IN THESE SILENCES SOMETHING MAY RISEOi, this book is a doozy! I read it months ago but only just finished its companion novel so I think I'm finally ready to organize my thoughts and write a review of this thing. I know I rated it three stars but that's really only in comparison to King's other work. Because compared with other writers, this book is far better, but compared to a lot of his other novels, it is just on the lower end of the Stephen King spectrum for me. Which really is too bad because it contains one of the most brilliant evil entities about which I've read.TAKThis book is about a group of strangers who find themselves stranded in the Nevada desert in a small town called Desperation. Not just stranded in the desert, but locked up a rinky-dink sheriff's office because the local sheriff, named Collie Entragian, has gone totally berserk. He pulled these strangers over, found some cause to haul them off to the police station, and some of them even had to watch loved ones die in the process. Desperate to leave with their lives intact, these strangers have to work together to get away from this rogue man of the law (who keeps interjecting phrases such as Tak a la, Tak a wan into every day speech and who also seems to be literally falling apart at the seams). Among these strangers are the Carver family: Ralph, Ellie, and David who lost their young daughter/sister, Pie, at the hands of Entragian; a local drunk and veterinarian, Tom Billinglsey; tough but afraid Mary Jackson who saw her husband Peter murdered in front of her; and prize-winning legendary author Johnny Marinville, setting out on a cross-country voyage to gain substance for his new memoir: Travels with Harley. They are later joined by Marinville's road manager, Steve Ames and a hitchhiker he picked up named Cynthia Smith (who is also a character in Rose Madder). These strangers come together to try and figure out why they are the only survivors of whatever happened in Desperation, and why Entragian decided one day to kill everyone in the town. What they discover is a malevolent spirit who has hidden underneath the earth for centuries, waiting to get out and wreak havoc all over the place.Tak is a hard entity to figure out. At first I kind of thought he was a demon, but that has too much of a mythological or religious aspect to it. Malevolent spirit also doesn't seem to work much. I think what I came to realize was that Tak is basically chaos. A non-corporeal entity whose sole purpose is to inhabit human hosts to create a world of chaos out of a world of order. But Tak soon realizes that humans cannot host it for long. The energy that Tak creates wears their bodies out too much, and any kind of flaws whatsoever grow exponentially in a short amount of time. Collie Entragian's pale skin made him susceptible to the sun, literally causing cracks in his body. Another human host had an unknown case of cancer which made his body break down from the inside out. Tak fed on the chaos of killing, of sex, of debauchery, of arguing. Its where it drew its life force from. TAK. IT. IT. TAK. I couldn't help but find similarities between two of King's most notorious evil beings. And as he kept referring to Tak as IT, I think he wanted the connections to be made. Just one more reason why I love this author. No, Tak's real, it has a being. It had to get Ripton into the mine because it can't get through the ini--the well. It has a physical body, and the well is too small for it. All it can do is catch people, inhabit them, make them into can tak. And trade them in when they wear out.The quote above just shows how totally complex this whole IDEA of Tak is. Can tak. Can tah. Ini. Things that exist only in Tak's world. A world that has just collided with Desperation, Nevada.Anywhoo, I could go on and on and on and on about so many things because there are so many to digest. Tak meets its match in young David Carver, who is a very religious boy with a hell of a lot of faith. God speaks to David and uses him as a vessel to defeat Tak with the help of the others. Each of the strangers has their purpose, and David emerges as their leader. I think this is where the novel started to fail a little bit for me. The characters are all so CONTRIVED. As if they were all playing caricatures of types found in horror movies. David is the one with the faith. Johnny Marinville is the skeptic. Tom Billingsley is the token drunk. Cynthia and Steve provide the romance. Mary is the feisty alpha female. None of the characters rang at all genuine or true to me. And that was a major problem.Wait, back up. Stephen King's characters didn't ring at all true? Something doesn't seem right about that. King is a MASTER of characterization. I've never known him to provide such hokey and caricatured characters before. Is this some kind of setup? Was this on purpose? King pits these characters against each other, in opposition. Particularly toward the end, Johnny the skeptic and David the faithful really seem to complete the circle with each other. I don't really know how else to describe it. They become connected in some way, either through God, or some other kind of energy that is antagonistic to Tak's. It is through these two characters that answers begin to appear. David represents life, faith, youth, destiny. Johnny, washed-up, sold-out old Johnny Marinville represents just that. Waste. Death. Endings. Selling Out. Giving In. "When a person stops changing, stops feeling, they die. The times you've tried to kill yourself since, you were just playing catch-up. Weren't you?" And the child smiled at him with a sympathy that was unspeakable in its innocence and kindness and lack of judgement. "Johnny," David Carver said, "God can raise the dead."So now we are back to good and evil, God and Tak, faith and doubt.I did enjoy this book and found it to be one of King's headier novels. I definitely liked it better AFTER reading The Regulators and taking both books as a whole. I'm also not sure I read this at the right time to fully digest it and uncover all its brilliance. I know its there, somewhere in the mines of Desperation, Nevada. I just came back with a lot of dust. I may need to go back down to the mine again to see if there is any gold.
