Blood of Elves
Premio Ignotus and (retrospectively) David Gemmell Legend Award winner: the pivot from celebrated stories to continental saga, and the template for the games' and series' Ciri-centred mythology.
Book Entry · Horror
What is The Stand about?
A security failure at a Defense Department lab releases Captain Trips, a superflu with a 99.4 per cent completion rate, and King spends three hundred unhurried pages killing America — the tunnel sequence, the clear, the dreams beginning. The survivors sort themselves by dream: toward Mother Abagail, a hundred and eight years old in a Nebraska cornfield, or toward Randall Flagg, the walkin' dude, the genre's best devil, building order in Las Vegas. The epic that follows — society rebooted in Boulder, the bomb in the closet, the final walk west — is King's Lord of the Rings, by his own account: American geography as moral landscape. The 1990 uncut edition restores four hundred pages.
Why it matters
Perennially voted King's masterpiece by his readership and the model for the modern plague epic — Station Eleven, The Passage and the entire premium-TV apocalypse owe it rent; twice adapted for television.
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Hugo winner 2016 — first volume of the unprecedented three-peat — and an instant canon entry: the most influential fantasy novel of its decade, on syllabuses from sixth forms to doctoral programmes.