Review: The Stand

The Stand by Stephen King
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

It was a great ride for 1100 pages. A bit too long in some places, but otherwise better paced than any of the ASOIAF books, although I think that series has conditioned me to expect all 1000+ page books to be horribly paced. It was cool to see how each of the individual storylines began to converge together, and while the transformation from a "post-apocalyptic plague" to "post-apocalyptic good vs. evil" story was a bit jarring at first (it felt almost like reading two separate novels joined at the hip), it worked out in the end, and for a while I was obsessively hooked. King really knows how to draw you in.

And then the ending came along. I actually didn't have an issue with the deus ex machina here at first given the nature of how the entire plot developed, but after trudging through the remaining bland 50+ pages and ruminating over the implications, holy crap that ending sucked- to the extent where it makes you wonder what the point of it all was. Maybe you could argue something about how fate and God worked throughout the entire story to justify it (and other stuff), but it doesn't make the aftertaste any less bitter.

Also, -1 star for killing off my favorite character. I know that sounds petty, but in light of the ending, this death was pointless. The main characters who survived until the end were the least interesting of them all, and it made me almost feel like King was trying to make an ironic statement about how everything you do in this life is futile.