A disparate collection of travellers are abducted by an insane cop and incarcerated in the jail of a small Nevada mining town in the middle of nowhere. It quickly becomes clear that the cop isn't just insane - he's posessed - and an ancient tunnel recently uncovered at the mine may hold the clue...King's novels are rather variable in quality. I suspect that most careful and discerrning readers, even King's Constant Readers, will acknowledge that as true. I'll qualify the statement and state that I haven't yet read a single King that I *didn't* like but I *can* recognise their flaws. Perhaps that's the mark of a true fan (I'd like to think so)?Now; I'm re-reading a lot of his old stuff and (slowly) coming up to date with his newer work so I can't claim to have a huge base across which to compare, but I think that Desperation has to be one of his better novels. It scores highly on a number of counts, the best probably being the atmosphere that King develops: the desperate, deserted, dusty desolation of the setting, the sense of rising foreboding as events build to a head, the terror and uncertainty evoked by the murderous cop, the helplessness of his victims and the sudden randomness of their deaths. This *feels* like a horror novel. The depiction of the mad cop is also masterful: he's not simply insane Tak, his problems go far deeper than that and his strange mannerisms and sayings convey his demonic posession rather well.That said, King lets himself down somewhat with the dialogue he constructs for his other - less mental - protagonists and they frequently talk as if their lines had been scripted by a Hollywood B-movie dialogue coach; wordy and schmaltzily sincere. Perhaps it's less noticable to an American, but I found it hard to swallow without gagging slightly.The characters are, as ever, King's usual band of non-descripts and includes a regulation college lecturer. The cast is supported by a slightly stronger character in the guise of Johnny Marinville a self-centred, self-important writer trying to resurrect his fading star by going on a road trip. He's obviously meant to be deeply unlikeable (see The Stand's Larry Underwood) but this is always a dangerous tactic in my book as an unsympathetic lead can detract from or even put you off the story altogether (which is why I never managed to complete Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series). That doesn't quite happen here because Marinville just isn't strong *enough*.Anyway, I've spent more time criticising the book than I intended. At the end of the day it's a good, page-turning story with a strong theme and plenty of gore! I realise now that, over the last few years I've been plodding through my reading list unenthusiastically and under-engaged, struggling to find anything that I really wanted to finish. Returning to King after a ten (or more?) year break, I seem to have rediscovered a joy in reading. Suddenly I find myself creeping downstairs at 1am to read another chapter, or turning off the telly so that I can read instead. For me, with all its faults and failings, Depseration is a part of that discovery.`Did you puke in the back of my cruiser, Lord Jim? Because if you did, the first thing you're gonna get when we hit town is a big old spoon.'
What do You think about Desperation (1997)?
