Stephen King

Richard Bachman

Wentworth, Ohio: a small friendly town where the Carver children bicker over sweets in the E-Z shop and writer Johnny Marinville is the only resident who minds his own business. On Poplar Street, apart from the impending storm, it's just a normal summer's day - with Frisbees flying, lawn mowers humming and barbeques grilling. As the paperboy makes his round, he is unaware of the chrome red van idling up the hill . . . Soon the residents will be caught up in a game of wills as the regulators arrive in force to face a child whose powers of expression are just awakening.

The Regulators

From the Flap:

Nevada is mostly a long stretch of desert you cross on the way to somewhere else. And with someone else, if you're lucky...because it's a scary place. Headed down Route 50 in the brutal summer heat are people who are never going to reach their destinations. Like the Jacksons, a professor and his wife going home to New York City; the Carvers, a Wentworth, Ohio, family bound for a vacation at Lake Tahoe; and aging literary lion Johnny Marinville, inventing a gonzo image for himself astride a 700-pound Harley.

A dead cat nailed to a road sign heralds the little mining town of Desperation, a town that seems withered in the shade of a man-made mountain known as the China Pit. But it's worse than that, much worse. Regulating the traffic there is Collie Entragian, an outsize uniformed madman who considers himself the only law west of the Pecos. God forbid you should be missing a license plate or find yourself with a flat tire.

There's something very wrong here, all right, and Entragian is only the surface of it. The secrets embedded in Desperation's landscape, and the evil that infects the town like some viral hot zone, are both awesome and terrifying. But as young David Carver seems to know - though it scares him nearly to death to realize it - so are the forces summoned to combat them.

Desperation

Patrick Book

Call it a sentimental favourite if you must, but this might be my favourite King. It is mystical, spooky, terrifying, and bears witness to an unthinkable level of carnage. 

Given his recent revisiting/sequelization of some older works, I would give my left arm for him to go back to this world (and, of course, that of The Regulators as well).

Sian Wadey

Desperation by Stephen King

I'm a massive King fan and this was a great addition. King is the master at writing about 'end of the world' scenarios and this definatley was one of them. The decription of the town and all the different characters was brilliant as was the lead up to all of the characters being in the same place. I've now bought The Regulators, which is the accompanying novel that King wrote under his pseudnym Richard Bachman.

Celeste Richardson

Actual rating: 3.5 stars, rounded up.

King did a really great job crafting these characters, David in particular. David is a very interesting, multifaceted kid with a fascinating faith. I love the things King has to say about faith over the course of the novel, and how central it is to the plot. Even those things that I staunchly disagree with make great food for thought.

The reason this book didn’t score a higher rating from me is because things get really, really gross. I mean nasty. Even for King, there were some exceptionally vile scenes. I suppose this was a successful way to up the fear factor. This was truly a straight up horror novel. But I think it could have been toned down a bit and been just as effective, as well as easier to stomach.

On a perfect summer afternoon in Wentworth, Ohio, many of the citizens who live on Poplar Street are killed mysteriously, and at the center of the mystery is a young boy named Seth Garon, whose supernatural powers are just awakening. 1,250,000 first printing. Lit Guild, Doubleday, & Mystery Guild Main.

I’m very glad I read this immediately after reading Desperation. Firstly, had I not read these back to back I might have forgotten some of the characters who, while radically different, share their names across the two novels. Secondly, I’m glad I read Desperation first because I fear I would have actually been disappointed in that one had it been preceded by The Regulators. While I enjoyed both, I found The Regulators to be the better story overall.

King, writing as Bachman here, couches an absolutely horrifying tale within the confines of everyday suburbia. I’ve never been more glad to live in the woods with no close neighbors than I was while reading this book. Your average summer day in the burbs is wrecked by a seemingly random drive-by shooting. But the shooters return, and there’s something incredibly off about them, and their vans, and their weapons. Things get more and more sinister from there. 

The two main things shared by this novel and its sister, Desperation, are the character names and the antagonist. I found it fascinating to read about characters with the exact same names but who were, for the most part, radically different from the counterparts in the other novel, with radically different fates. There were a select few of these characters who mirrored their other selves in some way, but it was a very exclusive group. Which just served to make those certain characters all the more interesting. 

Another of the main bonds between these two novels is Tak, the incredibly freaky antagonist. I found his influence even more disturbing in this book than I did in Desperation. I think this is due to a couple of things. First, everything happening on a particular suburban street made the action feel more claustrophobic, which upped the creep factor. Second, Tak was working through the possessed body of a child, which is always a terrifying horror trope. 

This loose duology was a very interesting stretch of my long road to the Tower. And these two novels are unequivocally horror, without a shadow of a doubt. If you’re looking to be freaked out, both of these books are a good bet. But I liked this one better.

Once a thriving copper mining town in the middle of the Nevada desert, Desperation is now eerily abandoned. It's the last place that travellers like the Carver family bound for vacation and writer Johnny Marinville astride his Harley would expect to be stopped and charged. But Desperation still has a local cop —a unique regulator who patrols the wilderness highway.

The secrets buried in Desperation are as terrifying as the forces summoned to encounter them. A terrifying transformation is taking place and the travellers will soon discover the true meaning of desperation..

--back cover

Cams Campbell

Average nourishment. Not an earth-shattering tale by any means, but reasonably average and mildly entertaining. It's no Stand, that's for sure. I like Stephen King novels for dog walks on the headphones and I'm trying to catch up on my Goodreads challenge, so I needed something that would be easy listening to draw me away from my podcast list for long enough to get through a book. It helps that grass-cutting season is once again upon us.

Amber Laha

I didn't realize this was a Stephen King book until after I had already bought it. I am not a fan of his writing style and this was no different.

Very good begining and middle, but rather dull ending. Happens with King's works often - he's such a magnificent storyteller and manages to build the story up but then has a rather simple and dissappointing ending - oversimplified conclusion and writing.

Sunelle Chamberlain

I didn't enjoy this book at all. Everything seemed so far-fetched.

Desperacja

Magdalena

Dyllan Erikson

Amber Laurent

Emil

A. D. Knapp

Colton Ray

Jayme Cochrane

Beth Seaton

Desesperación

Nicolás Pérez de Agustín 

Welcome to Desperation. A place beyond your wildest imaginings. Where the unbelievable can become reality ... 

Desperation: a small town in the middle of the Nevada desert. It looks hauntingly familiar with its signs to the Desperation Coffee Shop and Video Spot. Just off the loneliest highway in America, it should be a refuge in a wasteland. But there's something missing. The once thriving copper mining town now seems eerily empty. Almost abandoned. Except for a few desert animals — snake, coyote, buzzard. And of course the local cop patrolling the wilderness road — Desperation's unique regulator. 

Headed down Highway 50 are travellers who are never going to reach their destinations. Like the Jacksons, a young professor and his wife going home to New York City; the Carvers, a Wentworth, Ohio family bound for a vacation in Lake Tahoe; and Johnny Marinville, the once famous writer who's getting back on the road with a new book, 'Travels with Harley'. 

The secrets embedded in Desperation's landscape are as awesome as the forces summoned to encounter them. When they are unleashed, a terrifying transformation takes place and the wayfarers will begin to discover the true meaning of the word desperation ... 

In the tradition of The Stand, Desperation is an apocalyptic drama of God and evil, madness and revelation in which the master of horror and suspense tempts you into his literary lion's den. And holds you willingly behind bars.
--front flap

The Regulators

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