Customer Reviews

Desperation (Wheeler Publishing Large Print)

5 star:		(342)
4 star:		(137)
3 star:		(68)
2 star:		(35)
1 star:		(46)

 

 

Having read just over half of King's books, I have to say that Desperation ranks up there with Wizard and Glass as one of my favorites. That said, this book is not for the shallow or the feint of heart. Desperation is a tale of hope and love in the darkest hour--and the hour is dark indeed.

Desperation is a desert town in Nevada. This place, where on the good days the people can be 'intense,' has been turned into a wasteland by an ancient evil. A group of unsuspecting strangers drawn to the town must survive their encounter with this force and in the process make a decision that will forever change their lives.

King's set-up to this story is long, gruesome, and grim. There are parts that any decent person will recoil from--as they should. The evil in this book is not glamorous; it is evil in its most fallen and base form.

Once the dark 'collecting' of the opening is through, the novel finally hits full stride. Good appears in the most unexpected form. Evil is engaged in a battle to the death.

Usually 'good vs. evil' type novels suffer from too much of a 'black and white' didactic moralism. The beauty of Desperation is that the heroes of the novel must first engage the evil and good within themselves before they can lift a finger to fight the real enemy. King never fails to amaze me with the craft of his words and his honest description of the glory and shame of being human.

Desperation is a stand alone novel. However, it ties in (as do many of King's novels) with the Dark Tower series. It also has a bizarro 'sister book' in the late Richard Bachman's The Regulators.

I give Desperation my heartfelt, highest recommendation--don't be scared off by a little blood and guts. There is a lot of despair, desperation and cruelty in these pages. There is also faith, hope, and most importantly--love.

Having just slogged through "Bag Of Bones", my expectations for this book were pretty low. Basically, I was anticipating another seven hundred page turkey; my only real motive for reading it was making room on my bookshelf. Imagine my surprise to find it to be one of the best King novels I've ever read. At first, it looked like Jim Thompson-style noir. The villain, a six-foot seven small town Nevada psychotic cop, prowls U.S. 50, "the loneliest road in America", rounding up innocent motorists, kidnapping, imprisoning and killing them. So far, so good. The pure simplicity of such a storyline, especially in the hands of a master storyteller such as Steven King, can't fail to draw a reader in. The brute evil of Collie Entragian, the cop, combined with the isolation of the abandoned western mining town in which the story is set, creates a powerful, suspenseful conflict for the group of travellers Entragian has waylaid and locked up in the jail of the town of Desperation. But there's more. It soon becomes apparent that the supernatural is at work (what Steven King book would be complete without the supernatural?). Entragian speaks to the coyotes, buzzards, scorpions, spiders, snakes and other desert creatures in an unknown language, commanding them to help him carry out his nasty business. He has made good use of them so far, doing away with the entire population of Desperation, and will soon be turning his efforts against the travellers in his jail. For all of it's atmosphere and suspense, this novel is actually a return by King to the exploration of good versus evil, the nature of God and the mystery of faith which he delved into in "The Stand". David Carver, the protagonist, is an eleven year-old boy on vacation with his family when captured by Entragian. He must pit his recently acquired religious faith against the evil spirit of Tak, who has risen from the nearby Diablo mine and inhabited Collie Entragian's body. This faith is mercilessly tested throughout the story, and it's not always clear that God is with this unfortunate little group. If "Desperation" has a weakness, it's probably in the characters. In my opinion, King has never been much in that department and he doesn't show any new ability along those lines in this book. I cared about David and the other good guys only because the story itself grabbed me. However, if that's the worst you can say about a Steven King book, chances are you're talking about a good read. Believe it or not, this is some of the tightest seven hundred pages I can recall reading. I strongly recommend this book.

1996 must have been a heady year for Stephen King--coming off the critical and commercial success of his excellent six part serial, The Green Mile, he followed up with a pair of hard hitting, well-written novels, Desperation and The Regulators. Desperation was clearly his best work since Misery. The Regulators, written under his pseudonym, Richard Bachman, was less successful, but pleasurable reading nonetheless.

The Regulators is King's version of the classic Twilight Zone adaptation of Jerome Bixby's It's a Good Life. The denizens of Poplar Street, located in the small town of Wentworth, Ohio, find themselves sealed off from the rest of the world, trapped in a pocket universe created by the imaginings of an autistic child who has been possessed by a demon. Neighbors must band together to fight off killing machines that seem to have sprung from the television screen.

