If I like King's The Stand, I'll also enjoy...

…what? I am just now finishing the expanded edition and have really liked it. I believe this is just the second S. King book I’ve read, after ‘It.’ Not sure if the its the narrative flow, the setting (end of world/rebuilding world sorta), character development or what, but I like it. Any suggestions on similar stuff I may enjoy?

The Dark Tower series. King’s self-ascribed opus.

Loved The Stand, could not finish the Tower series. Lord, was that thing bloated and self-important.

Salem’s Lot, Christine, Firestarter. . . all good in my book.

Try Max Brooks’ World War Z. It’s similar in theme to The Stand: there’s an apocalypse, humans endure terrible hardships to survive, then begin to rebuild civilization.

Plus, it’s got zombies.

I’ll second Salem’s Lot. It’s one of my favorite books. If you read it and like it, also check out Peter Straub’s Ghost Story.

Insomnia by Stephen King is really good, as are Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight, two books that each contain 4 smaller novellas.

For more “End of the World/Plague Antics” (my favorite genre), you might like…

World War Z by Max Brooks
The Changed World series (starts with Dies the Fire) by S.M. Stirling
Cell by Stephen King (shut up, I liked it!)
Infected by Scott Sigler
The Taking by Dean Koontz
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

I haven’t read him for a long time, but Robert McCammon is a favorite of people who also like King. Swan Song is McCammon’s apocalypse novel, and can be compared to The Stand. My favorite McCammon is Stinger, about a big monster that takes over a town. It reads like a 50’s B-movie and is great fun.

One of the things I liked about The Stand was the scope – lots of characters, with different things happening to all of them, in different parts of the country. It didn’t drag, anywhere.

Not a horror writer, but another writer who offers a wide scope is Don Robertson, particularly his Civil War novels. He’s TOOP but used copies can be found.

Try “Earth Abides”, by George Stewart. A more realistic take on what might happen after a great plague, and a good read.

You might like The Keep by F. Paul Wilson. It’s good in it’s own right but there were two sequels I don’t recall the titles of. If you like Stephen King’s writing you should pick up Bag of Bones, the story’s a bit different than typical King but very well written, my favourite by him.

If it’s other King books you would enjoy based on your enjoyment of The Stand, you would like the Dark Tower series, as well as Eyes of the Dragon. Also try his short story collections. If you don’t like one of the stories, you can skip ahead to the next one.

*'Salem’s Lot * is my fave. The Shining was 100x better than the film.

My favorite King books: The Shining, Misery, Different Seasons, and the Bachman Books.

That is a brilliant book.

King’s novella The Mist is very good, with apocalyptic stuff going down there as well.

I’d second McCammon’s Swan Song, though virtually none of his other books stand up nearly so well. (And even this one seems very derivative of The Stand, honestly.)

If you like some zombie in your apocalypse, Monster Island and its sequels, by David Wellington are very good. They are available in online serial form or print. Online is here.

Lucifer’s Hammer, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, is a slightly dated but still entertaining “Worlds Collide”-type story about survival after a comet strikes the earth.

David Brin’s The Postman has its fans. I was fairly ambivalent, personally.

Damnation Alley, by Robert Zelazny, doesn’t have the same kind of mystical weirdness as some of these others, but is up there with I Am Legend in its influence on subsequent post-apocalyptic fare.

Man, Monster Island was weird. It was like ten different books all thrown together that never made any sense but was still entertaining.

If I like King’s The Stand, I’ll also enjoy…

. . . slamming your hand in a car door? Poking yourself in the eye with a sharp stick? Over and over for like a thousand pages? Feeding your eyelids to badgers? Pick one.

Ignore him Survey1215 , he’s a Showgirls fan.

Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Pet Cemetery

This is the one I’d recommend; I think it’s a pretty significantly different take on the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it though it does often get compared to The Stand.

Or, if you’d rather be mostly left in the dark as to what caused a world-spread disaster, there’s Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, The Road.

Or, if you’d like a disaster that takes place in a short timespan (over night) and focuses on just a few characters, there’s The Taking by Dean Koontz. It was announced about a year and a half ago that Ghost House is making it into a mini-series, but I haven’t heard of any progress since then :frowning:

Duma Key. The story isn’t epic like The Stand, but so engrossing and entertaining that you won’t care.

I came here to suggest this.