The Stand by Stephen King
In the Stand, Stephen King's expanded, vast, ambitious post-apocalyptic epic urban fantasy, a military experiment gone wrong unleashes biological warfare on the American public(and the world) to disastrous consequences. The survivors across the US slowly group together into two opposing groups united under two very different leaders: the first, 'The Walking Man" a strange revolutionary housing an immortal demon, the second, Abagail, a simple 108 woman with a lot of faith in God. Eventually, she sends 7 people on a hopeless quest over the Rocky Mountains to confront and destroy the Dark Lord...in Las Vegas, where the shadows lie....
The most obvious inspiration for this sprawling(but never tedious) novel is the Lord of the Rings. It's roughly the same length and has several themes, actions, motifs in common. That's not to say it's a rip-off; it is most definitely not. I see it more as a homage to Tolkien's work.
I enjoyed the book from it's horrifying beginning, it's calm, peaceful interlude at the center of the novel, to the explosive climax and long, struggling, denouement. The beginning, the accelerating spread of Captain Trips(the variant of Superflu which wipes out most of the population) and the slow coalescing of the characters into one group was very well done and believable which is no mean feat when you have a cast of hundreds and a continent-wide setting. I loved the trek through the mountains in the winter , a journey one could drive in a day and a half, but which takes the characters, bereft of modern transportation, weeks. That part, more than any other really drove home the collapse of civilizaton that this world had gone through and the spirit of the characters to achieve their objectives in spite of it all.
There is a load and a half of characters in this book, but fortunately King embues them all with enough personality that the reader can tell them apart; and the reader likes and roots for all of them. Well, most of them. Obviously, with the exception of the main protagonist, who is a supernatural being of evil, the rest of the characters, even the minor ones, are not simple: the good guys are far from perfect and the bad guys are mostly just doing their jobs out of fear rather than any real malice.
For some reason one minor character(the Kid) who appears in the first half of the novel really stood out to me; the physical description was just awesome: funny, clear drawn, detailed, very much a cartoon figure, yet...somehow very real to me in the character's stupid Neal Cassidy meets psychotic Gene Vincent schtick. The Kid is a real caracature but he's almost an American archetype in the power he had to capture and even kind of scare me. Like, I've almost known kids like that. Almost.
The quibbles I have are few One which I have it with all of Stephen King's work that I've read(which is not much--I'll be readiing more in the future) is that sometimes the foreshadowing is a little heavy handed. I mean, he tells the story like he tells the story and that's that--who am I to argue with one of the best and most successful speculative fiction authors of all time? But sometimes I think he lays the foreshadowing on a bit too thick. I mean, not only the foreshadowing but the red herrings that are made to trick to reader into thinking it's foreshadowing..It's all so obvious. It reminds me a lot of TV movies or series (this is one of the reasons why I'm not a huge fan of TV shows). And obviously TV has been a huge influence on Stephen King and the way he tells stories. But, you know, I think King(and TV) just underestimates the reader's intelligence, that's all.
The religious aspects of the story are also a little hokey to me--this is a book written for people who more or less identify themselves as American Christian protestants, I guess. Nothing wrong with that, really, but it is something that, again, reminds me of some aspects of TV(especially old TV shows) that I suppose is ultimately very American in it's wholehearted embrace of cheese. But it's so central to the story that I can't imagine excising it.
The climactic point in Las Vegas is unsatisfying. Literal deux ex machina. Not a fan, but whatever, teh rest of the book was enteretaining enough.
One more thing: STEPHEN KING LOVES PRODUCTS. The constant name-dropping of all the products(not crackers, but NABISCO crackers, not a lamp but a COLEMAN lamp, not just a can of PIE filling but...well, you get the idea.) sort of rubbed me wrong at first. I know that it probably embues the story to American readers with a certain immediate realism, but I couldn't help noticing it constantly. It's a real document of American realia that way, i guess, but it took me out of the story. But, as the King is self-consciously telling a post-apocalyptic epic fantasy on the American continent, and the characters are very self-consciously American and patriotic to boot, all these trappings of Americana are fitting and even, ultimately, satisfying. _
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Honor amoung Thieves by Jeffrey Archer
I read this in a day and a half during a time when I was hospitalized for thrombosis and....
My God. Absolutely the most, the worst, the terriblest, comically bad book I've ever had the pleasure of reading all the way to the end of.
In order get back at the USA for the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein steals the original copy of the Declaration of Independence: THE ORIGINAL DOCUMENT, fellow Americans? The one with Thomas Jefferson's decaying DNA on it!! Outraged, aren't you? horrified at the very thought, I'm sure. The infamy!!!
His evil plan? To tear it up on LIVE TV. Despair, O US of A! Gnash thy teeth and tear out thine hairs from the very roots for thou hast been bested!!
In the wake of the decade long WAr of Iraq, I guess there is a sweet sentimetality in viewing the cartoon villain of Saddam Husein during the Clinton era. Life was so much simpler then, wasn't it? Remember when we were the good guys, the winners of the Cold War, the benevolent empire...?(sigh)
Archer's understanding of the nature of American nationalism is about as nuanced and accurate as Roland Emmerich's.
At least I"ll never make the mistake of reading Jeffrey Archer again
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