The Stand - Softcover

King, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0340951443 ISBN 13: 9780340951446

Publisher: Hodder Paperbacks, 2007

Synopsis

When a man crashes his car into a petrol station, he brings with him the foul corpses of his wife and daughter. He dies and it doesn't take long for the plague which killed him to spread across America and the world.

About this title

Review:

In 1978, science fiction writer Spider Robinson wrote a scathing review of The Stand in which he exhorted his readers to grab strangers in bookshops and beg them not to buy it.

The Stand is like that. You either love it or hate it, but you can't ignore it. Stephen King's most popular book, according to polls of his fans, is an end-of-the-world scenario: a rapidly mutating flu virus is accidentally released from a U.S. military facility and wipes out 99 and 44/100 percent of the world's population, thus setting the stage for an apocalyptic confrontation between Good and Evil.

"I love to burn things up," King says. "It's the werewolf in me, I guess.... The Stand was particularly fulfilling, because there I got a chance to scrub the whole human race, and man, it was fun! ... Much of the compulsive, driven feeling I had while I worked on The Stand came from the vicarious thrill of imagining an entire entrenched social order destroyed in one stroke."

There is much to admire in The Stand: the vivid thumbnail sketches with which King populates a whole landscape with dozens of believable characters; the deep sense of nostalgia for things left behind; the way it subverts our sense of reality by showing us a world we find familiar, then flipping it over to reveal the darkness underneath. Anyone who wants to know, or claims to know, the heart of the American experience needs to read this book. --Fiona Webster

Review:

A writer of excellence...King is one of the most fertile storytellers of the modern novel (Sunday Times)

'King is the greatest popular novelist of our day, comparable to Dickens'. (Toby Litt, Guardian)

About this edition

• Publisher: Hodder Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0340951443
• ISBN 13: 9780340951446
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 1344