The Stand

I read a Dutch translation of The Stand when I was 14, and I absolutely loved it back then. It's considered King's magnum opus by many, and I decided to reread it in English 3 decades later.

It came out in 1978, and as it was such a success, King decided to add 400 cut pages in 1990, totaling at 1,138 pages. I'm pretty sure I read a translation of the uncut version, but today I regret going all in.

King is a great writer on a sentence & scene level, and I was pretty invested at first. But gradually it becomes clear the novel doesn't really go anywhere, getting bogged down in descriptions of a certain kind of America, with characters that have loads of backstory, but remain pretty cardboard nonetheless. You could call it immersive writing, but to me it felt like padding, and this uncut version is pretty self-indulgent.

It takes a long time to set up the second half of the book, and it turns out that isn't interesting either from a thematic point of view either, with a very simple, supernatural good vs bad dichotomy.

It might have worked much better in it's original version, but I guess I'll never find out. I bailed out after 500 pages. I must have read over 15 King books as a teenager, but I don't feel like revisiting any of them again based on this partial reread, even if I can see some of them working very well as a beach read.