The Stand
By: Stephen King / Narrated By: Grover Gardner
Length: 47 hrs and 47 mins
THE Pandemic book! But, dude—yeh yeh yeh: Budgetary reasons for the edit, but those edits were fine and dandy…!
I first read The Stand as a teenager whilst in the boondocks of Texas, visiting my Abuelita, and if ya’ve ever been in the boondocks, there’s nothing like an epic to get ya through daaaays of looking at mesquite and of listening to cicadas droooooning endlessly. Little did I realize back then that I was actually reading a heavily edited version of what Stephen King wanted—it had hundreds of pages cut due to budgetary fears, as in: Who was up for paying a gazillion and six dollars for a MASSive hardback?
But I looooved it: It was perfect with its horror of a pandemic that wipes out 99% of the population, sparing but a scant few, leaving a battle between Good and Evil. The military concocted a constantly shifting superflu, and Randall Flagg, the Walking Dude wakes from his ever-existing presence to stride about the country, attracting followers, getting ready to unleash unholy hell upon those that are drawn to Mother Abigail, a 108-year Black woman who reeeeally wishes God would take that particular cup from her as all she wants to do is die peacefully at the home in Nebraska where she’s lived all her life.
Uhm, noooo, she can’t. God has called her, survivors have dreams of her, all are drawn to her goodness, a beacon in a crazy and now sometimes evil world (All except for those drawn to, well, King decided to call this Evil in the Flesh: The Black Man which, now strikes me as sooooo inappropriate a moniker—could he not choose something less offensive?). And while we’re on the subject: It would appear that the superflu wiped out everybody except for one Black woman—Mother Abigail—and one Black man—dude on the Evil Side in Vegas—and left only white people (And forgive me for not capitalizing the W in white as that aaaalways has me thinking: White Supremacy, something I canNOT get over!).
But ANYway, you add all that up with women being kinda sorta cardboard cutouts, survivors until they mate with a man, at which point said man becomes EVERYthing to them, and you do indeed have a rather dated book. Since Mr. King not only added the extra pages but also wrote some new schtuff specifically for this re-release, one woulda thought that perhaps he miiiiiiight’ve given a good think to all these things.
Alas, he did not, but when all was said and done, this is still THE ultimate pandemic book, in my opinion; it’s just that all those hundreds of pages were pretty unnecessary: Seriously, I don’t need to get Frannie’s mother’s reaction to her pregnancy as the woman rather comes off sounding like Carrie’s mother so it’s been done and listened to before. Also, EVERYbody notes that things are ticking off “like seasons in a dry age;” one would suppose that really, everybody thinks differently, no?
Okay, so it looks like I keep coming back to griping—lemme get to just how AWEsome this audiobook is: As it’s an audiobook, and not the print version, let’s go on to Grover Gardner as the narrator. At first I thought, Huh? I mean, the man CERtainly can pull off an epic; it’s just that in another epic audiobook I have where he narrates, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (57+ hours)? I set it on my nightstand at bedtime and, despite its being well-written and interesting as all get-out, the man’s voice just has me crashing off to sleep after a relatively short time. And that’s a nonfiction where there aren’t the demands for many many characters.
Well, he was totally suited for this book; yes, the narrative kinda started off drone-ish, leaving me thinking: Uh-oh. But his dialogue was spot on, his ability to command emotion was spot on, his ability to rev up the tempo when action called for it was... spot on! Kudos, Mr. Gardner: Thank you soooo much for keeping me so very invested in the storyline for 47+ hours—Because of you, I finished this puppy in waaaay less time than I’d planned as I simply could NOT delay gratification but got through it ASAP, in a tizzy cuz I was jonesing for my story-fix.
So if you’re wondering: Is this audiobook worth it? Heck YESSSS! Just be prepared for some non-PC winces coming your way now and again (Oh who’m I kidding? A LOT!). But truly, in this age of Shelter in Place and wear your face mask (With some non-masked person coughing in your general vicinity…)? The pandemic part, the feeling of Oh. My. God: THAT person sneezed, has it, is spreading it, is totally worth the skin crawling you’re likely to experience.
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