This incredibly long work of fiction by King was an interesting read, but drug on for too long. I enjoyed the shift of the book from the first half to the second, where we begin to see the story’s characters come together in a more meaningful, overarching plot. The characters in The Stand are very real. Each one is given a very specific, very meditated personality that King hand-crafted; they truly feel like people you could meet on the corner, complete with human desires, good and bad. The second half of the book dives into pseudo-spiritual human elements which led to an interesting story, but it’s never explained quite enough to satisfy my curiosity. The book has an interesting and somewhat unsatisfying ending which suggests that the “bad guy” Randall Flagg is never destroyed, but merely exists as some form of devil who simply moves from place to place to raise up evil.
Over the course of its several hundred densely filled pages, you begin to form emotional attachments to these incredibly realistic characters, and when I finally reached the final page, I finished in tears.