I'm a huge King fan, as you can certainly tell by now, and this is one of his absolute best.

The plot is sprawling and fun, even the expanded addition. (I've read both and didn't feel the extended version was too wordy.) Some of his books did fall into that trap (like Insomnia, for instance,) but this isn't one of them.

It's admittedly been a while since I last read The Stand, so I'm not going to attempt a thorough review. This is just to confirm, in case you haven't given it a chance yet, The Stand is well worth the time it'll take to read it.