The Stand (Original Version)

It just would not be flu season without reading a novel about a plague!

The abridged version of The Stand. I have never read this version but I have twice read the unabridged, all 1100 pages. I have always wanted to read this version, mostly so I could explore the differences. Hopefully I will be able to do that - although with so many books in between it seems a little unlikely.

I love that he felt this is his fantasy epic, like The Lord of the Rings. I agree, up to a point, because The Dark Tower series is his LOTR epic. I feel qualified to make that statement since I have read his catalog and I have read LOTR ten times. [Why read new books, when there are so many brilliant ones to re-read?]
Stephen King's Inspiration:

For a long time--ten years, at least--I had wanted to write a fantasy epic like The Lord of the Rings, only with an American setting. I just couldn't figure out how to do it. Then, slowly after my wife and kids and I moved to Boulder, Colorado, I saw a 60 Minutes segment on CBW (chemical-biological warfare). I never forgot the gruesome footage of the test mice shuddering, convulsing, and dying, all in twenty seconds or less. That got me remembering a chemical spill in Utah that killed a bunch of sheep (these were canisters on their way to some burial ground; they fell off the truck and ruptured). I remembered a news reporter saying, "If the winds had been blowing the other way, there was Salt Lake City." This incident later served as the basis of a movie called Rage, starring George C. Scott, but before it was released, I was deep into The Stand, finally writing my American fantasy epic, set in a plague-decimated USA. Only instead of a hobbit, my hero was a Texan named Stu Redman, and instead of a Dark Lord, my villain was a ruthless drifter and supernatural madman named Randall Flagg. The land of Mordor ("where the shadows lie, according to Tolkien) was played by Las Vegas.