The Stand, The Complete And Uncut Edition
by Stephen King
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In 1978, science fiction writer Spider Robinson wrote a scathing review of The Stand in which he exhorted his readers to grab strangers
in bookstores 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
On The Flap
This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error
in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a
chain letter of death.
And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped
of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a
handful of panicky survivors choose sides -- or are chosen. A world in which good
rides on the frail shoulders of the 108-year-old Mother Abigail -- and the worst
nightmares of evil are embodied in a man with a lethal smile and unspeakable powers:
Randall Flagg, the dark man.
In 1978 Stephen King published The Stand, the novel that is now considered
one of his finest works. But as it was first published, The Stand was incomplete,
since more than 150,000 words had been cut from the original manuscript.
Now Stephen King's apocalyptic vision of a world blasted by plague and
embroiled in an elemental struggle between good and evil has been restored to its
entirety. The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition includes more than 500
pages of material deleted, along with new material that King added as he reworked the
manuscript for a new generation. It gives us new characters and endows familiar ones
with new depths. It has a new beginning and a new ending. What emerges is a
gripping work with the scope and moral complexity of a true epic.
For the hundreds of thousands of fans who read The Stand in its original
version and wanted more, this new edition is Stephen King's gift. And those who are
reading The Stand for the first time will discover a triumphant and eerily plausible work
of the imagination that takes on the issues that will determine our survival.
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