Desperation

Stephen King

3.85

142,243 ratings by Goodreads

ISBN 10: 0140863184 ISBN 13: 9780140863185

Publisher: Penguin Audio, 1996

Several cross-country travelers--including a writer, a family on vacation, and a professor and his wife--end up in the little mining town of Desperation, where a crazy policeman and evil forces force them to fight for their lives. Read by Kathy Bates. Simultaneous.

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Review:

En route to Lake Tahoe for a much anticipated vacation, the Carver family is arrested for blowing out all four tires on their camper. Collie Entragian is the arresting officer, the self-made sheriff of a town called Desperation, Nevada, and the quintessential bad cop. Unbeknownst to the Carvers, Entragian regularly sniffs out passerbys on this stretch of road, and in fact has done in nearly every resident of his hometown. He can also change form and summon the help of creepy creatures, including scorpions, snakes and spiders. Though the family seems doomed, an unlikely hero emerges --11-year-old David Carver--who finds his own way to get around the Law.

Desperation is the companion novel to King's The Regulators, which was published simultaneously under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Forget the more-or-less literary novels of recent years, like Dolores Claiborne. These books mark the return of the Stephen King of The Stand and Pet Sematary, where King's main concerns where whether good could defeat evil and how much gore could be squeezed into (or out of) one book. In each novel, the characters and situations are altered as King plays with questions of identity and form. But both really center around a new personification of evil that goes by the name of Tak. Tak wants to rule the world. Somebody has to stop him. Somebody's eyes have to pop out. Somebody's head has to explode. Now that's Stephen King!

About the Author:

Stephen King, the world's bestselling novelist, was educated at the University of Maine at Orono. He lives with his wife, the novelist Tabitha King, and their children in Bangor, Maine.

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