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4.14 AVERAGE
4.14 AVERAGE
adventurous
dark
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
i've heard that this is the book i thought the stand was going to be, and that's extremely accurate. a goddamn incredible book.
dark
hopeful
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Good story , but runs a little to long.
The end of the story is wrapped up quite quickly, compared to the whole lenght of the book, some idears are introduced but never followed up.
The end of the story is wrapped up quite quickly, compared to the whole lenght of the book, some idears are introduced but never followed up.
Despite some (IMHO) overly gruesome descriptions, and also despite its obvious ripping off of Stephen King's The Stand in many ways, I ended up enjoying this more than I had expected.
One terribly picky detail - in a late part of the book, there's a bit about a horse affectionately biting a person's hand. AFAIK, that's totally wrong. The mechanics of a horse's jaw makes it so that once they have something in their mouth, they have to bite down until their mouth is almost closed before it will re-open. So they might "nibble" at clothing, or even skin, with the teeth just a tiny way apart, but if they open their mouth widely enough to take in a finger and then close down on it, that's going to HURT (and possibly result in amputation of the finger.) Plus, there seems to be remarkably little difficulty in feeding said horse, despite there being no grass for the critter to forage and one would assume little or no hay remaining 10 yrs after the holocaust. McCammon just doesn't deal with these issues -- I suspect the horse was a convenient fix for the transportation problem and he didn't think enough people would object to those pesky details to waste time figuring out a work-around.
One terribly picky detail - in a late part of the book, there's a bit about a horse affectionately biting a person's hand. AFAIK, that's totally wrong. The mechanics of a horse's jaw makes it so that once they have something in their mouth, they have to bite down until their mouth is almost closed before it will re-open. So they might "nibble" at clothing, or even skin, with the teeth just a tiny way apart, but if they open their mouth widely enough to take in a finger and then close down on it, that's going to HURT (and possibly result in amputation of the finger.) Plus, there seems to be remarkably little difficulty in feeding said horse, despite there being no grass for the critter to forage and one would assume little or no hay remaining 10 yrs after the holocaust. McCammon just doesn't deal with these issues -- I suspect the horse was a convenient fix for the transportation problem and he didn't think enough people would object to those pesky details to waste time figuring out a work-around.
adventurous
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
DNF after the utterly unnecessary rape 300 pages in that took the book from entertainingly incompetent to creepy and gross. This is a terrible book.
I understand why this book is considered as a pillar of the post apocalypse/horror genre. It definitely is. Absolutely terrifying. Some characters own my heart (Josh and Swan, Artie and Sister), some are awful but very real to what would happen in this situation unfortunately...
fucking BLEAK. i had to take breaks reading this because it put me in such a dark & hopeless mood. definitely a must-read for fans of apocalyptic fiction, but know that this one is TOUGH. i don’t know how i feel about the supernatural/religious aspect of the villain - it felt a little incongruous to me, but that might just be personal preference. tw for all manner of human awfulness
Content Warnings
tw for truly ALL manner of human awfulness. racial slurs, sexual violence, regular violence, cannibalism, etc
I get all the comparisons to The Stand because these are both post-apocalyptic doorstoppers, but aside from that, a Flagg(ish) villain, and a couple people having visions of cornfields in some flyover state, they’re not that similar. This one is definitely darker just in terms of sheer Mad Max-level brutality, which is great when you're in the mood for it. I just wasn’t that invested in most of the characters, and some of the fantasy elements were just plain weird/pointless or wound up being ridiculously anticlimactic . The writing was mostly good (minus the POV shifts from paragraph to paragraph), especially when shit hits the fan in the beginning, but don't come looking for Larry’s Lincoln Tunnel scene or a “no great loss” chapter here.
3.5 stars? Overall I did still like this. I did. But listen. All I'm saying is that I flew through The Stand in about a month. This took me seven.
Spoiler
(wtf was the point of Job’s Mask? Why were only some people affected? Everything’s so black and white in this book, it’s not like we didn’t already know who was Designated Good or Designated Evil. Also, who/what caused it?Spoiler
(don’t get me started on the glass ring macguffin, which was built up over the course of the entire book and then used for nothing by the end, and also had no explanation for who/what was behind it all)3.5 stars? Overall I did still like this. I did. But listen. All I'm saying is that I flew through The Stand in about a month. This took me seven.