"The Stand" by Stephen King
My rating: *****
I was realizing yesterday (and times prior to that) that I had REALLY fallen off the map with this blog, and I missed it. So here we are. Back again. At least (hopefully) for the summer until my life gets crazy again when school starts back up in the fall. :-)
Being a rather big fan of the TV show LOST, The Stand is a book I have wanted to read for a long time since it had a large impact on the writers of the show. And as you can see, it's a HUGE book - 1100+ pages - the longest I've ever read in my life! It was well worth the time, though. As I got toward the end (**spoiler-ish warning**) I tried to anticipate how it would all turn out. As I read the last words, "Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again," I couldn't help but think about a scene from LOST where Jacob and the Man in Black (MIB) are sitting on the beach, chatting as if they are old friends. They see ships off in the distance approaching the island, and the MIB says to Jacob, "They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same." Jacob replies by saying, "It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress." At the end of the show, whether you liked or disliked the ending, they're all together...they learned how to live together. And that was the most important thing - to not give in to the MIB's temptation to end it how it always ends. So it is with The Stand. The dark man will always be out there with his smooth talk, trying to persuade people to join his side - and he WILL get people on his side, but there is also always Mother Abigail, inviting people to follow her. At the end of the day, the power of good and being together trump evil. Every time.
