The Stand

Stephen King 1978

Devastation Rating

Ugly Crying
survival horror loss dystopian

Our Take

A superflu called Captain Trips ends civilisation and King fills the silence with something worse: people. The Stand is sprawling, operatic, often maddening — but the opening plague sequences are among the most viscerally terrifying in American fiction. The horror isn't the virus. It's who gets to rebuild. King makes you care about each survivor only so the losses hit harder.

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