Warning! Spoilers for the Chronicles of Narnia Below!
Desperation and the Regulators were a very
interesting concept that I’ve not seen done elsewhere. They were
published at the same time in 1996, one openly written by King, the
other purporting to be by his long-dead alias, Richard Bachman, the
manuscript having been found by his widow and published posthumously.
Both include the same characters – including Cynthia, of Rose Madder –
though they’re in slightly different situations, with, for example,
parents swapping places with children in one nuclear unit.
In Desperation, a small town is slaughtered en
mass by the sheriff who then begins luring other victims in. One of the
characters, David, made a vow to God when a friend of his didn’t die,
and is thus enlisted as God’s representative, to save the town. His
thoughts on this reminded me a lot of Neil Gaiman’s The Problem with
Susan, a story about the elder Susan Pevensie after her family die at
the end of the Narnia series.
In Good Omens – by Terry Pratchett and Neil
Gaiman – it is stated that, if God is omniscient and all-powerful, there
cannot be a war between good and evil. There can only be one long,
unfathomable game of solitaire. Both Susan and Desperation reminded me
of that; both point out that their respective gods could have prevented
the accident in the first place, but didn’t. Not a tame lion.
The Regulators involves an autistic boy who is
given reality warping powers by the same unpleasant being who is behind
the events of Desperation. I do wonder if the Regulators isnt’t real at
all; if, instead, Tak has just moved the world sideways, into one in
which he can try something new. We see in Wizard and Glass, after all, that sideways worlds exist. As well as in that short story where Little Tall became the home of the zombie apocalypse.
I found Desperation to be one of the more
horrifying of King’s novels, on the basis of one single line. Long
before the events of either book, there was a cave-in which trapped
seventy Chinese workers. No one tried to get them out, and when asked
why, a character explains “because they were Chinese”. The line’s
delivered as a criticism of the people of the time, not as a justifiable
reason, or at least, that’s how I took it.
Six Stories is a special edition of, well, six
stories, published in a limited run of 1100 volumes, each signed by
King. I cheated; the stories were later published in Everything’s
Eventual and Hearts in Atlantis, so I read those versions instead.
They’re heavily edited, in some cases, but I viewed this as an
acceptable compromise, given the difficulty and expense it would take to
track down one of those limited editions.
Although I’d read Everything’s Eventual before,
and thus had read five of the six stories, the only one I really
remembered was Autopsy Room 4. Possibly because of my fear of locked-in
syndrome (I’m also cleithrophobic and trypophobic – don’t google image
search that last one). I quite liked Luckey Quarter [sic], I think
because it was slightly more optimistic than King’s normal work.
I’ve already started Wizard and Glass, the next
book published by King, and the fourth part of the Dark Tower Series.
Then I’ll reread Little Sisters of Eluria, and there’ll be a long, long
stretch before I get to Song of Susannah, which was published in 2004,
immediately before The Dark Tower. The final (or, at least, most
recent) book of the series was published in 2012.
Interesting, the first book I read in 2016 was
the first book of King’s published in the 1990s; Four Past Midnight.
There are only six books left in the decade after Little Sisters of
Eluria; Bag of Bones, Storm of the Century, Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon,
The New Lieutenant’s Rap, Hearts in Atlantis, and Blood and Smoke. The
Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is pretty short, especially for a King novel,
and Hearts in Atlantis only contains six stories. The New Lieutenant’s
Rap is also a short story. I’ll aim to finish those by the end of this
year.
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