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A top priority of my 2015 reading challenge was to take The Stand, Stephen King's epic apocalyptic fantasy published in 1978 and reissued by the author in an unabridged version in 1990. When finished, another challenge would be to contribute something new to the discussion of a novel which many of you were handed on your first day of junior high or high school. When Bilbo Baggins glances in the rearview mirror, he sees Randall Flagg gunning down the highway and gaining on him in popularity.

If you've read the novel, please skip the following twenty-nine paragraphs. This plot summary is for purposes of my own dementia only ...

On June 16, 1990, Charlie Campion, sentry at an unnamed military installation in California, wakes his wife in a panic. He grabs their infant son and without packing, the family flees the base as it goes into lockdown. Unknown to them, a weaponized strain of the flu known as Project Blue has escaped and each of them has already been exposed.

Campion reaches the town of "Arnette" in East Texas before succumbing to the virus and crashing into a Texaco station. Of the good ole boys assembled here for their nightly political and economic discussion, Stuart Redman has the reflexes to shut off the pumps before they can ignite. Stu, a strong and silent type, works in a factory assembling calculators.

In Manhattan, singer/songwriter Larry Underwood completes a cross country drive from L.A. to reach his childhood home. After years of struggle, Larry has a hit single with a tune he initially wrote for Neil Diamond called "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?". Lost in a 24-hour scene of drugs, booze and parasitic friends, Larry hopes to get his head together and begins patching things up with his estranged mother.

In Ogunquit, Maine, college student Frances Goldsmith breaks the news to her quasi-boyfriend that she's pregnant, a pharmaceutical mishap with her birth control pills being responsible. Frannie seems to realize how unhappy she'd be married to this guy and indicates that she plans on keeping the baby. While her father Peter supports her decision, Frannie's mother flies into a fury over her daughter's scandal.

In "Shoyo", Arkansas, a young drifter named Nick Andros is attacked by local yokels and after giving them a fight, is almost beaten to death. Nick, a mute who communicates through handwriting, impresses the sheriff with his integrity and is deputized when the lawman needs someone posted at the jail. The sheriff isn't feeling so well. It seems that a bad case of the flu is spreading through town ...

The virus that becomes referred to as Captain Trips spreads from Arnette like a killer chain letter. Charlie Campion infects almost every man at the Texaco station. One of these infects his state trooper cousin, who infects a traveling salesman, who infects hundreds who infect thousands. Captain Trips comes on like the flu: chills, fever, loss of appetite, progresses to swelling and finally, respiratory failure that proves fatal for 99.4% of those exposed. The military goes Gestapo, censoring news broadcasts, executing journalists who stumble onto the truth and finally, exporting the virus abroad in order to absolve the U.S. of blame. By month's end, most of the population is wiped out.

Stu, the sole survivor of Captain Trips from Arnette, had been interned at a medical facility in Vermont. He escapes execution at the hands of his Army guard and making his way through New Hampshire, crosses paths with a retired sociology professor named Glen Bateman and Glen's dog, Kojak. (The virus proved 99.4% fatal among man's two best friends, the dog and the horse). Parting ways, Stu stumbles across two more survivors, Frannie, and Harold Laudner, the obnoxious teenage brother of one of Frannie's friends. Harold harbors an unrequited love for Frannie and without family or friends to torment him, discovers survival skills he never knew he had.

Larry has a nervous breakdown escaping Manhattan, stumbling through a Holland Tunnel stacked with corpses and wandering the country with the conviction that he's no damn good to anyone but himself. Two survivors are watching him: a young schoolteacher named Nadine Cross and her ten-year-old ward, a regressed savage she refers to as "Joe". The boy is as hostile toward Larry as Harold is toward Stu, insecure that the women in their company will leave them for a stronger man. But Larry gains Joe's trust by playing the guitar and singing for him. Meanwhile, Nick bicycles through Oklahoma, where he meets Tom Cullen, a mentally retarded adult who can't read, but knows enough to save his new traveling partner from a tornado baring down on them.

All three bands share intense dreams, good and bad. On the light side, they're drawn to the goodness of Abagail Freemantle, a 106-year-old widow in Nebraska. Mother Abagail is convinced she's been chosen by God to lead her people across the country to Boulder. On the dark side, they're terrorized by a supernatural being going by the name Randall Flagg, also known as the dark man, the tall man, and the Walkin' Dude. Flagg is able to assume the form of a wolf, a crow or a weasel and has an eye powerful enough to watch all the survivors. In dreams, he lies to them, and menaces any good intentions they have left. Flagg is drawing followers to meet him in Las Vegas.

