So again I’ve read another old favorite I’ve read, and of course it’s another Stephen King novel. The mirror novel to “The Regulators”, written under the Richard Bachman name, “Desperation”.
The state of Nevada is mostly just desert you just happen to cross along the way to someplace else. Sometimes with someone else, that is if you’re lucky, because in reality it is actually a very scary place. Heading on down route 50 in the really hot, and brutal, heat of summer are a group of people that are never going to reach their intended destinations.
The Jacksons who are making a return trip to their home in New York City. The Carvers, a family from Wentworth, Ohio, who are heading to Lake Tahoe for vacation. And an aged literary lion named Johnny Marinville, who is inventing a gonzo image for himself while riding a Harley.
A road sign, with a dead cat nailed to it, heralds the name of a small mining town called Desperation, which sits under the shadow of a man made mountain known as the China Pit. But it’s a whole lot worse than what it appears to be. Regulating the traffic of the town is Collie Entragian, and enormous madman in police uniform that considers himself as the only law west of the Pecos. And god forbid if your license plate goes missing or wind up with a flat.
Something’s very wrong in Desperation, with Entragian being only being the surface of it. The secrets that are embedded in the landscape and the evil that has infected the town like a viral hot zone, are both terrifying to an alarming degree. Despite scaring him to death as he realizes it, young David Carver seems to know and so does the forces that summoned to combat them.
This was another book I’ve read a long time ago along with “Needful Things” and “The Tommyknockers”. And since it is a mirror novel to “The Regulators” it flips the setting from Ohio to Nevada (in “The Regulators” Desperation is mentioned multiple times). But like in “The Regulators” there are some pretty brutal moments and also the dark entity named Tak. I like both versions of these books although some would prefer one version or the other.
by i-the-muso-1968