It's been a while since I read this book. I had some pretty fond memories of it, and it's always been my favorite of two companion books that King/Bachman published together. They are alternate realities, kind of mirror images, of each other... But The Regulators is also a link to the Dark Tower universe as well. We have the same characters (plus some new), but in different roles and with different perspectives and personas than we saw in Desperation. We have a different setting, suburban Ohio rather than BFE, Nevada, but Desperation, NV makes a cameo appearance so that Tak's presence is explained. Because Tak is again our villain here, but in a very different manner than he was in Desperation.It seems to me that The Regulators should be read 2nd, if one is to read them back to back. It seems to make more sense that way. You'd have a fuller understanding of the capabilities of Tak, and of the characters themselves, even though their lives in each book are incredibly different. But more than that, it's always seemed to me that the characters that we meet in The Regulators are the "real" versions of the characters. These are the characters as they really exist, and the characters that we met in Desperation, Nevada are selfishly warped caricatures of themselves. With the exception of the two "outsiders" from each book, which are the same - Steve and Cynthia. These characters remain almost exactly the same. Their situations have changed, yes, but THEY have not. The basic story is the same in each book - a group of (mostly the same) people have been chosen and attacked by an ancient evil being called "Tak", and they must fight for their survival. Desperation has a kind of gritty, realistic feel, with fantastic elements regarding what Tak is and is capable of, and the divine intervention of God to help the group. The Regulators, however, is almost cartoonishly fantastic regarding the events that happen, but real in that there is nothing to help the group but themselves and their intuition and wits. I love the characters in The Regulators much more than those who appear in Desperation. They are just normal people, in a friendly neighborhood, who see the insane pop into their lives and cope as best as they can. There's no sense of the resentment or anger that Desperation had, because people here aren't being called on for help by a God that was cruel enough to take everything and then some and then demand help. It's easier for me to accept chaotic craziness of random events than a divine plan of misery and loss and suffering leading up to a sacrifice of everything. Anyway, my point is that I like these characters because not only do they feel truer to me, I can identify with their confusion and reactions as they are more similar to my what my own would be than what Desperation's characters showed.Another plus for this book is that the statement/questions hardly made any appearances at all. Maybe this was because there wasn't that "guiding hand of God" bending people's intuitions toward a specific goal, but I much prefer when questions are just questions and statements are just statements and guesses are just guesses. :)I always enjoy this book, but I have to say that having read more of King's books now, especially the Dark Tower books, than I had the last time I read it, I enjoyed this even more than the last time. There will be spoilers for both The Regulators and the last Dark Tower book, so stop reading now if you don't want to be spoiled. Last warning!Ok. If you're still reading, so be it. The last bit of The Regulators is a letter from a newlywed woman staying at the resort where Audrey's recreated safe place is based on. She writes to a friend of hers who is a sucker for ghost stories that as of June 19, 1986, the resort has been haunted for four years by a mother and son, who are obviously supposed to be Audrey and Seth. The letter intimates that there are alternate planes of existence, and that the letter writer does not feel that they are ghosts, but rather that they are just on a different plane. "Go then, there are other worlds than these." Right? However, what's really creepy and weird is if you notice the date, it's 13 years to the day before the accident that almost killed King. 13 years to the day before his life is saved by Jake Chambers and Roland Deschain in The Dark Tower. So, with the alternate plane reference, and the characters dying and coming back to a different time and place, and the letter's date, we have definite links to the world of the Dark Tower. But Stephen King had NOT had his accident when he wrote The Regulators. The accident would have been 3 years in the future. Crazy.
I haven’t read The Regulators for a long time, a couple of years at least and I forgot how brilliant it is. It was a joy to read it again and remember how damn good it is.In many ways The Regulators is just like Desperation. An ancient evil that goes by the name Tak escapes its underground prison and takes possession of an innocent bystander and all hell breaks loose.The Regulators and Desperation could be seen as the same story executed in very different ways. The similarities start and end with Tak taking possession of an innocent bystander.In The Regulators, Tak is imprisoned in the mine deep under the town of Desperation and bored. He can take possession of the humans working on the mine but his powers are so great he causes the host to explode – literally.One day Tak’s dreams come true when a young autistic boy called Seth Garin passes Desperation on a family vacation. Seth is special. He’s telepathic and has other gifts. Tak knows he can possess Seth without his host exploding. He calls to Seth and takes possession of his body.The Regulators is King’s brilliant execution of the fall-out from this.Seth is obsessed with an old western called The Regulators, the TV show Bonanza and a kids cartoon called MotoKops 2200. Tak uses his powers and Seth’s gifts to manifest characters and events from all of these.Popular Street starts to turn into the old west, specifically what the town of Desperation in Nevada looked like back in the 1800’s. A child’s cartoonish impression of this anyway.Characters from The Regulators and MotoKops 2200 band together to take out the residents of Poplar Street who have become the enemy – deadly aliens who’ve invaded earth and want to wipe out humanity. This is taken from an episode of MotoKops 2200 called The Force Corridor.The Regulators is a bit mental. In a good way. Absolutely nuts.The Regulators has some very scary moments.Tak is able to make people physically close hurt themselves. He uses this to make Seth’s aunt Audrey hit herself. He makes Audrey’s husband Herb kill himself. When Audrey is able to escape her house and join her neighbours she tells them about various punishments Tak dished out including making her run head-first at the wall, over and over until she knocked herself out. Creepy as hell.As Popular Street turns more and more into Desperation in the 1800’s the residents are hunted through the woods by freakish coyotes that can kill them but turn to dust when shot as if they were just holograms.I loved the subtle changes in characterisation from Desperation.Ralph and Ellen Carver are now the children and Kirsten and David are the parents.Cary Ripton, the man who Tak possesses first in Desperation is now a young child and the first to die.In Desperation, Johnny Marinville saves his ailing career and reputation as a womanising wastrel by deciding to write a series of stories about small town America. In The Regulators he does this by writing hugely popular children’s novels about a cat detective. This made me laugh.There are loads of examples of this. Poplar Street is in Wentworth, Ohio. It’s the street where the Carvers actually lived in Desperation.I think The Regulators is far superior to Desperation. I loved Desperation but The Regulators is miles better. I loved the fact there’s none of the religious nonsense of Desperation. It made me wonder what alternative versions King could write of his own novels.
