The Stand by Stephen King

Hold it right there. One thousand, four hundred and forty pages. Let me say that again. ONE THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED AND FORTY PAGES - plus the preface which has Roman numerals for page numbers. Folks. This one took a while to read.

The end of the word as we know it has arrived. Approximately 90% of the population have died. There are hardly any doctors left, no electricity, people are scattered across America... And of course, it is Stephen King, so there has to be something else going on too.

I picked this one up for the reading challenge I am doing this year, which required that I read a book published in the year I was born. 1978. Of all the books that were published that year, this was the one that struck my fancy the most.

Now, this was not a bad one, I must say. But, shew, it was long winded. Now, this is not necessarily a bad thing - if you happen to like books that you can happily live in (and I use the word 'happily' very lightly here) for a couple of weeks. Then perhaps this is the book for you. If you get frustrated with long, expansive details that aren't actually necessary to the plot, then you should give this one a skip. There are LOADS of details in this one.

My favourite part was the beginning of the book, watching the virus spread, and I enjoyed seeing how people reformed communities and tried to get things running again. I must admit that the idea of the apocalypse being cause by a flu-like virus was freaky - especially as the kids at school were all coming down with colds, and it just added to the whole experience. As someone who is not American, though, I would have liked to have heard a few things about other parts of the world - although I will concede that without technology, that would have been nearly impossible.

King does a great job of bringing these characters to life. They were real and I cared for them. But it is hard to not care about people after you have read about them for 1440 pages. (Can you tell that I am stuck on that page count?) He had a good combination of both likeable and unlikeable characters, and they added to the story and gave it depth. This novel, mostly, is about people - so although I was more interested in the plot, the people are what made the story interesting.

I must admit that I do fall into the category of readers who get impatient these days. I suppose it is one of the negative affects of doing reading challenges. I enjoyed it but I found myself wishing that some things had just been chopped, if not for my reading challenge, then for my wrists.

I gave this 3 stars on Goodreads. Although King is a master story teller, I really feel that this could have been cropped a bit, and that cropping it would have added to the suspense.

This is the 73rd book I have read for the 2015 TBR Pile Reading challenge.