I finished
Swan Song last night. It was a good read but I think
The Stand is much better, mainly because the characters in
The Stand are a lot more complex and believable than those in
Swan Song.
Reading
The Stand for the first time, and each time thereafter, I became very emotionally involved in the story. When bad things happened, or characters died, I was often moved to tears. And like real people who may or may not do what you expect of them, I was often surprised by what many of the characters in that story did.
In
Swan Song, I found the characters somewhat two-dimensional. They were wholly good or wholly bad with very few exceptions. Every one of them did just what you would expect them to do. I had no emotional involvement at all.
The end of
Swan Song was actually kind of boring in that I no longer expected to be surprised and I was not. The end of
The Stand, on the other hand, knocked me for a loop the first time I read it and it remained very poignent with every reading.
I like a lot of action, adventure and suspense in a story and
Swan Song had enough of that to make it enjoyable. A really good book, though, has characters that make you truly care what happens to them. And that is where
The Stand is far superior.
IMHO