[books] Stephen King, Desperation (1996)

While I'm still two books behind his most current output, it would appear that Stephen King has gotten back into a groove of strong writing. He had hit a bit of a rut several years ago with his attempts to cash in on the success of the movie for his novel Misery, by penning a couple of bland novels (Gerald's Game, Dolores Claiborne) that rehashed the isolation theme at the core of that story. Since then, he has turned out some good, solid stories that get back to the basics, which, in King's case, is scaring the pants off of the reader. One of the latest of these is a little ditty called Desperation, and in reviewer jargon, it's a non-stop rollercoaster of thrills and chills that will have you afraid to turn the next page, but unable to stop yourself. And you can quote me on that.

On the surface, this story looks a lot like King's epic The Stand. It's primarily a tale of good against evil, with a rag-tag group of people brought together to do battle with a bad guy of considerable power. In The Stand, it was devil-incarnate Randall Flagg. In Desperation, which is both the title of the novel and the small mining town in Nevada where most of the novel takes place, it appears to be a small-town cop, named Collie Entragian, gone mad. As you might have guessed, there's something more evil than that at work in Desperation. On the side of the good guys, there is a recently (and I mean quite recently) widowed woman, an aging, almost has-been writer and his "roadie," a young Generation Xer borrowed from another novel, a family of four, and a couple other stragglers who have unfortunately crossed paths with Entragian. Among their number, part of the aforementioned family, is young David Carver, who may possess the key to survival against almost certain death otherwise.

The pace is quick, and the twists are good. I won't spoil any of them here. Entragian, or at least the force behind Entragian's madness, is a convincing enemy. The conflict of good versus evil, personified by David and the hulking police officer from Desperation, is awfully compelling. King goes a bit deeper into his self-references here, bringing a whole character in from another novel (Cynthia Schmidt from Rose Madder, but she was only a minor player before this. He also shows what I imagine to be quite a bit of his own character, or at least his own ideal character, in that of writer Johnny Marinville. The fact that he is carrying on like the rock star that King has always wanted to be is something of a giveaway. It should come as no surprise that the old writer is pivotal to the story. On some level, Stephen King may be living vicariously through Desperation, but that doesn't detract at all from the excitement.