Wed Aug 06 2003 at 16:33:20 d e a t h , e n t r o p y a n d a n a m e r i c a n e p i c I'M NOT SURE "EPIC" even covers it. At over 450,000 words¹, it's half the length of the King James Bible. It kills off something like five billion people in its opening swipe. It reads like the intersection between Revelation and The Lord of the Rings. And it is horribly, unforgivably engaging. The Stand begins with an unlocked animal cage, or a weak seal, or a broken vial. The origin is not exactly clear. What is clear is that a disease, a made-to-order disease, has traveled, in the lungs of an AWOL soldier, from a military base in Nevada to a small town in east Texas. It infects 99.44% of the people it comes into contact with, and it kills everyone it infects. And containment is no longer an option.