Ok so I’ve never read the book seen the move or the show but I love apocalyptic stuff. I saw the book is 1,000 pages. Does it get slow? I’m not a huge reader unless something is really good but I may like this one and I have several trips coming up where I can read on the flight.
One of the best books I've ever read. And I really enjoyed both adaptations/miniseries! Though I like the first one with Gary Sinise and Molly Ringwald better than the second one. In any event, read the book first!
The TV movie beginning with the bio warfare lab getting infected while Don't Fear The Reaper is playing has really stayed with me all these years later.
Holy eff. Yeah, my own twelve year olds would have reacted the same way. Actually, my older probably would have gotten up and walked out of class to sit on the bench outside the room and completely shut down in an out-of-body experience in full panic attack, for 2-3 hours.
This literally happened to them once in seventh grade, when they were watching a movie about racism and how messed up skinheads are/were, and a black man who was crippled by am attack was literally describing how he was floating above the whole scene, seeing a young black man in the ground wing stomped to death, and thought, "Wow, that guy isn't going to make it. That looks painful." He was watching himself die. Our oldest literally got up with tears streaming down their face, walked into the hallway ("without getting a pass or asking to be excused!" Duh. Gee.... Do you think?) and sank onto a bench to stare silently across the hall for over an hour (through class changes, and everything).
We had a warning in their file - that all the teachers were supposed to know about - to tell us first if they were going to show something pte really upsetting to a social justice and caring-oriented empathetic pre-teen with crippling anxiety. Apparently, it never occurred to this social studies teacher that this movie and scene could be that upsetting to a child with autism and severe anxiety. WtaF? What the heck would be that upsetting then, Mr Professional? Wow. They couldn't go back to that class for days, without starting to shake.
I remember talking about that book with my friends who were also fans in our early 20s back in the 80s. We decided they could never make it into a movie because it would have to be something like six hours long. Then they made a miniseries for TV, and it was perfect! Very well cast, also.
I watched it on TV when it was first created. It was a huge deal, and popular! It was a miniseries, and awesome. Cool that it was also on VHS though. I'll bet you can get it on DVD nowadays.
Gary Sinese is one of the most frightening actors I've ever watched "trying to be scary". He regularly puts me on edge when he's not playing a sociopathic serial killer! That eerie, knowing, smirky smile? Yikes.
Yeah, I agree that “the stand“ was one of Stephen King’s finest works. What’s ironic is that he wrote it early in his career, and later when he was being interviewed, people would come up to him and say it was the best thing he had ever written. That made him feel rather upset, because, what author wants to hear that their best work was written 25 years ago?
I read it for the first time when I was a young teen. I've probably read it two dozen times since. Odd as it seems, I feel like my outlook on life has been shaped by that book.
It’s a masterpiece imo. I read it when it first came out and I reread it all the time. I’ve never seen the miniseries because I know it won’t be like the book and I already have pictures of the characters. It’s amazing.
I have a decades long tradition of rereading the extended version of the The Stand every summer. Damn if that beginning chapter hooks you in every time. Absolutely one of my favourite books, and my favourite of King’s novels— which has some strong competition.
The scariest thing to me was the people that managed to survive the plague but then were immediately killed by trivial things. A burst appendix, random accidents, the poor toddler that fell into a well
It’s been implied (in another book) that Satan is another of his names. Flagg appears or is mentioned in one form or another in a number of SK’s books.
Recently re-read The Stand after several decades. Astonishing novel. Justin Cronin's The Passasge is another horrifying book in the same vein. Would not recommend the follow-up novels, but that book made my hair stand on end
It's an amazing book. I enjoy watching both of the series but still not as good as what was written. The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton is another good one to check out, though I like The Stand better.
You can almost take the supernatural stuff out, because a big part of The Stand (like a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction) is that human nature will be the biggest issue after a decimating disaster. Good people will try to band together, but bad people will prey on them.
My guy, I'm on book 4 of The Dark Tower series and I'm on the seat of my drivers seat every time I listen to the damn book. And there is definitely "crossover" (more like honorable mentions) of The Stand and several other books and I adore it as much as Brandon Sanderson's crossovers with "Wit" so far. Lol
Cool thing about The Stand for me. I first read the book in June 1990 and read it corresponding to the exact day to day dates in the book till July or so. After that I spaced it out a bit since the dates were more spread out. So wild and excellent book
This was my sentiment when reading The Stand for the first time back in middle school. It still haunts me to this day. Genuinely, the stuff if nightmares.
King understands the nature of human evil so well. In his books, no mattter how bad things are, someody deliberately makes them worse. That feels accurate.
I don't know if this will help
you feel better. I'm taking a class on the plague, and my professor talked about this book. He said while it definitely takes some liberties (basically always assuming the absolute worst outcome will happen at every turn) it isn't totally far-fetched or unrealistic.
