As the story goes, my wife first spotted me reading a book by her favorite author while waiting for a show by her favorite artist. As I had finished my previous book on the fifteenth occasion of that historic moment, and I still needed to read it in the original English to count towards #66, I decided to pick up that book again.
Desperation is probably the last gory supernatural horror story Stephen King put out. Sure, later books have a bit of gore, or a supernatural angle, and pretty horrific things do certainly happen, but this seems to be the last one where all of that is so front and center. It is cruel and bleak and pretty horrible, and I can imagine King having a blast writing about this an aeons old demon (quite literally from The Pit) of unspeakable evil. He puts him a bunch of people in a remote and isolated mining town in Nevada, and from there on, they have to deal the best they can, while the casualties pile up. It might be middle-tier King at best, but it is still damn amusing.
As it doesn’t make sense to read Desperation without its ‘mirror’ piece The Regulators, that’s where I went next.
Richard Bachman’s widow found the completed manuscript of The Regulators in a box in the cellar. The cast of characters is, quite curiously, very similar to that of Desperation. Heck, even the bad guy, some demonic spirit from a pit in Ohio possessing an autistic boy, caries an uncanny resemblance. But other than that, the books are nothing alike. Well, okay, the casualties pile up here as well. It’s also an amusing read, but the other one’s my favorite.
- Book read
- Stephen King — Desperation
- First line
- “Oh! Oh, Jesus! Gross!”
- Book read
- Richard Bachman — The Regulators
- First line
- Summer’s here.