The Stand by Stephen King

Has anybody here read this book? I think this is probably one of the longest novels Stephen King has ever written, I haven't read it yet myself, last year I got a couple of chapters but not much...but they recently had the miniseries on SyFy again and it's got me interested in taking it up again, and I'm lucky because the library here has the full uncut edition.


I've asked before WHAT exactly was missing in the 300+ that was cut from the first editions but people can't really seem to answer on that one, I wonder why?

Anyway, has anyone else here read through the 'War and Peace' of Stephen King?

I know I responded to this before. Don't know why it didn't show up. Anyway, yes I read the original years ago and as much as I liked it in particular and King in general I don't have any plans to re-read it or the expanded edition any time soon. Ask yourself this though. Would they have published the original if they had edited out anything vital in the first place?

Well King certainly thought what was taken out deserved to be put back in, and he admitted himself that it wasn't ALL there the second go around, that some things were still left on the cutting room floor because they weren't important to the story.

In the foreward to the book he explains that the cuts were made because of basically money reasons because they couldn't sell a book that long for the $13 they were trying for originally. And they gave him a choice of him picking what had to go, or they'd do it themselves, and he did it so you have to wonder if it had been up to the editors, what would they have taken out that he didn't?

From The Straight Dope.com:

In the unabridged version, there are a bunch of vignettes about people who survived the initial Superflu but died of accidents or other causes later. One man died of a heroin overdose, one man died while jogging incessantly, one boy fell down a well, etc.

From The New York Times:Books

Hundreds of pages of text are devoted to vignettes - some poignant, nearly all disgusting - of Americans in all regions and walks of life being stopped in the tracks of their ordinary existence by the dread and incurable disease. Two things make Mr. King's rendering of this phenomenon peculiar, one might almost say original. The first is the sheer number of cases reported and described. At first, you read along expecting things to change, a cure to be found, an escape to be discovered, but after 300 or more pages it becomes clear that variations on one theme - not progress - are the novelist's plan.

Also for your amusement:
http://www.funtrivia.com/quizzes/literature/stephen_king/the_stand.html

Have you read The Dark Tower series? The Stand is one of about a dozen other titles that are related to it. As long as The Stand is, if you count all seven books together (and they're really just part of one long story), it dwarfs The Stand.

So I'm about 400 pages into the book now, and one thing I want to comment on...when people discuss the miniseries vs the book, they say how different Harold is, how he's nicer in the book, I'm not seeing that. He starts off as annoying, and right away thinks, like I said before ever opening the book, that he OWNS Fran, that she is his property, he seems to have it in his head that his word is the Gospel and anyone who even opens their mouth to what he has to say is immediately wrong and a liar and looking to kill them because nobody except him knows anything. Annoying as hell and I can't wait for him to be killed off.

I just had to comment...it's so funny how sometimes you find JUST what you're looking for when you're not even looking for it. I stopped in at a thrift shop today on a whim and went over to the books section and THERE on the $1.00 shelf is a pocket version of the full uncut The Stand...which I'm glad for because this way I don't have to worry about getting the library's huge bulky copy back to them on time with still 600 pages to go through.