The Stand

The Stand - The Stand ( . English title The Stand ) is a book by American author Stephen King from 1978. The publisher let the book first only in an abridged version published because it was felt, a book of over a thousand Pages are hard to sell. It was only when Stephen King became known to a larger circle of readers that the full edition was published in 1990, which is about 400 pages longer than the abridged first publication. In 2016, Heyne Verlag also published an unabridged new version with 1712 pages. This is one of King's books with the greatest word count.

action

The book covers the story of a pandemic . Although the characters are all US-Americans , it is mentioned in the book that the effects of the rampant virus also affect other continents.

A mutated flu virus breaks out from a secret military laboratory , which was code-named Project Blue in some US states . The military is unsuccessfully trying to prevent the virus from spreading. The virus has a 99.4 percent chance of infection and kills almost the entire American population. As the disease spreads, it is nicknamed Captain Trips .

However, several thousand people are immune to the virus and survive the flu wave. In a depopulated world with millions of decaying corpses on the streets, they have to assert themselves without the comforts of civilization . So there is no electricity or water supply. Due to the greatly reduced population, however, there is an abundance of medicines, (canned) food and weapons as well as all kinds of equipment for everyone. An old black woman, mother Abagail Freemantle, appears to the survivors in their dreams , who lives in a house near a cornfield. Some follow the old woman's mysterious call and move to Nebraska . Visions of a dark man named Randall Flagg appear to other survivors. They move to Las Vegas , where Flagg is establishing a totalitarian state . The men and women around Mother Abagail, however, travel on to Colorado and establish the Boulder Free Zone there . They begin restoring the electricity supply and setting up a medical service. The Free Zone is supposed to become the nucleus of a new civilization.

The forces led by Randall Flagg are building a powerful military force. More and more often, Flagg shows himself as evil personified , as an antichrist and messenger of the devil . He is the bringer of the apocalypse who wants to lead humanity into the last stand.

The story continues to boil down to the all-important confrontation between good and evil. But although the people of the Free Zone Boulder represent the good in people, they are not without flaws either. In turn, the baddies led by Randall Flagg are not all unscrupulous villains either.

The Free Zone finally sends a group of four messengers to Las Vegas. Mother Abagail had given this to them as God's commission for them. Stu, one of the four messengers, has an accident on the way in which he breaks his leg and stays behind. Flagg has the other three messengers captured and wants to put them to death as a deterrent for his followers plagued by doubts . However, one of the prisoners provokes him in such a way that he has him killed beforehand. At the meeting on the occasion of the execution, an atom bomb explodes , which the simple-minded "garbage can man" wanted to bring to his Mr. Randall Flagg.

Stu, who was left in the desert after the accident and is one of the few survivors near Las Vegas, sees the mushroom cloud on the horizon. With the help of a spy from the Free Zone who was able to leave Las Vegas in time, he returns to the zone and reports there on his experiences.

people

Stu (Stuart Richard) Redman is a quiet man from Arnette, Texas. He is at the gas station of his friend Bill Hapscomb when the terminally ill Charles Campion, who was the only one able to save himself from the military laboratory when the virus broke out, rams the gas pumps in his car, feverish and comatose. Stu and many of his neighbors are first quarantined by the military and then taken away to research a cure for the flu. But the virus is spreading too quickly and is raging faster and faster among the world's population. Stu is also the first to be found immunized to the outbreak of the superflu while his friends and neighbors die from it.

Stu is nearly killed by a government agent but is overwhelmed and escaped due to his fear of the flu. He wanders New England for a few days before meeting Glen Bateman and then Fran Goldsmith and Harold Lauder. The four head west and take in new survivors on the way there until they reach Boulder. On the journey, Stu falls in love with Fran and accepts her unborn child as his own. This romance, however, leads to tension with Harold Lauder, who is also in love with Fran. When they arrive in Boulder, Stu gains authority in the Free Zone by becoming the Speaker of the Free Zone Committee and the first Marshall. After an attack planned by Harold, Stu is informed by Mother Abagail that he must leave for the west and face Randall Flagg. Stu agrees and leads Larry, Glen, and Ralph west to Las Vegas. However, Stu breaks his leg in Utah and is forced to stay behind. He falls ill but watches from a distance the final destruction of Las Vegas and is eventually saved by Tom Cullen, who also nurses him to health. Stu and Tom then hike back to Boulder, where Stu meets Fran again, who has since given birth to the first immune child. Stu and Fran later leave Boulder to start their own family in Maine.

Nick Andros is deaf and dumb and is ambushed outside of Shoyo, Arkansas just before the flu breaks out. He befriends the sheriff and his wife, but watches them die when the epidemic breaks out. Nick almost dies of infection from a graze shot, but recovers, then makes his way to Hemmingford Home, Nebraska. On the way he meets Tom Cullen and later Ralph Brentner. The two become a kind of family for Nick. Nick leads the growing community to Nebraska, where they meet Mother Abagail, who then leads them to Boulder.

Nick works on the Free Zone Committee, where he becomes the head of department. It is also he who eventually recruits Tom Cullen to spy in the West. Nick is killed in Harold's attack on the committee. The reader later learns that Nick should actually have led the resistance against Randall Flagg. Nick's ghost appears to Tom Cullen after his death. He leads him home and shows him how to look after Stu.

