[books] Richard Bachman, The Regulators (1996)

It's no longer a secret that Richard Bachman is the "alter ego" of horrormeister Stephen King, but King reportedly buried Bachman several years ago when his identity was revealed. However, a "long lost manuscript" was apparently found, and has been published as The Regulators, a story of an evil force that has trapped and tormented a neighborhood in Ohio, and threatens to do more damage unless the remaining residents of the street can band together and defeat it.

This book came out at the same time as King's own Desperation, and reading both novels in succession is particularly disconcerting. It's an interesting concept, as both books are essentially about the same evil, only in different manifestations. The Regulators finds the bad guy/thing/whatever making it out of the mine shaft in Desperation, AZ, and getting all the way back to middle America through Seth Garin, a six-year old autistic boy. The infuriating part is that both books use all the same character names, only the characters themselves are, with a few very notable exceptions, quite different. Desperation featured the Carver family, only this time, the children are the parents, and vice versa. Mary Parker, whose husband was killed early in King's novel, is knocked off in the early going here. As a result, the story was a little difficult to follow, as the reader is forced to suppress the memory of the other book as he or she reads this one.

The story also isn't quite as good. A child's playthings become tangible terrors for the people of Poplar Street, and this forces a bit too much reliance on the fictional MotoKops, a sort of Mighty Morphing Power Rangers that drive around in brightly colored vans. While its hard to say that these vans and their drivers aren't believable in the context of the whole story, they aren't terribly compelling. There are some interesting interactions in the course of the book, but nothing really holds up well, quite possibly because of the weird sense of deja vu created by the dual identities of the characters. What is interesting is that this book solidifies the roles of writer Johnny Marinville, Cynthia Schmidt, and Steve Ames as the real protagonists of both novels, although their identities have also shifted between the two.

On some level, The Regulators represents an interesting little experiment on the part of Stephen King. To tell the same story twice, in entirely different contexts, may have seemed like a neat idea, but reading the two books in rapid succession is clearly not the way to appreciate it.