The Stand Review

The Stand is widely considered one of the best fantasy novels of all time, and now that I’ve finally gotten around to reading it, I must agree. But forget the “fantasy” designation—it is one of the best novels or any kind, period.

Even though it is considered fantasy, The Stand is not easily classified. It is an epic, surely, but it is not an epic fantasy in the way the Lord of the Rings or the Song of Ice of Fire are epic fantasies. What it is closest to is supernatural thriller, but thrillers are usually short in length with non-stop suspensful action. But in a book of 500,000 words, non-stop suspensful action would get tiring. So, no pun intended, I’d say The Stand stands on its own. As a lot of good novels do.

I’ve always liked the novel format because it can be of any length that makes the story work. But even The Stand could have been longer. You see, there are actually two versions of The Stand—one published in 1978 and one published in 1990. The one published in 1990 restored some uncut material and updated when the story took place from 1980 to 1990. The 1990 version is 40% longer than the 1978 version. Why the change? Believe it or not because of a cost-benefit analysis of production costs to sales. That’s right. They wanted to cut the “cost of goods sold” to ensure a good profit margin. In other words, it was just too damn expensive to make a book that big. And, apparently, dividing it up into the three books that are there was, for some reason unknown to me, not a viable option.

Because of it’s length, it can feature a myriad of fun, interesting and complex characters, some of whom develop (especially what you could call the main character, if you could call anyone that, Stuart Redman) and mature, and others that are just exciting (like Trash Can Man). The antagonist, oddly, is one of the least interesting characters in the novel, but we really don’t care about that. The novel isn’t about him. It always about how the characters react to disastrous circumstances. And I won’t give away why I think Redman is the “main character” or the “protagonist,” but I also won’t give away why you can make an equal argument that he is neither of those things. Suffice to say this is an epic, and there really is no one protagonist, or two, or three…maybe six. Yes, you might say there are six protagonists.

The Stand is divided up into three books, each of which follows an Epic structure, alternating between different character points of view to tell many simultaneous stories. The main driver of the first book is an accident at a U.S. government lab that unleashes a deadly virus on the world. It’s more of a horror thriller that shows the death of modern society as the world descends into chaos. Everyone is just trying to survive. The second book is about re-building society, while the third book is fighting a threat to the new civilization. So it is both apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic. The first book is “ordinary horror” while the second and third books are “supernatural.” Like in The Green Mile, the supernatural element is introduced more than one-third of the way through the novel.

I’m sure it’s no accident that there are no wealthy characters in this book. And after society collapses, it wouldn’t matter anyway. Well, there is one wealthy character that dies early on choking on her own vomit. Yes, lots of people die in a plethora of disgusting ways. Maybe I’m too macabre, but I found that a great romp. Then there’s the psychotic arsonist (the aforementioned Trash Can Man). While this character is not explored in-depth, he is nonetheless a horrifyingly fun character, and towards the end you find yourself cheering for him. And then there’s the deaf mute. He writes down everything he says, but somehow King writes it as if he actually talks. Kinda unrealistic, but I understand why he did it that way. And finally, I have to mention the feeble-minded Tom Cullen, who when you first meet him you would never think of him as the hero he becomes.

If you are a Stephen King fan you will not be disappointed in the least.

If you aren’t a King fan, but you either enjoyed a book or two, or haven’t read anything of his, I heartily recommend this novel. The length shouldn’t scare you away too much. If you’re a light reader, what you’ll find is that you’re reading it more and more just to find out what happens next. When you will be disappointed is when it’s all done. You’ll have invested a great deal of your life into this book and you will suffer from withdrawl when it is over. And if you don’t read much, then you don’t really care how many books you read, anyway, do you? If it takes you a year to get through it, so what? How much you enjoy it as opposed to other books you could be reading should be what matters. And most people will enjoy this book. As long as you enjoy reading about people dying in gruesome ways, that is.

Perdido Street Station Review

Perdido Street Station is, at heart, a thriller and horror story. It is science fiction and urban fantasy in its world building--this is not a thriller that takes place in a conventional Earth setting. Instead, New Crobuzon is a large city on some other planet--nothing is mentioned about its relation to Earth at all, but references to other nearby regions lead to the conclusion that it does not take place on Earth. And there's no space travel of any kind, no notion of life anywhere on any other planet. New Crobuzon is populated with all sorts of intelligent species, some of which you might guess were manufactured somewhere, and others you specifically know are manufactured. Plus humans. You gotta have humans, if only as a reference race, something the reader can latch onto and say, "OK, I know who these are, and now I know how they relate to the other races." It's really hard to write a book about alien races without introducing humans as reference, as foil.

Most of the "technology" is really fantasy. Kinda steampunk, but much richer than that. This is mainly fantasy that *looks* like science fiction. No elves here, but there are khepri--humans with insect heads. Fantasy.

But as I said, it's a thriller and horror story. It starts out a little slow, as there is a lot of set-up required for this story in Act 1. Yes, it uses three-act structure. Boo! Hiss! And because of that, the first 211 pages (of the paperback) are slow and difficult to get through. Until then, there's no big action sequence. Is it worth the wait? I decided it was, but I really think it would have been better with some more explicit action. That's not to say some interesting things don't happen in those 211 pages. They do, and they're compelling, and I still recommend you get through it.

Act 2 (3-act structure, boo! hiss!) is a monster movie. We need to fight the big bad monsters that threaten the city. But they don't just threaten the way a few bad mobsters would. There are mobsters and all kinds of unsavory types in New Crobuzon, and while they're all destructive and make life dreadful, miserable, and dangerous, by and large, despite all the dysfunctionality and filth and morbidity, the city moves along, and you could even say thrives, in it's own way, the way mold thrives in the walls of a building. No, these monsters threaten the very existence of the city--not in a cartoonish, there's a matter/anti-matter explosion threatening the city sort of way--but in an insidious, permeating, draining sort of way (avoiding spoilers here), which is what makes it a horror story in addition to a thriller.

Perdido Street Station is dense. It can be hard to read at times, especially with an SAT vocabulary word appearing every 5 pages or so. Mr. Mieville seems to have forgotten to always use a less obscure word when it will convey the same meaning. Because you can only convey meaning if your reader understands what the heck you're saying. And to force the reader to look up a word every 5 pages severely breaks up the storytelling. Maybe if one out of every 30 pages. That would probably be fine. But, seriously, I started counting once I got to page 150 or so: 93. That's how bad it was.

So it's a thriller and horror story, with a science fiction and urban fantasy background. It's a dense read (I had to re-read some pages and sections), it has a lot of obscure vocabulary words, and it's long (probably about 200K words). This isn't a book you read in a weekend.

But man is it fun! As thrillers and horror, it's one of the best. As sci-fi and urban fantasy, it's a great setting. And it's a perfect blending of the four genres. I found it in the library in "Teen Fantasy." Well, you can put it in thriller, horror, sci-fi or urban fantasy, but it's not "Teen." I suppose someone thought all urban fantasy was "teen." But this is not.

I recommend this book. I give it five stars despite its obvious flaws, because, in execution, this book is really, really good.