Fran (Frances Rebecca) Goldsmith , a student at the University of New Hampshire, is pregnant at the beginning of the book. This leads to a painful argument with her mother and the relationship with the child's father, Jesse Rider, breaks down. The super flu takes almost everyone in Fran's hometown, so that in the end she and Harold Lauder are the only survivors. The two join other survivors and make their way to Stovington, Vermont, hoping to meet officials at the disease control center there. However, they later learn from Stuart Redman that no one in the control center survived either.

The two set off with Stu and Glen Bateman, but find the center exactly as Stuart Redman has reported. Then the small group heads west to see Mother Abagail. On the way there, Stu and Fran fall in love, which the reader learns about in Fran's diary. Fran also works on the committee of the Free Zone and sets the moral direction there. Fran and Stu's relationship makes Harold angry, but Harold decides to let it go. Fran remains suspicious of Harold, however. This suspicion turns out to be justified when Harold reads Frans diaries and then wants to kill Stu out of jealousy and hatred.

Fran rescues most of the Free Zone Committee when a premonition about Harold's bomb hits her. Fran is slightly injured in the explosion, but her child survives. Fran is against Stu's trip to the West, but accepts his decision when she realizes this is Stu's mission. Fran later moves in with Lucy Swann and gives birth to a boy. Despite the joy of the birth of her child, Fran is devastated when the baby catches the flu. Later, however, Fran receives the message almost simultaneously that Stu has returned to the Free Zone and her baby has also recovered. Towards the end of the book, she is more and more homesick for her beloved homeland, Maine, and at the very end Fran and her little family set off again eastwards.

Randall Flagg is a demon who appears in several of King's works. He is a kind of Antichrist who wants to prevent civilization in America from being reestablished after the super flu. Flagg is evil personified, compared to Mother Abagail as good personified. He is rallying a culture of evil and technology in Las Vegas. Its appearance changes again and again from human to demonic to different animals. In the book, the simple-minded Tom Cullen describes Flagg as follows:

“ He looks like anyone you see on the street, but when he grins the birds fall dead off the phone lines. If he looks at you in a certain way, your prostate will hurt and your urine will burn. Wherever he spits, the grass turns yellow and dies. He comes from outside of time. He doesn't know himself. "

Flagg has a gift for foreseeing the future, among other demonic abilities. However, when he is unable to put his plans into practice, he gradually loses his demonic powers over the course of history. He appears to be killed at the end of the novel when the hand of God rests on him and detonates an atomic bomb that destroys Las Vegas and with it Flagg's supporters. However, in the end credits of the book it is reported that Flagg disappeared shortly before the explosion and took shape again on an unknown tropical island. He is worshiped there by the locals and consolidates his power again. So the cycle begins again.

Abagail Freemantle is a 108 (in the film adaptation 106) year old black woman from Hemingford Home, Nebraska (there is a real Hemingford, but this may not coincide with the location mentioned in the novel for various reasons). The woman has the gift of the second face, also called Shining (which appears for the first time in King's novel of the same name ) and is in connection with God. This also gives her the gift of the healing hands. She believes she has been chosen by him to bring people together again after the epidemic.

Mother Abagail is the spiritual leader of the good guys in the last stand, but she only plays this role up to about halfway through the novel. Believing that she had sinned - she felt pride in her role as leader - she disappears for a long time in the Colorado desert to purify herself and to repent. Only after a long absence does she return to Boulder, Colorado, the meeting place of the good guys. Here she is able to convey her new task to Stu and his most important companions: They should go to Las Vegas and fight the Dark Man. At that moment she realizes her real task, which is not to lead the group, but rather to show them the right way. Shortly afterwards she dies.

Links to other works

• Randall Flagg is the old nemesis of Roland Deschain, the gunslinger and main character in Stephen King's book series The Dark Tower . On closer inspection, it is found that Randall Flagg is a shapeshifter and appears in several of King's books, e.g. B. in the novel The eyes of the dragon . In the book series The Dark Tower there are several references to a world depopulated by the Captain Trips virus.
• Frannie reads to a terminally ill person from a book by Bobby Anderson, the main character in The Monster .
• Stu and Tom ride a Plymouth on their way to Boulder. A leatherette cover with the initials AC hangs on the car key. This fits the main character Arnold Cunningham from Christine .
• The character Abagail Freemantle has the same family name as the protagonist of the 2008 novel Wahn . As King himself confirmed, it is an urn-nephew of mother Abagail.
• Towards the end of the book, Fran mentions beautiful places in the state of Maine to Stu, including Castle Rock , a fictional small town mentioned in several of King's books.

filming

The book was filmed for television in 1994 under the title Stephen King's The Stand, based on a script by the author.

Audio book

• In May 2012, Audible published the unabridged book read by David Nathan .

literature

• Stephen King: The last stand. German first publication. Translated from the English by Harro Christensen. Bastei-Verlag Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1985, ISBN 3-404-28126-8 .
• Stephen King: The Stand. Full paperback edition. Translated from the English by Harro Christensen, Joachim Körber and Wolfgang Neuhaus. Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-453-43818-7 .

Web links

• The Stand at StephenKing.com
• The Stand - The Stand in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (English)
• The Stand - The Last Stand in KingWiki

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Stephen King: The Stand - The Last Stand novel . Heyne, W, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-453-43818-7 ( google.de [accessed on May 3, 2020]).