The Stand

“Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.”

From the President's speech, delivered at 9 P.m., EST, not seen in many areas.
". . . a great nation such as this must do. We cannot afford to jump at shadows like small children in a dark room; but neither can we afford to take this serious outbreak of influenza lightly. My fellow Americans, I urge you to stay at home. If you feel ill, stay in bed, take aspirin, and drink plenty of clear liquids. Be confident that you will feel better in a week at most.
There is no truth--no truth-to the rumor that this strain of flu is fatal. In the greatest majority of cases, the person afflicted can expect to be up and around and feeling fine within a week. Further-"
[a spasm of coughing]
"Further, there has been a vicious rumor promulgated by certain radical anti establishment groups that this strain of influenza has been somehow bred by this government for some possible military use. Fellow Americans, this is a flat-out falsehood, and I want to brand it as such right here and now. This country signed the revised Geneva Accords on poison gas, nerve gas, and germ warfare in good conscience and in good faith. We have not now nor have we ever--"
[a spasm of sneezes]
"--have we ever been a party to the clandestine manufacture of substances outlawed by the Geneva Convention. This is a moderately serious outbreak of influenza, no more and no less. We have reports tonight of outbreaks in a score of other countries, including Russia and Red China. Therefore we--"
[a spasm of coughs and sneezes]
"--we ask you to remain calm and secure in the knowledge that late this week or early next, a flu vaccine will be available for those not already on the mend. National Guardsmen have been called out in some areas to protect the populace against hooligans, vandals, and scare-mongers, but there is absolutely no truth to the rumors that some cities have been òccupied' by regular army forces or that the news has been managed. My fellow Americans, this is a flatout falsehood, and I want to brand it as such right here and..."
But people also know that there is no vaccine and that super flu isn't a serious disease, it is a deadly disease.
A super flu was developed by the Forces of the U.S. pig paramilitary and disbursed by accident.
The U.S. pig paramilitary now means to cover up their murderous blander even it means the 75° of population will die.
It is more than a disaster or a tragedy; it is the end of all hope in the government.
If this is a "minor outbreak of flu," why has martial law been declared for Los Angeles and surrounding areas?
If this is a "minor outbreak of flu," then why are barge-trains being towed out into the Pacific and dumped?
And do these barges contain what the population is afraid they contain and what informed sources have assured them they
do contain-the dead bodies of plague victims?
Finally, if a vaccine really is to be distributed to doctors and area hospitals early next week, why has not one of the forty-six physicians that this newspaper contacted for further details heard of any delivery plans?
Why has not one clinic been set up to administer flu shots? Why has not one of the ten pharmaceutical houses they called gotten freight invoices or government fliers on
this vaccine?
They call upon the President to answer these questions in his speech, and above all they call upon him to end these police-state tactics and this insane effort to cover up the truth . .
Somebody made a mistake. "And they're trying to cover it up.
It was the people in authority who did this. They're good at putting things back in order. They've solved the depressed economy, pollution, the oil shortage, and the cold war, all at a stroke. They put things in order, all right. They solved everything the same way Alexander solved the Gordian knot by cutting it in two with his sword.
Mother Nature just doesn't work that way.

The story is set in 1990.
The book is structurally divided in two sections: the first one tells the flu outbreak and its deadly spread.
The second section is underlined by a science fiction post-apocalyptic style, where the main characters are Good and Evil and the survivors of the dreadful "Captain Trips".
"Captain Trips" is the mortal flu virus that has decimated the 99 percent of the American population.
Capitan Trips has been caused by the dispersion of a bacteriological weapon.
The contagion is very fast and the flu destroys the organism in a short time.
Few are those who are immune and they differentiate into good and bad people.
But everyone has his own story: there are university students, children who have lost their parents, arsonists and rapists.
They live in empty towns dominated by nothing, where everyone can have everything, but nobody can live alone.
All the survivors start their travel to East where they hope to create a new life with new friends and a new landscape composed by green fields, blue lakes and high mountains.
On the contrary at the West side, Mother Abgail a woman of 108 years old and a her committee try to recreate the American Nationality, a luxury society ruled by a single man: Randall Flagg, the Black Man.
The survivors can make their choice: to go towards East or towards West.
Among the main themes that King develops, we can find the innate human ability of self destruction, the ability to survive, the choice to live a new life, but above all we discover the supremacy of the Evil's shadow to appear.
The description of the characters (Fran, Larry, Stu, Glen, Mother Abagail, Flagg, Lloyd...) is skillful and it allows the reader to know their inner soul and their emotions.

E' stato il mio libro preferito dell'adolescenza, non solo di King, ma di tutto (il poco) che avevo letto fino ai mei 18 anni.
Ho deciso di rileggerlo 25 anni dopo, in inglese, ed è rimasto il mio libro preferito. Nonostante in questi anni mi sia innamorato di Roth, Baricco, Franzen e tanti altri.
Perchè nessuno come King mi ha fatto amare ed odiare in maniera così viscerale i personaggi di un libro.
Ho portato Fran, Stu, Harlod, Randall e Larry come me per tutti questi anni, e ritrovarli ancora splendenti, anche se visti con uno sguardo più maturo, è stata una delle più grandi gioie letterarie della mia vita.
Non è un libro apocalittico, di sci-fiction, sulla lotta tra il bene ed il male. Almeno non è solo questo.
E' un libro sulla vita, e sulle infinite strade che si possono percorrere per attraversarla, nel bene e nel male.

I’ve always had a colorful mind that teleports me to unknown worlds and it makes reading Stephen King's stories an entertaining experience.

The Stand isn’t for the faint-hearted, the umbrella of political correctness was out to pasture. King is no doubt mischievous and likes to rile readers but it’s for a greater purpose. He wants to draw attention to the unfortunate labels that are prevalent in our and many other societies. He’s advocating in a subtle, yet clever way. It’s not a coincidence that the heroines in many of his books are often individuals that society looks down on. I respect that.

The characters came to life in such a way that it was an intimate affair. I use to think Stephen was all about the scare but he’s a funny guy and it comes through in just about all of his books. My favorite scene was with Stewart and Tom near the Christmas tree. I cried my eyes out. By then, I knew them as if they were my neighbors in the free zone. The most terrifying part of the story was when Flagg and Nadine commenced. It was disturbingly delicious in the most diabolical sense. One could only wish to have the skill to describe something so horrific in such a way that makes the reader want to crawl out of themselves to escape the image budding in their minds.

He has a knack for honing in on the very thing that makes one’s blood crawl, and scraps terror from the bowls of one’s imagination with the stroke of a pen. And that's why, I wouldn't want him to read me a bedtime story.

I must be a rare bird. When I was deciding which book to read I found dozens of praises of this book (even people who had read it several times) but, after reading it, my opinion about it can't be worse.
The big problem of this novel is that King needed 1400+ pages to tell a story that could be told in less than 200. The author's ego prevailed editor's criteria (who are you to cut my masterpiece, I'm Stephen King)
Most of the book describes characters and situations that have no interest at all. Just a couple of the "bad guys" have enough charisma to be hook you to the story. The "good guys" are a set of boring flat characters.
Only the easy going King's prose keeps you reading to the last chapters and these final chapters complete the wreck of the novel: Naive deux-ex-machina ending.
My thouht after finishing the book was that most part of the time I spent on it was wasted time.