Though I normally agree with @Jeruba, I have to completely take issue here. The Stand is also my favorite BY FAR with Needful Things being second. I also greatly enjoyed Cujo (the book, not the movie), because of the way it built the suspense to a point where you could almost feel what the characters felt. I’m not huge on a lot of his most recent work, but up until the early 90s he was pretty consistent…I didn’t really feel he lost his edge until right around Insomnia.
But back to the Stand, I like stories about the end of the world, which is what this starts out being, but unlike ANYTHING else I’ve ever read, he gets it so right, in so vivid details. He doesn’t take the way out many authors do by joining the story in the aftermath of the tragedy that wipes out most of humanity, he walks us through it in intimate detail, and he does such an incredible job of describing how the survivors deal with and integrate into this new world. There are so many things that clearly WOULD happen if people began to die by the millions, that most people if they were to consider it as a what if would never even conceptualize, but not only does he hit on all the small finer details of what going on living would be like, he does an amazing job of describing human ingenuity and how they end up dealing with it. And that encompasses the first ⅓ of the book.
The second ⅓ is about the journey, about the purpose of all of this, one that was only hinted at in the beginning. We believe it’s just a man made accident, but come to realize that this whole thing has some sort of higher (or lower, depending on who you are) purpose, and people are drawn to either the light or the dark. We meet an inspirational force for good, and we meet the incarnation of the ultimate evil, one which is eternal. We see how our characters who have now formed inter-relationships, tend to migrate, and what happens when a person is torn, we feel the intimate inner workings of the characters’ thinking and really come to understand what motivates each person to make the decisions they make.
And in the 3rd part, we get to the end game, the final confrontation between good and evil, and the rebuilding of conflicting societies, only one of which can ultimately stand.
I would point out to you that this book was originally released in the 70s when King was an up and coming writer, and not yet someone who could pretty much say, “this is it, take it or leave it”. And as such, they cut his nearly 1100 page book down to just 800 pages when it was first released, and indeed cut out an entire character. Fortunately, by 1991, he was able to restore it to its original glory….THAT is the version you should read (I’ve read it like 6 times, and feel like I need to read it again). For my money, it’s not just the best Stephen King book I’ve ever read, but the best book I’ve ever read, period.