Stephen King has been writing very good and very scary novels and short stories for a number of years now. The Stand is something of a departure for him. This is not to suggest that it is not good, or, in its own way, scary. But the word which best describes it is one not heard much today outside of English classrooms: epic. Another word should also be resurrected too, this one out of the dusty tomes of Biblical scholarship: apocalyptic….

[He sets the stage] for a conflict, and in reference to that struggle one could dig up one more of those rarely used old words: Armageddon.

Stephen King is a masterful writer…. (p. 378)

J. Justin Gustainis, in Best Sellers (copyright © 1979 Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation), March, 1979.