by Jay Wilburn
The plan is to reread all of Stephen King’s works in the order that they were published. Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance had the vision. I’m doing it because I am a writer and I want to improve my fiction. And I love Stephen King’s stories. I think there is something to be learned through this process.
You can also go back to the beginning and read Before Carrie or any of my other posts up through this one and beyond by checking out this link to the Master List of all my #StephenKingRevisited posts.
My paperback version of this book doesn’t even bother with the Richard Bachman pen name. It just plasters Stephen King across it.
“Oh, oh, Jesus Gross.”
Tak!
And we are off on a great adventure. If you are planning on reading Desperation and The Regulators, my recommendation is to read Desperation first. These books are essentially two different stories that run in parallel universes. The suspense in Desperation works much, much better if you read this one first. It then helps create a healthy disorientation as you go into The Regulators that contributes to the experience of that novel, too.
It appears to be a creepy small town story on the front end. The entrance by the characters was creatively done including one misleading cut that makes the reader feel misplaced in time.
King adds fear, removes it, adds it again, and then ramps it up. It kept me off my guard in a way that many horror stories rarely achieve well. There is surprise violence against a POV character I didn’t expect coming. It left me feeling lost early in the novel in a good way. The reveal of why the travelers were chosen and spared is chilling.
We get references to Snapple and some 90’s flavored Clinton bashing from a character. Jolt cola makes an appearance here, too. Hating “Achy Breaky Heart” is a detail I feel in my soul. I worked in a Waffle House in the 1990’s when this song was insanely popular and customers played it on the jukebox a lot.
The Motorola cellular phone references left me realizing how quickly things change and we forget how things worked in the past. It’s a flip phone, you had to wait for an “S” and two bars in order to make a call, don’t forget to pull up the antenna, dread hitting the roaming network, and you had to press send to accept incoming calls. I’d be lost if I was transported back in time for this.
Cynthia Smith from Rose Madder appears in this story. This young woman can’t seem to stay out of trouble in the Stephen King universes.
Eleven year old David’s “true conversion” is interestingly written and is an odd counter-magic for the evil found in the town of Desperation. King dips hard into Christian faith and mythology for this one as characters are literally getting messages from God. It is done with such unflinching sincerity that it makes me uncomfortable in places. Still well written.
The horrors of death are done masterfully and terrifyingly in this story. Every loss is felt deeply and with lingering sorrow. This is some of King’s best work in terms of building depth and sympathy for characters and then unleashing the monsters. The thing is that the monster is loose from the beginning. Sometimes he shows us the death and then goes back to make us miss the character once we already know they are gone. The stakes are well raised for every character and moment.
He uses the word “alkaline” a lot to describe the sand and dust. Alkaline is the zestful “Achy Breaky Heart” of this novel.
He uses rose madder as a color description in this one. Tommyknockers, the gremlin miner myth, are mentioned, too.
Arnette, Texas, that first appeared in The Stand, is mentioned and one of the characters has an aunt from there.
A professor is quoted in one character’s memory as saying, “Lying is fiction. Fiction is art. All art is a lie.” This story lies artfully and feels like the truth all the way through. Possibly a contender for a top ten or top twenty list of King’s best novels.
My next post in this series will be Before The Regulators which will be linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.
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