In Boulder, Glen compels Stu to start organizing a civil society before people start forgetting what that was. Stu assumes the role of town marshal, while Frannie and Nick also consult on a committee that begins making Boulder work for the survivors who begin streaming in. Feeling rejected and bitter, Harold and Nadine find themselves drawn into the fold of Randall Flagg, who has unlimited potential for corrupting mortal men and women, but is afraid of what he can't see, which is hope. Both sides sense a great battle coming ...

Stephen King began working on The Stand in the mid-1970s after moving his family to Boulder, Colorado. He was inspired in part by the news of the day: industrial accidents, government coverups and secret military projects coming to light, particularly germ warfare programs. King has often said that he'd always wanted to write an epic fantasy like The Lord of the Rings but one with an American background. Some of his fans maintain that The Dark Tower series is the author's magnum opus, while others consider The Stand to be his best work.

-- King has an extraordinary gift for putting his lens right where I wanted it to be and in The Stand, he gives us a front row seat for the end of the world. A government lab turned into tomb? Check. A research facility with corridors that go on and on, filled with corpses and no apparent exit? Check. Civil society being rebuilt the right way in Boulder? Check. A society of fear being rebuilt the absolutely wrong way in Las Vegas? Check!

-- The Stand taps into the fascination and even sense of wonder that might come from surviving an apocalypse and rebuilding the world, as well as your own life, again. Food and supplies are plentiful. Wildlife begins to come back. The open road awaits. This is tempered with what King is really good at, which is plunging the reader into the absolute terror of losing your family, your safety and your state of mind in the aftermath of mass extinction.

-- My favorite characters existed on the margins of the story, namely, Tom Cullen, whose childlike innocence and susceptibility to hypnosis qualify him for hazardous duty in Las Vegas as a spy. Tom is in many ways a reader surrogate. The magnitude of Captain Trips is so great and the death toll so catastrophic that the only way to deal with any of it would be to revert into Tom's world of toy cars, Pringle's Potato Chips and his friends. He's limited in his thinking but enormously perceptive.

-- In addition to Tom, I loved the character of Dayna Jurgens, a fitness instructor from Ohio and abduction survivor whose mental and physical strength also qualifies her for spycraft on behalf of the Boulder group. Unfortunately, Dayna doesn't have a dry erase board mind like Tom, but her total commitment to her cause and her resolution to die a good death -- preferably taking Flagg with her -- were potent. King makes several allusions between post-plague Vegas and Nazi Germany, and I came to see some similarities between Dayna and Sophie Scholl.

-- The major characters -- Stu, Frannie, Larry, Nick -- all seemed like they could shop at the same hardware store in Maine. They're all white and almost exclusively male. I get that diversity is not really where authors were in the '70s and that King was probably writing characters he identified with, but it's disappointing to see the survivors of the apocalypse look so alike. Mother Abagail is guilty of every stereotype that has since been exposed as The Magical Negro.

-- I accepted the paranormal elements all right but King abuses deus ex machina to get his characters out of scrapes. Psychic visions reveal the true nature of other characters. Ghosts visit the living in their dreams with vital information. Decisions are based on directives from the Almighty, regardless of their logic. Consider how much King typically relies on divine intervention in his fiction and then consider how many pages he has here to slip this stuff into the story.

-- I don't believe that the government coverup material has aged well. Government paranoia was so of this time -- The Parallax View, All the President's Men, Three Days of the Condor and Close Encounters of the Third Kind were in theaters while the book was being written -- and even King has admitted that if he wrote the book today, the virus would be released by terrorists, not the feds. The lengths the army goes to cover up the superflu stretches believability, maybe not in 1978, but definitely today.

-- Five stars and a must-read regardless. The weaknesses I've mentioned are more interesting to me than most of the strengths in a lot of other bestsellers. For example, the lack of color and the obsession with government conspiracy in the novel seem unavoidable considering when it was written.

The Stand has been in the works as a motion picture event since it was published. King adapted a screenplay he hoped George A. Romero would direct (they made Creepshow instead). Screenwriters tried whittling the material down to a three-hour movie until a four-part mini-series aired on ABC in 1993. Adapted by King and directed by Mick Garris, the mini-series is currently available for streaming on Netflix, but this production is from a time when television was still quite bad. It's cheaply made schlock for all ages that alters the novel in small ways, scene by scene until the mini-series resembles the book only in token ways. Ed Harris and Kathy Bates, veterans of King novels on the big screen, appear briefly in uncredited roles, teasing a real, A-class version of this novel that might finally be headed for theaters.