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King wanted to write his generation's Lord of the Rings, and he very nearly pulled it off. It is a sprawling American myth dressed in the clothes of a plague thriller, and the astonishing thing is how close he comes. A weaponised superflu, nicknamed Captain Trips, escapes a military lab and erases roughly ninety-nine percent of humanity in a matter of weeks. What remains is a depopulated continent and a handful of survivors who begin, without quite understanding why, to dream. The good are pulled east toward Mother Abagail, a hundred-and-eight-year-old woman of unshakeable faith in Nebraska. The rest drift west toward Randall Flagg, the grinning dark man whose empire grows in Las Vegas. It is the oldest story there is, good against evil, and King tells it with such conviction that the familiarity becomes a strength rather than a crutch.

The first third is the finest extended sequence King has ever written. Watching civilisation come apart, one stalled car and one silent telephone at a time, is genuinely harrowing, and the early chapters carry a horrible plausibility that has only sharpened with the years. The real triumph, though, is the people. Nobody builds a character who steps off the page quite like King does here, and the cast is enormous: Stu Redman, the laconic Texan; Larry Underwood, the one-hit musician learning to be decent; Frannie Goldsmith, pregnant and grieving; Nick Andros, the deaf-mute drifter; and Tom Cullen, written with a tenderness that never tips into condescension. Even the villains are rendered with care. Flagg is the most magnetic creation in the book, and the gentlest pleasure of the longer edition is the room it gives lesser figures like Trashcan Man, whose pyromaniac devotion gains real pathos in the restored pages.

That longer edition is worth pausing on. The 1990 Complete and Uncut version reinstates some four hundred pages, shifts the setting forward a decade, and asks the reader to commit to a twelve-hundred-page monster. The expansion is not free of cost. There are long stretches, particularly the bureaucratic business of the Boulder Free Zone committee, where the breakneck momentum of the opening sags into exposition and societal theorising. Glen Bateman, the sociology professor, is endearing but is leaned on far too heavily as a delivery mechanism for the book's ideas. A reader could be forgiven for feeling that the original Doubleday cut, lean by comparison at a mere eight hundred pages, is the tighter and more disciplined book. Both versions are great; only one of them is also bloated, and which is which depends entirely on your appetite for sheer immersion.

The novel's other flaws are harder to wave away. King's women, for all that Frannie is vividly drawn, too often function as emotional weather rather than agents of their own, a limitation the 1970s origins of the material never fully shake off. And then there is the ending, which has been the subject of more argument than any other element of the book. After a thousand pages of meticulous build toward a final confrontation between the two camps, there is, pointedly, no stand. The resolution arrives as a literal deus ex machina: a supporting character wanders in with a nuclear warhead, the hand of God descends to detonate it, and Las Vegas is vaporised in a single flash. The heroes who walked across the desert to face Flagg are, in the end, spectators to their own climax. It is the technique we would mock in a lesser writer, and the symbolism is about as subtle as that nuclear blast.

And yet. The book is unashamedly written in a Christian register, with Mother Abagail's faith and Flagg's demonic register established from the first, so an Old Testament God reaching down to settle accounts is not the betrayal it first appears. King handles it through allusion, matter-of-factly, and on the page it just about earns its keep even as it disappoints. The truth is that an ending which fully satisfied would almost have to diminish everything that came before; the journey was always the point, and the journey is extraordinary.

What lingers is not the warhead but the long walk to it: the empty highways, the dreams, the fragile decency of people rebuilding a world from nothing. This is a flabby, uneven, occasionally maddening book, and it remains one of the most compulsively readable epics in American popular fiction. It is King swinging for the fences, and if he doesn't quite clear them, the sheer height of the attempt is its own reward.