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.
I found a woman’s name signed inside the cover of my copy of The Regulators. It was neat script with a very precise hand. I tried to look the person up, but they do not appear to have joined in on the social media age. I always find it odd that a person sees a book as important enough to mark as their own in some personal fashion, but then sell it to a used bookstore afterward. I suppose it is possible that someone who inherited it after the original reader passed the book on or passed on themselves could have dumped them off. At any rate, I’m happy to have it and read it now.
There is an editor’s note on the passing of King’s imaginary Bachman identity. Bachman’s imaginary wife is involved in finding this manuscript in this fictional backstory.
A map of the street bears the names of dead and living characters from Desperation, all living happily on a street in Ohio which used to be the home of the incarnation of David in the universe of Desperation. This Regulators universe is one in which Stephen King is an author and not one in which King’s many stories and monsters are reality. I missed a ton by not reading Desperation first when I read Regulators years ago. Many details about lives and backstories are parallel, but other things have changed dramatically. For example, in one case the kids and the parents swapped generations. MottoKops 2200 toys return with the characters from the previous novel. Melissa Sweetheart is back. The town of Desperation itself will enter the story in an imposing way. Poor Cynthia Smith with her two-tone hair has gone through Hell in three straight novels by King beginning with Rose Madder. And, of course, Tak!
Random violence tears their normal world apart and then the characters are separated in a desperate attempt to find cover. They’ll have to come together and separate a number of times through the novel as their world is torn apart and reformed in even more dramatic ways. The appearance of the Russian thistle in a backyard is somehow more creepy than the gunfire that preceded it.
There are news articles between each section of the story. In many cases it is not transcribed but created and then photocopied like a real clipping. Some of these interludes are quite long and involved in explaining or buffering parts of the story or backstory.
A child’s voice on the phoneline is quite a disturbing mystery at the beginning. This begins a phone theme through the novel that plays out nicely. Something as simple as an unoccupied house on the street is set up to be important later as the backstory on these small details are revealed over time. King creates a good puzzle of seemingly minor details throughout the novel.
The info dump of the neighbors getting up to speed on the forces behind the strange occurrences of the day is a little too on the nose. The characters go from a great sequence where nothing is going right and no one can communicate important facts to each other in time to a scene where characters are in lockstep and are finishing each other’s thoughts in a way that doesn’t quite align to where they and their understanding currently sits in the story.
King has an ongoing problem of different characters in different locations coming to identical conclusions at around the same time. Characters in two different houses decide on the same path of exploration to send someone for help right down to the exact same plan B. In a single story it might play as a novel occurrence that folks came to the same thinking once. Occurring book after book and often more than once in the same book undermines the characters and the story a bit in my humble and less successful opinion. That being said, the identical thinking plays a little different in The Regulators and the characters pay for it.
The bumbled shootout in the woods is really well done. Everyone misunderstanding. Everyone refusing to understand. Everything going wrong and causing more to go wrong.
The closing letter mentions The Shining by Stephen King in the Regulators universe. We get a hint that ghosts may sometimes be a thin spot between dimensions and realities. In this way, some characters we lose may get to live on in peace in one of these thin spots.
On the whole, King created a magnificent puzzle in this story where all the pieces come together and contribute to the story from mysterious beginning to the costly end. I strongly advise reading Desperation first and The Regulators second to get the fullest impact from both stories. Coming into Desperation cold adds to the mystery and the impact of the reveals. Coming into The Regulators with the knowledge of Desperation, adds to the disorientation and unease of the mysteries in The Regulators. You get the best experience of both novels, in my opinion.
My next post in this series will be Before Wizard and Glass which will be linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.
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