The Stand

The Stand is an epic post-apocalyptic dark fantasy novel by the American author Stephen King, first published in 1978 by Doubleday. Its plot centres on a deadly pandemic of weaponised influenza and its aftermath, in which the surviving humans gather into factions led by personifications of good and evil.

King began writing the story in February 1975 with the intention of producing an epic in the spirit of The Lord of the Rings, and found the book difficult to write because of the number of characters and storylines. That scale is why the novel is usually described as an epic rather than simply as a pandemic story. The virus is called Captain Tripps, and it gets out when one man leaves a biological-weapon facility after an accident.

The novel marks the first appearance of Randall Flagg, King's recurring antagonist, who would return in other books including the Dark Tower sequence. The framing of the aftermath as a choice between two leaders is what gives the book its moral structure, and the opening, in which a single escape from a research facility releases the virus, keeps the catastrophe attributable to a specific institutional failure.