Desperation features many of the same characters who populated The Regulators, albeit in altered form. Desperation, a small mining town off Route 50 in Nevada, is also under attack by a demon, but here the devastation is far worse. Instead of tormenting a few folks, the demon, after destroying most of the town, has taken to pulling people off the highway to satisfy its perverse longings. Again, a disparate group of people must cooperate to save their lives.

The contrast between these books is startling--if you never noticed the difference between King's and Bachman's styles, reading these two books back to back will be a real eye opener. Bachman creates the aura of immediacy, but we never really get to know his characters. King, on the other hand, hews to his tradition of giving us characters we really care about, people we would like to get to know. Bachman's style is also more disjointed than King's--he tends to jump about, giving the reader bits and pieces as he goes along, while King adheres to a more linear style of storytelling.

Desperation is the superior book. The small asides that link the two books seem natural in Desperation, but more forced in The Regulators. King also does more with the plot elements than does Bachman. Desperation is vintage King--you can feel his energy and confidence from the first sentence. The opening scene sets the pace for the entire book, as two characters are pulled over by a policeman. A nerve-wracking experience to be sure, but one which we are all familiar with. King then takes this ordinary situation and gives it a little twist. As it dawns on the couple that they've been pulled over by Lou Ford's even crazier cousin, they realize they might be in trouble. Little do they know that their problems, and the reader's enjoyment, are only beginning.

Reading these books together should be a lot of fun for most folks. In these novels, King indirectly provides insight into the creative process, proving that it's not where you get your ideas, but how you use them that counts. With the publication of The Green Mile, Desperation and The Regulators, he also showed that he was an extremely savvy marketer, scoring a bookselling hat trick that any advertising professional would envy.

I began this book on February 24 and finished it on March 1 (yes, one week). I have only read two other Stephen King books: The Green Mile and Cycle of the Werewolf. I gave both of them a "Good, but..." review. Then I read Desperation, and was amazed. It sounded pretty boring at first, but as I kept on reading, I didn't want to stop. Before I knew it, I was done with it. Now right after I read a book or see a movie, I like it or hate it. But as time passes, I realize how much I like (or hate) it. So I waited a week or so, and I realized how much I loved it. The characters are so well introduced, and the hatred that builds inside you for the antagonist is incredible. Now I am extremely afraid to go to any western state. I swear, if I see so much as a vulture, a coyote, a spider, or a mine, I will freak out and run for my dear life. I guarantee to anyone who reads this book: you will like it. If you don't, you seriously need to get a life. Tak!

Even the worst of Stephen King's novels are engrossing reads. That's probably the best description of this one. King wastes little time setting up the action or providing any depth to his characters. (In fact most of the characters in this novel are "types" recycled from his earlier work. There's the "cynical artist struggling for redemption"--see THE STAND or MISERY. There's the "ordinary boy with the special gift"--see, well, any number of King's books. You get the idea.) I think his true genius is that his books are gripping in spite of these shortcomings.

Still, this one really feels hollow after it's done. King has an interesting idea. Maybe the worst "monster" or all is really God. It's not a new idea for him--there's a line in THE STAND where one of the characters talks about God always requiring a sacrifice. "His hands are bloody with it." And the idea of the Old Testament God as a monster has real possibilites. But it's an idea that's raised here rather than really explored. And what's worse, King ACTS like he's explored it--acts like he's really said something. So you wind up at the end of the book feeling, "Huh--did I miss something?"

As is the case with so much of King's writing, the ending is a disappointment. It's rather like King gets these wonderful ideas for fiction, and he spends all his time and energy getting into these ideas and working them out. But they don't actually go anywhere.

Still other questions remain unanswered in the novel. Who is "Tak" (the demon/monster that God wants destroyed)? How did he wind up in Desperation? The whole thing is richly readable but ultimately unsatisfying.

Oh--one more thing. There's this odd overlap with the characters from THE REGULATORS. DESPERATION has some of the same characters--except they're not the same. In DESPERATION,the cop who terrorizes desperation has the same name as the cop who tries to fight the evil in THE REGULATORS. And the Carver family is in both novels--except that the names of the kids in one book are the names of the parents in another. And the monster, Tak, appears in both novels, except that its powers are slightly different in each.

I'm not sure what the point of all this is. King is working out two slightly different versions of the same fantasy? Like much else in the novel, this is a tantalizing idea, but not much is made of it. (I'd be interested to read about what other readers think about this.)