She's not really coming at it from a disaster recovery angle. That was my professor's biggest probelm with it actually, is that she assumes all response efforts would be varying degrees of inept (which again is technically plausible). She also stakes the whole premise of the book on it being a genetically modified form of y.pestis with higher virulence and transmissibility to make it scarier. He thought was unnecessary, and also very improbable because y.pestis is quite picky about temperature and that would be incredibly hard to modify genetically.
Yeah, in my mind, the true pandemic pathogens are always going to be novel viruses. Or, if humans somehow developed a prion disease that was as transmissible as CWD (the cervid prion disease that is contagious via pretty much any bodily fluids contacting wounds or mucous membranes, including sneezes), and that targeted the right protein, it could be an absolute nightmare scenario.
Why lead with “I don’t know if this will help you feel better” and then say something that will absolutely 100% make us all feel incredibly worse.😂 You’re like the arrested development doctor.
America, at a baseline, is selfish. That's why we fail at public health. That's why we fail at mass call-to-action. That's why we failed at pandemic response.
The only thing that actually gets America in full gear is when there's a clear enough external threat that everyone locks in because it attacks their own personal benefit.
MAGA is a death cult. Christianists are a death cult. Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 are a death cult.
"-ists" to distinguish from those who actually do the good works the Bible commands them to
America is just suffering from the apathy and neglect of those who forget that freedom and ethics require eternal vigilance, including the capacity to tell bad faith interlopers NO when they try to bully people.
I do agree there's a shit ton of death-cult stuff that the US should answer for in its meddling and atrocities around the world, but the country at its core would have eaten itself long ago if the worst parts of it had been the majority.
Yersinia pestis mortality rate is around 60%. Nearly 100% if you contract the primary pneumonic or septicemic version. I know it's hot to rag on the stupidity of people in response to Covid, but the mortality rate, and the intensity of symptoms (the plague does not resemble a common cold) would almost certainly led to less deniers. It's also an extremely well documented, preexisting pathogen most people learn about in school, which would help with that as well.
When the Black Death swept through Europe in the beginning if the second pandemic, nearly every European alive would've personally known someone who died. The same would be true in this scenario. The cold hard reality of that would be incredibly hard to deny.
On the other hand, it responds to antibiotics. It's a known quantity, and the best treatment is pretty well understood. One of the scariest things at the start of covid was that we didn't know exactly how it spread, what it could do, or how best to treat it.
True. But again, the premise of the book is that it's been genetically modified to resist antibiotics. And i believe the insinuation in this thread is that, this scientist was a plague researcher, it's not like they were blind sided by the possibility, why did they die? Obviously, you can (rarely) still die when receiving treatment, and it's possible that they were just extremely negligent. But what if it is an antibiotic resistant strain? That would be horrifying.
Her last book about nuclear war was better, IMO. While I think she takes shortcuts in this one, is still based in real scenarios that happened during Covid, so totally possible.
If you like books in this genre, I loved "The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States". That's the best of these three.
I too just finished Biological War. Agreed, not as good as Nuclear, felt half finished comparatively. And good recommendation on 2020 Commission, that is so good. Never checked to see if the author wrote another but will need to now
Is that the one with the scenario of nuclear war and timeline of what would happen and when? I think I did that audiobook and it's pretty fucking eye opening.
I found it almost as intense as "History of a Drowning Boy" by the actual Dennis Nielsen. I read the first chapter of Nuclear War: a Scenario and had to go and sit in a dark room in silence for a good 20 minutes. Fucked me up.
I agree with this take. It was very plausible, but truncated. Like she just had enough one day and decided to end it where she was. Also, the focus was so much more narrow than the first, with next to no information outside of a couple of American cities. This was a book that could have been much longer.
I’ve read it. I really enjoyed it. The thing to remember, though, is that it’s written a bit like a thought experiment about how a plague could spread in modern conditions under a worst case scenario, while trying to be accurate about current geopolitical conditions, if that makes sense? This might account for some of divisiveness.
No, she's a well known fear monger and the book is entirely implausible. My buddy read it (PhD in neuroscience) after reading her nuke book. He argues with me after that book, after he read this one he apologized to me and said he finally understood why I was so adamant about the first book being bs.
The human species may very well create something that gets out of control or faces a natural, biological disease, something like Ebola, that moves rapidly and is nearly always fatal. Instead of nuclear weapons, our demise could come from nature or our fiddling round with it. Or AI will do us in prior to that, as some are warning about.
I used last month's free credit on audible to get it and when my gf asked what I was listening to I explained to her "Annie just has this way of lulling you into a false state of security while simultaneously burning the world down around you"
Wasn’t this how humanity got mostly killed off in Stephen King’s ‘The Stand’, by a virus that escaped a lab causing most people to be filled with mucus and expire?
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u/hello_hola 7h ago
I just read a book about this EXACT same scenario. Book is called '' Biological War, A Scenario ". Scary as fuck.