Stephen King's Most Brutal Book? Desperation

Stephen King's Desperation has been an intense read. There's some among his books that just grab you instantly and you can't put them down anymore. Not until you finished them. So that's what happened to me with Desperation, certainly, as I read day after day as much as I could.

The cover of Stephen King's Desperation already shows what to expect.

Unlike many of his works Desperation is a straight forward book. It begins with the Carver family stopped by a police car in the middle of Nevada's desert. A huling police officer asks them to join him as a 'very dangerous man' is out there and lurking bypassers. Turns out that's him. Likewise 'the cop' as it is referred to catches some more victims which he either kills on the spot or locks into a jail cell in 'Desperation' a seemingly empty mining town in Nevada's desert. That's how the group of characters is gathered together in Desperation - the Carver family with mom Ellen, dad Ralph, son David and daugther Pie (killed by the cop), Mary Jackson and her husband Peter Jackson (killed by the cop), writer Johnny Marinville, and local old guy Tom Billingsley.

As it turns out the diggings in Desperation woke something evil, an ancient demon with the name of Tak. Tak for me is one of King's most memorable foes as it is not only a body changing parasite, an outspoken enemy of god but also one with a loose mouth and always good for some defty one liners.

Religion is a central concept in Desperation as young boy David Carver soon establishes a more or less direct connection to 'god' through praying. David then acts as god's puppet to stop and banish Tak. Personally that was a little too much on the Christian side of things for me. I'd preferred if King had used his concept of Purpose and Random in Desperation instead of the Christian god. Nonetheless I had a very good time with Desperation and that's what counts.

And one more word to the level of violence in Desperation. It is outstandingly gruesome, even for King standards. Not only sets Tak a breakdown of its host body in progress until merely a pile of blood and flesh is left over once it possesses it, but there's also massacre, killing of women and children, golf clubs rammed down throats and dead bodies everywhere. Enough to wonder if this might not be King's most brutal book written.

Now I'm reading Richard Bachman's The Regulators, the inofficial sister book to Desperation. The backpage of my copy of the Desperation hard cover edition already hints at this. I will write my impressions on this in lenght once I finished it. The first impression is that it's weird to see seemingly the same (but not the same) characters in a different context and I'm not sure if it can be as good as 'Desperation'. But I'll judge once I did the reading, not before.

The back of the book already hints to Bachman's The Regulators.

Oh, and I found out there's a movie to Desperation, which I will have to see as soon as possible: