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The Regulators
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...to the Ponderosa...
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The Regulators
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Those who have experienced Stephen King's novel Desperation will be in for quite a shock during the opening chapters of Richard Bachman's The Regulators. Characters who inhabited the former novel are back, filling different roles, and behaving as if they'd been there all their life. People who died in Desperation are alive and well again in the small suburban town of Wentworth, Ohio as if they were a travelling theatre group who put on a show in the desert and are back for something completely different in the suburbs.
This dark, viscious novel has a lot of fun playing off Desperation, utilizing some of the same scenes in drastically new scenarios. It's also interesting to discover how certain characters would have given different situations (the best change is the psycho sheriff -- a strictly one-dimentional role in Desperation -- has become a framed ex-police officer who can't seem to give up the cop life in The Regulators.
One thing has remained the same, however, the evil presence of the psychic vampire Tak, who has now come to settle in an extraordinary autistic boy named Seth Garin. Tak is able to use Seth in ways it couldn't use the normal humans of Desperation. By allowing Seth's dreams and wishes to become real, only adding its own nasty slant. Beloved characters from Seth favorite spaghetti Westerns and cartoon shows are made real an homicidal on the once quiet Poplar Street, spewing death and misery. The only person who might be able to stop Tak's misusing of the boy and the carnage in Wentworth is Seth's Aunt Audrey who is remarkable in her own ways. But the fight will not be easy, especially since Wentworth seems to be suddenly changing into a bizarre child's perception of an eerily familiar Nevada town.
The Regulators is by far the most violent novel ever written by either King or as Bachman, with an opening sequence even more disturbing than that of King's Rose Madder. However, the violence here only compels the reader to go further, like an especially bloody scene in an action movie. In a very literal sense, the bloodshed of The Regulators is cartoon carnage, and part of King's message is that too much TV can be hazardous to your health.
Another intriguing aspect of The Regulators is in the way it's presented. The tenses change freely from past to present, with no warning but chapter separators. The narrative itself is broken in places to allow for drawings, news items, journal entries, and teleplay scripts, making the book almost as fun to look at as it is to read.
So why revive the Bachman pseudonym? Perhaps it's simply because of the fact that under Bachman, King has always let his more violent side shine through (including Misery which was to be a Bachman book until Thinner prompted King out of the Bachman closet). Maybe King sees Bachman as his darker, more sinister, twin. That would be appropriate, for that is certainly what The Regulators is to Desperation: the cruel, nasty twin borne of the master of the macabre.
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