean angst because it’s more of an annoying tidbit in the reading experience than anything else.

That is this: This novel was originally published by Doubleday on October 3, 1978, and it is because of Doubleday’s vision back then of selling the novel for a specific price ($12.95 for a hardcover) that King was forced to reduce the original manuscript by roughly 300 pages in order to satisfy the accounting department’s justification of costs.

All that aside. When King sold the rights for the paperback rights and, eventually, set out to restore the lost pages in 1988, King annoyingly attempted to modernize the manuscript rather than keep it in the original setting it was written for (the years 1980 to 1981). The paperback edition set the story in 1985 to 1986, and the final product (because I believe it is impossible to buy a brand new printing of the original version) now takes place in 1990 to 1991.

I angst about this little thing (and I do mean little because most of the book does read like it was meant to take place in the 1980’s) because there are minor instances where King dropped the ball modernizing the text. And when they’re found, they remove the reader from the world of the story. I include this not as part of the review itself because, judging by most reviews I’ve read, most readers tend to overlook it.

So now that my angst is over with, we can get onto the good stuff, yes?

Excellent.

King really outdoes himself with the whole premise of this novel and the way he takes it out of the horror realm and adds in a lot of literary genre, specifically through societal criticism. He does this by structuring his novel as a figurative circle, which in all honesty is brilliant. Perhaps the line that struck me the most was: “The toys are all out there just waiting to be picked up again.” In one line King not only offers the reader a dose of what will eventually kill society (our “toys”) but also the fact that if given enough time we will never learn those “toys” (as he puts it) will eventually be our downfall again. It’s the choice, King suggests, that we have to make whether or not we will allow the circle to go ‘round and ‘round again. From that perspective, King really hits the ball out of the park there.

But this being the uncut version, I must confess that I subconsciously approached the reading of this novel as I would reading one of my own stories…with a watchful eye for edits. There were a great many moments where I highly suspected that King originally had cut slivers out and then re-added them in, perhaps even welded some of his sentences together without too much of an eye towards what was foretold two paragraphs later. Some of his lines were repetitive, almost to the point that some scenes read like caricatures of scenes rather than actually happening.

I found myself looking at this novel how I would personally edit it—what I’d keep and what I’d change up. For one example, King takes entirely too long to get from the climax to the ending, blowing about forty pages on parts that seemed irrelevant to me (I’m really trying my best here not to give too many spoilers, so bear with me, folks). For thinking about structure, one craft book I like to make reference to is K.M. Weiland’s book Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story because she breaks down how we typically think of traditional novel structure into sections. In this craft book, Weiland suggests that usually the falling action and resolution are a small segment at the end which serves to tie together all of the loose ends created from the rest of the story. While King is successful in tying together all of his loose ends, he spends entirely too many pages doing so—so many pages that this reader found it difficult to continue to be engaged in the story because my eye kept coming across paragraphs I’d either condense or scrap altogether.

Until a part of me just wished he’d end the book already.

Meanwhile, the climax itself was, more or less, an anti-climax when it all boiled down to it… I hate to be the nitpicker here because I truly did enjoy the novel as a whole, but King had enough components and had set the stage beautifully for all of them to come together in such a fashion that would have had the same outcome but (through slightly different methods) could have had a little bit more juice to the fine steak he tried serving the readers. Instead, his falling action encompasses more pages than his climax, to the point the climax reads almost like an after-thought.

I will be fair and suggest that, given the other more obvious edits, there were probably a lot of added pieces which took away from what was already there (specifically the climax). And I understand the point he was making thematically and how specifically he structured the novel to directly craft that point that, in true cyclical fashion, humans will forever find ways of destroying themselves if given enough time. But do I feel that all of these edits were worth the new edition?

Yes and no…

After doing a little research around the web about what exactly is missing between the uncut and the cut versions, it’s my opinion as a writer that King could have added perhaps 150-200 pages and not sacrificed the momentum or the scare that must be in the original 1978 version. He could have had a complicated plot that still handled time and pacing successfully that the reader would find it difficult to put the novel down. Instead, he added more pages than necessary that made the power of the text falter and drag where it could have accelerated.

I feel that as a literary text, The Stand as it stands (in its entirety) is worth a read, especially if you’ve ever given any thought to the world around you and what we take for granted—and what consequences we fear we’ll face in the event those we trust with our “toys” drop the ball. For only his fourth novel, you can definitely see King’s skill as a story-teller and his solidification as a literary horror writer.

He wrote characters that read like human beings and gave them complicated relationships with each other, society, and religion that transform this work from basic genre-fiction into art. With imaginative thematic passages and incredible insights into humanity, The Stand is a novel that is worth the time. I would recommend anyone looking for good example for writing do’s and don’ts or anyone wanting a hell of a thought journey about society give this one a go.

Seriously, just give it a read.