The Stand
After moving back to Maine with his family, King publishes The Stand through Doubleday publishing. The post-apocalyptic story follows several groups of people on their road to survival before coming together to form a community called The Free Zone King wanted his novel to be an epic.
For a long-time – ten years, at least – I had wanted to write a fantasy epic like [J.R.R. Tolkein’s] The Lord of the Rings, only with an American setting. I just couldn’t figure out how to do it. Then […] I saw a 60 Minutes segment on [chemical-biological warfare]. So […] the and of Mordor was played by Las Vegas.