"The Stand" by Stephen King - What Happens when 1% Remains

Regardless of whether or not you are interested in literature, chances are that you’ve heard the name Stephen King being bounced around.Indeed, his fame has grown to a level where pretty much everyone knows who he is, without necessarily knowing what he did, or what he even looks like.

And let me say that this reputation is well-deserved on his part seeing as how he came along with some of the greatest horror classics known to mankind, including Carrie, It, and The Dead Zone.

While he has experimented in different genres from time to time, he is mostly known for depicting the dark, chaotic, violent and insane side of reality, or at least how he would see it.

If you are looking to discover Stephen King and what he is all about, then I definitely recommend that you take a look at The Stand, which is basically a story which starts with a man escaping from a biological testing facility.

However, upon escaping he has also released a much stronger and mutated form of the flu which proceeds to destroying 99% of the human population, leaving only a handful of survivors.

In all the chaos two distinct leaders arise. On one side there is Abagail, a 108 year-old woman who urges people to band together and start building a community in Boulder, Colorado.

Opposite of her stands Randall Flagg, an infamous “Dark Man” whose sole purpose for living is to create chaos and violence. In other words, this is what Stephen King sees happening in a scenario where most of the human population has been wiped out.

As you can probably imagine, the story eventually develops in a complex tale which can’t really be put into a single genre. You will find everything in it including romance, political intrigue, surrealistic nightmares, a conflict between the last remaining human, a struggle between good and evil.

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Stephen Edwin King Personal site Here is a man who probably needs no introduction. Stephen King is known by virtually everyone as being the master of horror, coming up with classics such as It and The Shining, but his literary talents to extend beyond that as he delivered plenty of memorable novels in other genres, including 11/22/63 and Under the Dome.