Stephen King – The Stand Complete and Uncut Audiobook

The Stand was a milestone audio novel for Stephen King, and not merely because it is the approximate size and weight of an actual landmark. It was the audio book that finished his contract with Doubleday and landed him his first agent, turning Stephen King from wealthy author to some very, very rich writer. However, more importantly from a writing standpoint, there’s 1 detail which made it tower over everything else Stephen King had written up until that point, 1 factor which made The Stand particular.

Stephen King – The Stand Complete and Uncut Audiobook Free. And that variable? Simple: it was extended. M-O-O-N long. And that’s more important than you might think.
The Fantastic Stephen King Re-read: The StandAfter finishing The Shining, King took a month off before he started on his next audio book, The House on Value Street. However, after six months of effort nothing was coming, even worse for a character-based writer like King, his characters felt lifeless and made from other sound books.

Sitting at his dead typewriter, surrounded by his own study stuff, he found himself considering the 1968 Dugway incident, where an Army evaluation of nerve gas at Utah inadvertently killed 3,000 sheep, and also about George R. Stewart’s audio book, Earth Abides, about a pandemic that wipes out mankind, and about a lineup overheard to a late night Christian radio channel. The Stand Audiobook Download. “Once in every generation the jolt will fall among them.” These three ideas swirled in his thoughts and collided with his concept of the Dark Man, Randall Flagg, according to SLA kidnapper Donald DeFreeze. Nearly like automatic writing, he started typing a few sentences and, two decades later, The Stand was born.
King described The Stand because his very own Vietnam, an endless conflict that he sometimes despised, but couldn’t appear to finish. It took him two years to compose, and in the meantime he had to placate his starving publisher, Doubleday, with Night Shift when they arrived calling for another novel. The sound book “appears to sum up everything I needed to say up until that point,” King said in an interview. It had been exactly what he wanted: an epic of epic epicness. Stephen King – The Stand Complete and Uncut Audiobook. “I wanted to do The Lord of the Rings using an American history,” he claimed in a subsequent interview, going on to mention that this kind of ambition was something he wasn’t previously keen to admit in the event the music book was be a disaster. And at the beginning, there was every indication that it would be. He could cut 400 pages, or they would. The Stand was the final sound book he owed Doubleday on his contract, and immediately after it came out that he hired an agent, Kirby McCauley, also demanded a three-audio book $3.5 million deal. Doubleday refused to go above $3 million, which may have been exactly what King was hoping for. In seeming retaliation, Doubleday fired Bill Thompson, the editor who’d discovered King and that had been his strongest advocate at the house.
At first glance, The Stand isn’t a very promising sound publication.  The Stand Stephen King (Complete and Uncut Audiobook). Suffused with over just a bit Bruce Springsteen, out of its blue collar poetry singing the praises of small town America to the fact that the title is taken out of Springsteen’s song “Jungleland,” it’s an almost childishly schematic plot. Several thousand Americans are naturally immune to the plague, and the sound book follows a number of these as they dig out of the rubble. Guided by prophetic dreams, the nice survivors congregate to a plantation owned by Mother Abigail, a saintly, 108-year-old African female woman who leads them to establish the Boulder Free Zone. The expression characters are drawn to Randall Flagg, the evil Dark Man, and they set up camp at vegas.
The Great Stephen King Re-read: The StandThe rest of this audio novel follows the fellowship of this faith-based Free Zoners who set off on a mystical quest to destroy the technocratic Las Vegas team who are arming jet fighters and unearthing nukes, headed by Flagg who wants to have a baby and dominate the world. In the long run, the “Hand of God” touches off a nuclear device in vegas and everyone there dies. Stephen King – The Stand Complete and Uncut Audiobook. The final 60 pages are something very much like the conclusion of Tolkien’s Return of the King, as three of the heroes (two guys and one dog) struggle back home to Boulder following their adventures are over. However, they locate home so changed , or they themselves are so changed by their pursuit, that they must leave behind and strike out for wilder land to truly be in peace.
“I was suffering from a excellent case of livelihood jet lag,” King writes concerning the two years in which he wrote The Stand. “Four decades earlier, I had been running sheets within an industrial laundry for $1.60 an hour and composing Carrie at the furnace-room of a trailer. Suddenly, all of my friends thought I was wealthy. That was bad enough, scary enough; what was worse was the fact that perhaps I was. People began to talk to me about investments, about tax shelters, about going to California. These were changes sufficient to attempt to cope with, but at the top of these, the America I had grown up in seemed to be crumbling beneath my toes”.
The Fantastic Stephen King Re-read: The StandBeset by financial and lifestyle complications he had never dreamed of–from everything to do with his money to how to manage the growing legions of Number One Fans–King was also living in a world with rising inflation and gas costs, random terrorist attacks, Legionnaire’s disease killing 34 people in a Philadelphia hotel, and a blackout that left New York City dim for more than 24 hours, resulting in riots and looting. It was a complex life for a man who’d been living in a trailer five years before, a complicated life dwelt in a complicated world that was apparently getting more complex by the minute. The Stand Complete and Uncut Audiobook Download. Not able to fix this complicated, interconnected, tangled up world, King did the next best thing he wiped it out and began. It is possible to feel the fantastic relish King took in burning it all down from The Stand. The utter delight of unbridled destruction rings during the first half of the music publication, most especially in a very long chapter where Trashcan Man, a pyromaniac and mechanical savant, torches a few oil tanks and sets an entire city on fire.
But there was a plotting problem. When the world ends there will be considerable resources for the survivors, so how can he provoke his personalities into doing something interesting? Post-plague, the population could be scattered and likely amble along for a little, possibly with a few mutant biker gangs there and here stirring up trouble, however there wouldn’t be any overwhelming critical for folks to come together and take part in battle. That was a problem because King did not need his apocalypse to be pokey, he wanted his apocalypse to be an epic about the war for the spirits of the lands. Stephen King – The Stand Complete and Uncut Audiobook. His answer was to deploy that laziest of literary devices: dreams.
