The Stand (1978 novel)

Cover to the original hardcover novel. Art by John Cayea.

***The Stand*** by Stephen King is the original version of the novel. It was published in 1978 by Doubleday. It is the first appearance of most of the characters, fictional locations and objects.

King's fourth novel published under his name (he had previously published the novel *Rage* under the pseudonym Richard Bachman), it became his best selling novel to date, although it never hit Number One on *The New York Times* Fiction Best Seller List, perhaps at least in part due to a newspaper strike than ran from mid-August through early November, during which time the novel was released. Nonetheless, his next novel, *The Dead Zone*, would be his first to hit number one on the list, and he would have an almost unbroken string of #1's throughout the subsequent two decades.

The novel was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1979 - King's second such nomination after his sophomore effort, '*Salem's Lot* in 1975. It also took 15th place in the 1979 Locus Awards.

By 1990, when King released the Complete and Uncut Edition, he said he received more questions about *The Stand* than any other work he had ever written.

## Plot

***NOTE:* The following sections may contain spoilers.**
The plot of the original is a redacted version of what would be the Complete and Uncut Edition. The original was set in 1980.

## Background

In 1974, Stephen King published his first novel, *Carrie*, about an awkward teenage girl with telekinesis who exacts deadly revenge when she is pranked at her high school prom. The film was adapted by critically-acclaimed director Brian DePalma into a film in 1976, which was nominated for two Academy Awards - Best Actress for Sissy Spacek as the titular telekinetic Carrie White, and Best Supporting Actress for Piper Laurie as Carrie's overbearing, abusive mother Margaret.

Despite the critical and commercial acclaim from *Carrie*, King was still far from a household name. After the death of his mother, Nellie Ruth King (née Pillsbury), just after Christmas 1973, while King awaited publication of *Carrie*, he and his family had briefly moved from his home in Maine to Boulder, Colorado, where he had written his third novel, *The Shining,* about a winter hotel caretaker in Colorado who is driven insane by the ghosts haunting the hotel. That novel was inspired by the drug and alcohol problem King had developed after selling the rights *Carrie*, which would continue to haunt him until the late 1980s, when he became clean and sober. In the meanwhile, both the Boulder setting and the death of Nellie - a health care worker like Alice Underwood - from uterine cancer would inspire key plot points of *The Stand*.

While in Boulder, King returned to the idea of a concept he had kicked around for a decade: A fantasy novel with a clash of good and evil as epic as *The Lord of the Rings*, but set in contemporary America. The Patty Hearst kidnapping and Dugway sheep incident in Utah were also on his mind when he began work on the magnum opus, which took him two years to finish due to its complex and overlapping story arcs and a severe bout of writer's block two-thirds of the way through.

Further delaying the writing was the fact that when King submitted early drafts to his epidemiologist friends Russell Dorr (P.A.) and Dr. Richard Herman of the Bridgton Family Medical Center in Maine, they not only confirmed the plausibility of a genetically engineered virus as deadly and communicable as Captain Trips, but indeed said epidemiologists were surprised one had not already happened naturally. King would later say this was the first time he had ever written a horror which kept himself awake at night.

When he brought the completed manuscript to his publisher Doubleday - while having a severe paranoia attack partly induced by his drug usage - he was informed the publisher's calculations were the maximum cost of a book of his was $12.95, and as page count influenced cost, he would need to cut nearly 400 pages. King himself chose which sections to excise and which to leave, and he rearranged chapters to make the story flow and not leave key characters for too long at a time.

The resulting edited version became this, the "original novel" as it is sometimes referred to in this guide.

## *The Stand* paperback

Cover to the first paperback edition. Art by Don Brautigam.

### ISBN

978-0-451-13971-9

The contents of the first paperback edition are identical to the original hardcover except that the year is changed from 1980 to 1985.

## Chapters

*[See List of Chapters in Original Novel]*