Short Version: You know that meme, "Rocks fall, everybody dies"?... Yeah...

Long Version: Minor spoiler alert.
I utterly regret reading this book, it has put me off anything else by Stephen King for life. I am admitting this as a HUGE fan of The Dark Tower series and The Eyes of The Dragon, who couldn't wait to revisit Randall Flagg. But The Stand fails in many basic aspects of storytelling: The protagonists' actions don't resolve the central conflict; characters are informed by prophetic dreams as to what they should do next, even when it's at odds with their personal motivations, common sense, or physical abilities; POV characters are annihilated and replaced with personality-void background characters, not with any sense of karmic justice or literary motif, but simply because... that's life, that's humanity, it's constant random horrors and sometimes people you care about meet quick, pointless deaths...
But backtracking a bit, I'm not just being a nitpicky literary critic. I'm also alarmed by the amount of bigotry in this book. Flavorful dialogue to highlight a character's personality, I could understand. But the prose, the writing /itself/ is littered with hateful slurs: The N word, Red China, Red Indians, the C word, retard, bitch, on and on... The cherry on top for me of hateful imagery was calling the atomic bomb: The Hand of God. In short, the message of this book /seems/ to be: The White Supremacists inherit The Earth. I am scared and embarrassed to have told people I was reading this book. I now feel like if someone says, "The Stand is in my Top 5!" it is code word for "White Power!"
I might have written off the vulgarity of The Apocalypse as simply Stephen King trying to highlight the worst of humanity, and how the best would later overcome and persevere... Except that many of the same scenes, speech, and themes will later resurface in The Dark Tower series. /Now/ I'm concerned that Stephen King has something deep and personal that he's been trying to work through, psychologically, with his writing all these years. I am more afraid of the author than I am the horror story on the page.
I suppose the question at the end of it all is... Who is this book /for/?
If it's a horror story alone, just meant to scare the audience, then it excels in its horror passages. But they are each disjointed, and ultimately a little pointless. They are like short stories submitted to a magazine which was then amalgamated into an anthology: Great in bits, /terrible/ as a whole.
If it's meant to be more of a Great American Tale about how humanity triumphs in the face of Evil, then why do the protagonists' actions not contribute to that triumph? Why are they, instead, sacrificed or saved by The Hand of God?
If it's a modern Biblical-proportions tale, which is meant to meander, meant to show great and terrible acts of man and nature, meant as a cautionary tale to the audience...then wouldn't the intended audience be Christian, or thereabouts? A demographic who would most likely be offended by vulgarity? Why couch an odyssey in a horror story?
If it's for Stephen King to work out some things about sexism, racism, ableism, queer idetity, other religions, and any other demographic you can think of, because every single one of them outside of White Christian Male was insulted in this book, then whyyyy is it not in a long-ago-burned-up-journal that Stephen King kept to himself?
In summary, I suggest that one only read this book if you're teaching a class on how /not/ to write a book.