In 1980, America dies for its sins (pollution of both landscape and spirit) in a shifting antigen plague leaked from some cavern of government-sponsored biological warfare. But the purge leaves certain issues of good and evil unresolved. In The Stand, Stephen King divides the survivors up like tiddledywinks into two camps, one devoted to good …, the other to the devil. Will it be Walden III or the Fourth Reich? In the panorama of mass disaster—and with such moral freight to consider—King loses his characterizations … in a clutter of place-names and products….

[The] devil (otherwise known as Randall Flagg, an agent provocateur out of the Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil) successfully raises hairs on the arms. The prose flows well, describing multiple plague deaths, swollen corpses, and the rantings of idiot savants…. But The Stand is not a horror story like King's Carrie or The Shining, and...