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"God is cruel."
Three sets of travelers - a married couple, a family on vacation, and a self-important aging writer ("America's only truly great white male novelist") trying to revive his reputation by riding a motorcycle across America to write Travels with Harley - get arrested by a very strange cop and taken into the seemingly empty town of Desperation, Nevada.
This opening sequence is fantastically tense and sometimes darkly funny, tapping into the primal fears of being arrested, being framed, and being under the control of a malevolent and insane authority figure. It's my favorite part of the book. The cop is a bizarre and memorable character.
“You have the right to remain silent,' the big cop said in his robot's voice. 'If you do not choose to remain silent, anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. I'm going to kill you. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand your rights as I have explained them to you?”
This book is fun to read with no idea of where it's going, so I'm putting spoilers about the general plot and themes under a cut. It has some deep and serious themes conveyed by means of a pretty batshit plot, which is not uncommon with King but is taken to an extreme here; this is the same book where someone hurls away an attacking rat, and King describes the flying rat as a ratsteroid.
( Read more... )
Some of the prose is very beautiful, especially on grief, and there's two set-piece scenes that are outstanding. (The opening where everyone gets trapped, and the terrifying scene where Cynthia and Steve explore the deserted mine offices.) But overall, it's not one of my favorites.
The other interesting thing about Desperation is that King wrote a companion book to it, The Regulators, as Richard Bachmann. It's possibly one of the weirdest instances ever of a companion book, and I will review it tomorrow.
Three sets of travelers - a married couple, a family on vacation, and a self-important aging writer ("America's only truly great white male novelist") trying to revive his reputation by riding a motorcycle across America to write Travels with Harley - get arrested by a very strange cop and taken into the seemingly empty town of Desperation, Nevada.
This opening sequence is fantastically tense and sometimes darkly funny, tapping into the primal fears of being arrested, being framed, and being under the control of a malevolent and insane authority figure. It's my favorite part of the book. The cop is a bizarre and memorable character.
“You have the right to remain silent,' the big cop said in his robot's voice. 'If you do not choose to remain silent, anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. I'm going to kill you. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand your rights as I have explained them to you?”
This book is fun to read with no idea of where it's going, so I'm putting spoilers about the general plot and themes under a cut. It has some deep and serious themes conveyed by means of a pretty batshit plot, which is not uncommon with King but is taken to an extreme here; this is the same book where someone hurls away an attacking rat, and King describes the flying rat as a ratsteroid.
( Read more... )
Some of the prose is very beautiful, especially on grief, and there's two set-piece scenes that are outstanding. (The opening where everyone gets trapped, and the terrifying scene where Cynthia and Steve explore the deserted mine offices.) But overall, it's not one of my favorites.
The other interesting thing about Desperation is that King wrote a companion book to it, The Regulators, as Richard Bachmann. It's possibly one of the weirdest instances ever of a companion book, and I will review it tomorrow.