The Regulators Reviews


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The Regulators

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Poplar Street in Wentworth, Ohio is a nice place to live. The idling red van around the corner is about to change all that...

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Richard Bachman is really Stephen King, and The Regulators is a kind of companion novel to Desperation, which was published simultaneously. These books mark the return of the Stephen King of old; the Stephen King of The Stand and Pet Sematary, where good and evil were at war and blood and gore flowed through the pages. The companion novels center around a new personification of evil that goes by the name of Tak, unearthed by an evil mining company that's destroying the earth in the name of profit. In each, the characters and situations are altered as King plays with questions of identity and form. But the real point here is what's on Tak's mind? Does it want to "Eat pork rinds? . . . Screw some NFL cheerleaders? . . . Rule the earth?"

Product Description

Poplar Street in Wentworth, Ohio is a nice place to live. The idling red van around the corner is about to change all that...




    The Regulators Reviews


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    232 Reviews
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    13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
    5.0 out of 5 stars Who knew that earth demons like Chef Boyardee?, October 21, 2006
    'The Regulators' is not quite on the literary level of 'Desperation,' but that makes it more fun in a way, especially as it's less preachy. I liked that 'The Regulators' adds a little more information about the mysterious Tak. Here we see a more terribly playful, oddly fastidious, and possibly younger Tak who loves spaghetti, chocolate milk, westerns, and Cassie Stiles. And while most of the characters of 'The Regulators' are flatter than those of 'Desperation,' 'The Regulators' gives us a glimpse of what some inhabitants of Desperation might have been like before Tak possessed them, particularly Audrey and Collie who were never shown "pre-Tak" in 'Desperation.'
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    11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
    4.0 out of 5 stars Alternate versions of grisly, gory, terrifying horror, August 19, 2004
    By 
    Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews
    (VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
    This review is from: The Regulators (Hardcover)
    Our resident master of horror, Stephen King, chalked up another first with the simultaneous 1996 publication of two huge grisly page turners, "Desperation", and under the pseudonym of "the late" Richard Bachman, "The Regulators."

    A juxtaposition of the two covers reveals one picture - a menacing suburban landscape overlapping a western ghost town overrun with critters. But the two novels (almost 1200 pages of late nights and disturbing dreams) are each complete in themselves.

    "Desperation" is set in a tiny Nevada mining town of the same name and "The Regulators" takes place on one block of an Ohio suburb. What the two novels share is their characters and the same elemental evil force, Tak, which has escaped from a deep mine shaft.

    Although King has saved himself some work here - the characters have essentially the same personalities and backgrounds in both books - neither book provides a clue to anyone's fate in the other. The books are not sequential... Read more
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    17 of 20 people found the following review helpful
    4.0 out of 5 stars The Regulators, December 2, 2000
    By A Customer
    A good book, but Desperation was better. I read Desperation first, and expected it to be similar, but the two books are completely different. The force of evil in both novels is the same, and the characters have the same names but different personalities, and different people survive at the end. The ending is also different, Desperation's is far better. The story involves an autistic boy named Seth who seems to have some special powers. Soon, it becomes apparent that he is infested by a being/power called Tak, which feeds on peoples' "life-force". Tak is using its limited but growing powers to turn a pleasant summer afternoon in this pleasant Ohio suburb into a living nightmare for all its residents. I think the biggest problem with this book is the characters. There are so many of them that it becomes confusing, and that the author doesn't spend much time on character development for any of them. As a result, we really don't get to "know" any of them (except... Read more
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