The thing I noticed the first time I picked up a Stephen King book was his uncanny knack for detail. He could take a simple thing and go on about it for a paragraph and make it interesting. This is one of the key elements in "Desperation," a novel that thrives on its details. If it wasn't for the incredible descriptions of the Tak character, we wouldn't get that utterly grotesque mental picture of a creature that causes the bodies it inhabits to, quite literally, fall apart. Blood seeps from every orafice on the body like it serves as nothing more than a river system of open wounds. Tak is one mean SOB, and he's also one of King's most memorable villains. And of course, in order to combat a villain of Tak's stature, you need a good hero, or a group of good heroes. We have them in "Desperation." The middle-aged writer traveling the country, the young channel to God... Each character is interesting and well written, as King's character's usually are.

"Desperation" is mostly about Tak, and the power that he mysteriously holds over a small desert town full of dead bodies, and coyotes that obey his every command. The people who end up in this dead end town are nothing more than meat on a slab to this mischievious force, whom the devil would more than likely take in as a son or a brother. Tak is a merciless force of the paranormal that is hard to understand, but that is okay, but evil in itself can be a difficult concept. Heck, humanity can be a difficult concept, but that's what makes it interesting. Not really knowing what Tak wants even while we're seeing things from his point of view makes for some of the novels most interesting passages.

Maybe it takes a reader that really gets inside and becomes part of the story, but I thoroughly enjoyed "Desperation," and being the nut I am for perverted jokes, I always laughed at King's little innuendoes. He must be a great guy to hang out with at parties.

I had always avoided King because I think of myself as preferring "serious" literature. Desperation changed my mind about the horror genre entirely, and although I have since read several more of King's novels, it remains my favorite. People have complained this book is a rehash of previous works, but many solid writers re-visit themes and motifs that have particular meaning for them. No one criticized Hemingway for it. I'm not a big horror fan in general, but the real horror in this book is internal and familiar to almost everyone. Belief vs. skepticism. Insecurity and guilt. What if? Sure, there are a lot of memorable action scenes, but what fascinated me more is the unusual re-telling of the Book of Job. This book reminded me of some of Philip K. Dick's religious sci-fi novels. There's a tremendous amount of passion and soul-searching here. The writer is obviously the author's alter-ego, which adds another layer of depth. One of the other reviewers mentioned that Desperation caused him/her to seriously evaluate his/her religious beliefs. That's pretty impressive for a mass-market paperback, and I had the same reaction. The book can be read on at least three different levels, and it holds up on all of them. Just reading people's reviews made me want to go through it again.

Last fall, I had a little time on my hands to kill and I decided to stop by the library. I picked up the Stephen King book Hearts in Atlantis. I brought it home and finished reading it. I was intrigued. However, I was perplexed-this was my first Stephen King book-and I didn't find it to be all that horrifying. Anyway, I read Pet Sematary, just to be sure, and halfway through I was hooked. In October, at Border's Books and Music, I purchased Desperation. I read a few pages when I got home, and I found myself unable to put it down. This is by far his best book I have read so far. The setting is in the lonely town of Desperation, Nevada. Entragian, or Tak, the evil spirit who has taken his body, is out to rule the world.

Steve Ames and Cynthia stumble upon a horrific scene as they follow Steve's boss into Desperation. The Carvers, Mary Jackson, Jonny Marinville, and Steve Ames and Cynthia are now trapped, and Tak is getting angrier by the minute. How will they survive?

I strongly reccomend this book to anyone with a strong stomach. (You'll know why when you read it) There's a twist and turn every other page. You'll find yourself reading this book all night!

You won't be able to put it down! Guarenteed!

Desperation is no Stand, but not many works are. With that said, I liked this book. King gets too wordy, but he has been doing that for about 15 years, so I kind of expect it anymore. What he does well, however, is develop scenes that stick in your mind, and characters that you really feel you know.

Some of the stuff in Desperation is truly creepy, and he throws in the kind of gore that makes your skin crawl. The first hundred pages or so legitimately freaked me out, and I was hooked from there. The plot doesn't have that 'epic' feel a book this long should, but I still don't think you will feel let down by the end...worth reading if you like this kind of stuff.

I had been told and had read that this novel was extremely gorey and graphic. So i was a little hesitant at first about reading it. But, now that its finished i must say it wasn't that graphic. Some spots, yeah but not what i had thought it would be. This book is a fast read. This book is suspenseful. It doesn't bottom out much. Something is always happening. I mean this book isn't going to go down as a great work of literature but for what it is and compared to all the other books out there i have to say that its one of King's best. It is a really good book and read.