The Book: The Regulators, by Stephen King, writing as Richard Bachman
The Story: Hmmm. This one is a little bizarre. Not completely sure where to start.
It’s a normal day on a normal street in a normal town in Ohio. All of a sudden, a van pulls on to the street, rolls down the window and mows down people just going about their business. In normal, Stephen King style, a merry band of survivors get together and try to figure out what happened, why and how to stop it.
Meanwhile, one of the houses on the street is going through something totally sinister and creepy. There’s this autistic kid who has this evil little bug, Tak, inside of him and is torturing his aunt, who took him in after his family was killed.
This book is kind of a hodge-podge of letters, diary entries, newspaper articles, and straight narrative. Through all of this, a real picture of what is going on starts to come together. The story revolves around the survivors trying to piece it together too and overcome this evil before it gets all of them.
What I Thought: Let me start by saying any book set in Ohio gets me all excited. I loved all the little “Ohio” details that were thrown in. It never gets old for me.
So. Did I like this? Meh. I don’t know. It was a page turner, I’ll say that much. It is a pretty fat book and I just ripped through it. Even though I wasn’t head-over-heels sold on what was going on, I just had to see what happened next. And that’s a positive.
One thing that I’ve said several times as I’ve reviewed other Stephen King books is that I just love how he makes these characters that jump off the page. Usually, for me, his characters make the book. Maybe that is why I came out of this book not really in love. There is this pretty sprawling cast of characters and with only a few exceptions, it was hard to remember who was who. There were very few backstories and I never really felt devastated when a character died. Even a couple hundred pages in, I couldn’t really tell one character from the other. They all were just kind of a face-less blob. For me, this kind of took away from the story only because I never found myself emotionally attached.
The most compelling part of the story, for me, was how it was told. I loved the diary entries, the newspaper clippings and the letters. This made it so much more interesting to me than just a straight linear novel. I thought that it made reading the story more fun and I thought that it was pulled off well.
I know that this has a companion book, Desperation, which was written under Stephen King’s real name instead of using Richard Bachman. I haven’t read that one yet, but I’m sure next time I need another dark piece of brain candy, I’ll try to get my hands on that one. I’d love to see where he went with that.
Conclusion: I was tired of reading serious, non-fiction books so I grabbed this. It was alright. If you haven’t read Richard Bachman/Stephen King, please promise me that you won’t start on this one. It probably doesn’t even make my top ten. For a quick, fun read though, this will get the job done.