<div style='font: 11pt arial; text-align: left; '>I'd write you these myself, but I gotta go mow the lawn.
<I><B>Desperation</b></i>
<I>In the Beginning...there was the Highway, and the Highway was Dry and Dusty. An eclectic group of travelers along a desert highway in Nevada get stopped by a very large local police officer, who initially seems friendly, normal, and all business. But, the more you get to know him, the more strange he seems. Is he really just a local cop? Is the alcoholic writer just an alcoholic writer? Is the twelve-year-old boy, with a newfound but strong sense of religion, just a normal boy? What about the local copper mine? What about the lady mining engineer?
In some ways, this is "The Stand" revisited, with a disparate group banding together to fight an evil and supernatural force. It is a bit formulaic, especially early on. But, "God is in the details," and "Desperation" is a mine rich with interesting twists, themes, subthemes, and characters. ...David Carver (the boy) has hidden depths that turn this story into a near-epic. Good versus evil is the oldest plot (see the Book of Exodus in the Bible if you're unconvinced) but "Desperation" is definitely is definitely not your typical good guy battles bad guy story.</I>
<B><I>The Regulators</i></b>
An evil creature called Tak uses the imagination of an autistic boy to shift a residential street in small-town Ohio into a world so bizarre and brutal that only a child could think it up. It's as two-dimensional and gaudy as a kid's comic book, but for this reviewer, The Regulators is a gripping adventure tale about what happens when a mind fixated on TV (especially old Westerns and a cartoon called MotoKops 2200) runs amok. As Michael Collins writes in Necrofile, "[Stephen] King offers his readers a glimpse of the true evil of popular culture ... which has no design or intent, only an empty need to sustain itself. King is, I think, about the canniest observer of what America is, and that he generally writes horror ought to give us pause from time to time."</div>
[b]Sorry, it looks like I'm going to have to kill you in an instant.[/b]