The Amazing Stephen King Re-read: The StandThe organizing principle of this second half of this audio book wasn’t the jolt, but the dreams, good and bad, that attracted “great” survivors to Boulder and “bad” survivors to Las Vegas, spurring them into action when the more natural reaction may be to stay put. When it’s Mother Abigail’s disappearance, Trashcan Man unearthing a nuke, Mother Abigail suddenly sending the main characters on a quest, Nadine choosing to leave the Free Boulder Zone to have a baby with Flagg, or Harold setting a bomb, it feels like the hands of god is continually poking these figures into movement. Even the end of this audio book is a literal deus ex machina, together with all the “Hand of God” actually appearing and setting off a nuke.
The incessant meddling from on high is one of the weaknesses of The Stand, but the more severe problem is its tendency to participate in simplistic dualism, a dividing of the world into black and white, good and bad, nice and mean. The Stand Complete and Uncut Audiobook Free Online. There is a great old lady and an average old Nixon stand-in (although Flagg was based on a militant radical, he comes to resemble Tricky Dick far more, willing to say anything to get power, but ultimately insubstantial). There are individuals who believe in prayer and individuals who believe in technology. It will not help that the figures, once the audio book begins, are cardboard thin. Fran is a pleasant, practical pregnant woman. Larry Underwood is a greedy rock star. Harold Lauder is an evil lech. Mute, noble Nick Andros is a inspiration. Stop the audio book at page 200 and you’ve got cardboard cut-outs being transferred around a chessboard from the all-too-obvious hands of the author, disguised as the hands of god.
But as The Stand gets longer its characters get deeper only through merit of the fact that they must look in so many scenes. King gives his characters the room on the page they will need to surprise him, and in doing so they surprise the reader. By the end of The Stand, Nick Andros has come to be a cold manipulator, Stu is a waffler, Harold finds pride in hard work and seriously considers reforming himself, and Larry Underwood moves from yellowish belly to hero. Even saintly Mother Abigail falls from grace due to her pride, echoing the narrative of Moses prohibited to go into the Promised Land. Stephen King – The Stand Complete and Uncut Audiobook.
The Great Stephen King Re-read: The StandThe Stand is a sound book where the epic span functions in King’s favor, and he uses it not so much for giant collection pieces (most of the audio book consists of individuals either riding bikes or sitting around speaking) but to allow his characters age, ripen, and mature beyond their first stereotypes. Cease the audio book too early and it’s thin, simplistic, and far too long. However read it all of the way through and you will find that it operates on the same principle that has made HBO’s dramas so great: give fantastic dramatists all of the space they want, over a lengthy period of time, and they will give you characters that feel real. The Stand Complete and Uncut Audiobook by Stephen King. The Stand could be long, but King wants those pages to allow his fictional characters grow a third dimension. Some writers could do it quicker, but King seems to need the pages. What is more, it’s this span which enables his audio book to come close to transcending genre.
Terence Rafferty writing for the Times music book Review wrote that the vital difference between literary and genre fiction was that literary fiction “enables itself to dawdle, to linger stray beauties at the danger of losing its way” If this can be considered a working definition, then King is rapidly leaving genre behind. Even though the Lord of the Rings provided the template for The Stand, it is the minutes of the sound book that linger on extraneous details that make it memorable.
The Great Stephen King Re-read: The StandLarry Underwood’s trip through the pitch dark Lincoln Tunnel is a elongated nightmare that didn’t have to be written, the very definition of a “stray beauty” So is the chapter in which Fran Underwood struggles to bury her father. Or Mother Abigail’s chapter in which she spends all day fetching cows and fighting weasels. Stephen King – The Stand Complete and Uncut Audiobook. There are long sections told by the point-of-view of a single character or another that are simply unnecessary to the needs of genre: Trashcan Man lighting Powtanville on flame, Lloyd Henreid sitting in his jail cell for days on end, Nadine vacillating over what kind of man she would like to be. None of those chapters drive the plot forward, but they really do deepen the characters. In reality, given the audio publication’s preoccupation with fireside chit chat, picnics, and extended walks, so it feels tremendously relaxed for what could, in lesser hands, be another thriller.
Carrie was a gothic portrait of somebody, while ‘Salem’s Lot gave readers a large assortment of two-dimensional characters engaged in an epic battle. The Shining tightened the attention to four personalities and allowed at least one of them, Jack Torrance, to come to life in all his contradictions. Audiobook – The Stand Complete and Uncut. The Stand combines the personality function of The Shining with all the plot-heavy sprawl of ‘Salem’s Lot to provide a character-based epic. So of course it’s long. To compose a sound novel where this most characters make decisions that affect their destinies, behave contrary to their best interests, and whose inner lives do not match their outside, King needed a great deal of pages.
Afterwards King would be mocked for the length of his music books, and too frequently in his later career he would apparently spin his wheels, burning page while not telling the reader anything new. A good case in point is that the inclusion of 400 pages to a new edition of this Stand released in 1990 that did not so much add to its charms as irritate them under much more words. But at the very first version of The Stand the length is only long enough to allow King to let his characters extend their legs for as long as it takes them to come alive in his mind. Stephen King – The Stand Complete and Uncut Audiobook. It is the audio book where he acquired a representative and walked into another publishing house, a challenging move for any author. Beginning here, King would take all the time that he had to get his characters for as many pages as it took. The Stand was the sound book where he recognized he had the capacity to need as a lot of those pages as he desired.