The terror is relentless-this is King's scariest book since Misery-though the storytelling is looser than in The Regulators to allow room for spiritual themes. There, Tak stalks them by possessing humans and turning them into homicidal maniacs, and by unleashing armies of coyotes, spiders and scorpions. (The novels aren't sequential, however people who die in one can live, then die, in the other.) The exception is David Carver, 11, who, with a handful of other passers-through, including a major writer who's recently embraced sobriety, is trapped in the desert mining town of Desperation, Nev. Like the second panel of a diptych, Desperation employs, with one major exception, the same characters as The Regulators, and the same source of horror: an evil force named Tak. For if The Regulators is a work of secular horror, this is a novel of sacred horror (King's first), and explicitly so. With this astonishing work, King again proves himself the premier literary barometer of our cultural clime. 24 of The Regulators (Dutton Forecasts, June 17) and Desperation, he becomes the first bestselling author-maybe the first author ever-to issue three new major novels in one calendar year. Not only is he writing the first modern novel to be serialized in book form (The Green Mile), but with the publication on Sept. If the publishing industry named a Person of the Year, this year's winner would be Stephen King.
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