Stephen King’s epic The Stand is the quintessential novel of good versus evil in an apocalyptic world. Whew! A mouthful for an enormous undertaking of a book, whose complete and uncut version runs close to 1200 pages of reading. But if you are smart, you won’t be put off by the length of this novel – it soon has the reader inside a story that pushes you to try as hard as you can to finish the book before you turn off the light to sleep.

The Stand is a classic tale with a post-modern beginning. “Captain Trips”, a virulent and deadly flu pandemic, has decimated the population in the U.S. and the rest of the world, leaving very few survivors. Those who manage to escape the plague find themselves in a country full of rotting corpses and rampant destruction, having to deal with all the problems of survival faced by our early ancestors but with little experience of what is needed to survive in a brutal world.

The story follows our hero, Larry Underwood, from his awakening to the new world in New York City with the words of his latest mistake echoing in his ears – “you ain’t no nice guy” – to his position as savior of the new world under the aegis of the wizened old Mother Abigail from Kansas. His adversary? Randall Flagg – the dark man – who gathers around him a group of dissatisfied misfits and criminals and uses his dark powers to threaten to remove the last bastion of sanity and hope from the new world.

The action takes place mostly in the west – with Larry and his group centered in Boulder, Colorado and the Dark Man taking up residence in Las Vegas. Much of the tale is centered on how the two groups come together and begin to rebuild in their respective towns with similar goals such as turning the electricity back on, but brought about in entirely different ways, reflecting their motivation.

Of course, the story builds to an eventual conflict between the two groups, with the fate of humanity in the balance. Much of what happens is almost predictable, but the power of King’s writing makes this a page-turner, even when you think you know what will ultimately happen. As with almost any King undertaking, an element of the supernatural mixed with the almost-religious good versus evil is inherent, but even the most skeptical of readers is likely to be so drawn into the realism of the plot that any other-worldliness seems perfectly natural in this oh-so-unnatural landscape.

The book was first published in 1978, although the initial edition was missing almost 150,000 words that were later incorporated into the 1990 release of the uncut version. Both versions have their merits, although I personally prefer the 1978 original, probably just because it was the first version I read. And re-read. And re-read. In fact, The Stand is a book that I have probably read close to 10 times, and each time I take more away from it than the previous reading. The imagery and metaphors for our modern life are cleverly and expertly worked into the saga, and serve to cause the reader to pause and consider how they would behave if Captain Trips came to their town and where they would eventually end up – for in Stephen King’s new world, what happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas any longer.

Find the time to read The Stand and discover the power of Stephen King’s writing. You don’t need to be a fan of mystery or the supernatural. The power of The Stand is its applicability to everyone’s day-to-day life and the question of what would happen, and what would you do, if it all disappeared one day and you had to face a world without TV, electricity, police, politicians, jobs, money, and all the trappings of our modern-day life and find the courage somehow to go on. Would YOU take the easy way out or would you make a stand?