Say what you will about Stephen King, but you’ve got to hand it to our man in Maine: sitting down with one of his novels is never a struggle. Having read a number of his books, I’ve gradually come to think of him as being a bit like an old friend: a charming, chatty old friend who, for the price of a paperback, will happily sit down with you and tell you one of his numerous stories, stories whose occasional nastiness seems quite at odds with their mild-mannered narrator. On this level, Desperation does not disappoint; you’re likely to be hooked from the very first page. And, yes, it really is pretty nasty – but then I have got a slight phobia of creepy little towns, so I would say that.Highway 50 in Nevada is apparently (being a Brit I’d hardly know) “The Loneliest Highway in America” – not the kind of place where you’d want to run out of petrol, have an accident or, indeed, meet a seemingly psychopathic policeman, as a random group of travellers are about to find out to their cost. In fact, the policeman is just the tip of the iceberg, as the actual source of the horror is something bigger, older and considerably more deadly than one man. The small mining town of Desperation, once a small but safe and friendly place, has been devastated by an ancient evil, and it falls to a ragged group of survivors to do battle with that evil. It’s astounding how many of our primal fears King works on, and with what apparent ease: the fear of being possessed, the fear of bodily degeneration and decay, the dark, being alone, not being alone, wide open spaces, confined spaces, and of course what horrors might lurk in those spaces. In many ways this is not for the easily-upset: it’s genuinely horrific on occasion, and most certainly gory. King was never the man to spare us sickening physical details, and he’s on form here, disgusting us with every dribble of blood, every rotten lump of flesh and every putrid corpse. The foulness can get a bit much on occasion, and yes, it does begin to feel a bit gratuitous, but it’s a compelling story, so you can overlook that.There are one or two gripes: as is so often the case with King, he starts off so well, and with such an intriguing premise, that he actually sort of writes himself into a corner; the ending is a disappointment, not to mention unintentionally mildly funny. And of course there are the recycled characters, the characters who have made numerous appearances in other King novels – the young boy with strange powers, the weary, cynical writer, the slightly downtrodden woman who has to struggle against the odds – but then again the fact that they keep coming back only really testifies to how successful they were to begin with. If ever a writer was a victim of his own success, it’s SK; but then, in accordance with one of the major themes of the novel, God is cruel. Recommended, if not for the faint of heart.
—Mari Biella
Why, what a splendid book. Gosh! Tak.”I see holes like eyes.”Desperation is one of the downright scariest books I’ve read, and the scares come early. King manages, for the most part, to keep the tension up throughout the novel, which makes it one hell of an uneasy read. Some sequences are somewhat bizarre, and others are bluntly offensive, although this is only what you’d expect from a novel such as this: it’s not meant to be easy reading after all. Something about this bothered [him], but for now he paid no attention. His fright had grown into a sense of foreboding so strong and yet so diffuse that he felt a little as if he’d eaten something laced with poison.The story is definitely reminiscent of King’s earlier output and 1980s horror in general. Parallels can be drawn, not only with King’s own work, but also with novels like Floating Dragon and Phantoms. The nature of the supernatural antagonist is somewhat vague, but purposely so. Is it Demonic? Extraterrestrial? Biological?Dolls with no little girls around to mind them were sort of creepy under any conditions, that was his opinion, at least, and to come upon one abandoned by the roadside, half-buried in blowing sand—It’s a visual novel, and King makes very effective use of imagery. The abandoned RV with its door banging in the wind, the doll by the roadside… it’s enough to raise hackles. The desert in this novel isn’t as much majestic as it is creepy in its desolation. And always menacing.”Tell you what, pilgrim—this smells bad.”On the face of it, it’s typical King fare: very small town, multiple POV characters, supernatural evil, a healthy dose of Americana et al…. but Desperation does have one or two aces up its sleeve. It has some novelty value, having been released alongside The Regulators. It also has an epic and mythical sweep that can at least partly be attributed to the setting. Have I mentioned just how scary it gets?“What’s that?” she whimpered. “Oh my God, what is it?”There is an overt religious theme present here and King tackles themes like the nature of God (“God is cruel.” Vs “God is love.”), the nature of Divine Intervention, and Redemption etc. Just how much of this will appeal to the reader would probably depend. I can’t speak for others, but I enjoyed the book. ”My head is full of blackbirds.”
—Dirk Grobbelaar
One thing I find fascinating is how many critics write off Stephen King as a hack because he writes horror novels. Unlike literary authors, who write about extraordinary people in regular situations, King writes about regular people in extraordinary situations, and that’s just fine with me.Desperation is reminiscent of King’s magnum opus The Stand, and King revisits many familiar themes such as good versus evil, salvation, redemption, faith, so forth. There’s also a lot of blood and gore, which might turn you off if you’re not into that. However, I’d say the best thing about the novel is the spooky, desolate atmosphere of the ghost town in no-where Nevada where the action takes place.King’s a master at telling human, character-driven tales despite the presence of non-human, often demonic entities. Desperation is no exception and a great read. Go check it out!PS: If you happen to be driving through the desert and a creepy cop pulls you over, wait until he gets out of his cruiser, then hit the gas and get the hell out of there!
—Jeremy Bates
