Some of the scariest material that Stephen King has ever written — scarier, in its way, than anything in The Shining or ’Salem’s Lot or Pet Sematary — is contained in the first hundred-odd pages of his apocalyptic magnum opus, The Stand. There are no ghouls or vampires in those pages: Just the vivid and remorseless account of how a deadly supervirus, once freed from its home in a military laboratory, swiftly joyrides its way across the continental United States, passing from cop to waitress, patient to doctor, parent to child, as the Centers for Disease Control and the military …