Desperation
by Stephen King

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En route to Lake Tahoe for a much anticipated vacation, the Carver family is arrested for blowing out all four tires on their camper. Collie Entragian is the arresting officer, the self-made sheriff of a town called Desperation, Nevada, and the quintessential bad cop. Unbeknownst to the Carvers, Entragian regularly sniffs out passersby on this stretch of road, and in fact has done in nearly every resident of his hometown. He can also change form and summon the help of creepy creatures, including scorpions, snakes and spiders. Though the family seems doomed, an unlikely hero emerges --11-year-old David Carver--who finds his own way to get around the Law. 

Desperation is the companion novel to King's The Regulators, which was published simultaneously under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Forget the more-or-less literary novels of recent years, like Dolores Claiborne. These books mark the return of the Stephen King of The Stand and Pet Sematary, where King's main concerns where whether good could defeat evil and how much gore could be squeezed into (or out of) one book. In each novel, the characters and situations are altered as King plays with questions of identity and form. But both really center around a new personification of evil that goes by the name of Tak. Tak wants to rule the world. Somebody has to stop him. Somebody's eyes have to pop out. Somebody's head has to explode. Now that's Stephen King! 
-- unknown

On The Flap

Nevada is mostly a long stretch of desert you cross on the way to somewhere else.  And with someone else, if your lucky ... because it's a scary place.  Headed down Route 50 in the brutal summer heat are people who are never going to reach their destinations.  Like the Jacksons, a professor and his wife going home to New York City; the Carvers, a Wentworth, Ohio, family bound for a vacation at Lake Tahoe; and aging literary lion Johnny Marinville, inventing a gonzo image for himself astride a 700-pound Harley.

A dead cat nailed to a road sign heralds the little mining town of Desperation, a town that seems withered in the shade of a man-made mountain known as the China Pit.  But it's worse than that, much worse.  Regulating the traffic there is Collie Entragian, an outsize uniformed madman who considers himself the only law west of the Pecos.  God forbid you should be missing a license plate or find yourself with a flat tire.

There's something very wrong here, all right, and Entragian is only the surface of it.  The secrets embedded in Desperation's landscape, and the evil that infects the town like some viral hot zone, are both awesome and terrifying.  But as young David Carver seems to know -- though it scares him nearly to death to realize it -- so are the forces summoned to combat them.  In Desperation, Stephen King's sweeping brush paints an apocalyptic drama of God and evil, madness and revelation.  His genius for suspense has never been so finely honed, his imagination so shudderingly vivid, as when his wayfarers -- and the readers who dare to follow their course -- begin to discover the true meaning of the word desperation.

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Desperation (1996) -
Mass Market Paperback (2003), Library Binding (1999), Hardcover (1999), Hardcover (1997), Large Print Hardcover (1997), Hardcover (1996), Hardcover (1996)
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Desperation (unabridged) (1996) -
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