What do You think about The Regulators (1997)?
It feels unusual to give this thing such a high rating. I remember the beginnings of almost all of his novels surpassing the endings as far as my interest in King's writing goes. Maybe I just prefer open-ended scenarios a lot more, whether it be with film or literature, and he tends to try to wrap the plot up at seemingly arbitrary points in the story. His endings are hyperbolically ridiculous too. Anyway, what I remember so vividly about this story was the insane suburban slaughter at the beginning. One second two children are in a convenient store, and the little kid is looking a magazine with Ethan Hawke on the cover, thinking about sex, then him and his sister return to their neighborhood. Lazy summer day, etc. Suddenly a barrage of several brightly covered cars rip through unleashing a storm of bullets on the houses, killing most of the neighborhood. I know, most of the appeal of it lies in the cheap shock value inherent in the juxtaposition of the tranquil American suburb with the violent tumult of an inner city shootout. Naturally, there are the handful of survivors (so typical of the whole King oeuvre) that join together, find strength in numbers, and attempt to battle the sudden mysterious evil that is terrorizing them. I'd have to read it again, which probably will not happen for some time. If I had to admit it, I'd say that everything that King had written under the Bachman pseudonym was by far more interesting than his more popular books. Especially, the earlier stories which, from what I recall, he wrote in his drug addled college days. Out of all of his books (and there are just fucking way too many), this is the material that comes closest to experimental fiction. Of course, many of his rambling epics could be seen in the same light. Or it could also be because he has a tendency to especially not omit anything inessential. I don't know why I'm writing about this right now.Unfortunately, I spent a majority of my grade school days reading only Stephen King. I'm thankful to my mother in many ways because when I would see her with one of this things in her hand, my curiosity usually got the best of me. I wasn't exactly precocious as far as literary, or even book related taste was concerned, but reading King was the germination of my relationship with books. More importantly, watching my mother read was. I would like to thank both of them for that. I suddenly feel nostalgic for those days in the suburbs of northern Illinois, and the sweltering, humid heat. Going to the library in the summer when I was younger was the closest was the closest thing to a religious experience for me. I sometimes wish that I would never have become distracted by all of the sex, drugs, and rollerblading that I loved in my youth. Sooner or later I knew that these things would take me out of my sleepy, sun-filled bedroom. That the peacefulness of reading alone in my room would be interrupted by all of that fun-sounding adolescent life to be had. Not everyone does this. If I had to, then I might blame it on a hyperactive short attention span. (What's with the fucking double adjectives, Cline?) And what was that parenthetical thing you just did? Maybe I'm just trying to say that distraction is very ephemeral company in life.
—Jimmy
Steven King says at the beginning of The Bachman Books that from the very start of his pseudonym, fans were writing Bachman asking if he was secretly King. By the time Regulators was coming along, everybody already knew, so yeah, there was no point hiding, but you'd think Stevie would try something to separate this from his usual fare. This was just a huge gout of Steven King cliches fitted to the Steven King cliche 500 pages.Let's see. We've got a sleepy New England suburb where everything is summery and ideal, water sprinklers and baseball cards and bubble gum, et al. Everything gets assaulted by insane absurdist violence which King for some reason feels obligated to reason away by showing it's actually just a demon or an alien or something. We've got a small child with psychic powers, doing psychic battle with evil forces. We've got like 46 other characters (including a gifted middle-aged sellout author who of course is real nice and (view spoiler)[makes it to the end (hide spoiler)]
—Brady
I don't know how I missed this book over the years. I've read most of the Stephen King library. The Regulators is good, solid King--not, perhaps, one of my favorites, but a captivating (and chilling) read. As is common in his novels, the characters are strong, and the constant "Where does he come UP with this stuff?" question runs through the reader's mind. It starts off strong--action happens almost immediately--and feeds the reader enough information in the beginning to hook them but not enough to let curiousity wane. And the ending gives one food for thought.An interesting sidenote about this book is that the characters' names are the same as the characters in King's novel Desperation. I read Desperation years ago, but it isn't all that clear in my mind. But it seems that the books examine two different possibilities spreading from the same basic idea. The characters themselves are not the same in each book, and the names appear to be recycled randomly. Anyone ever read anything about why this is?
—Lisa Litberg
