Desperation
Stephen King

Nevada is mostly a long stretch of desert you cross on the way to somewhere else. And with someone else, if you're 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 Carter seems to know - though it scares him nearly to death to realize it - so are the forces summoned to combat them.

This is the sister novel to The Regulators and I do recommend reading The Regulators first, though in the end it probably won't make much of a difference which one is read when. It just seems to flow better reading The Regulators and then Desperation. Especially since they both contain the same characters, but in alternate universes.

Like many of Stephen King's novels, this one does not fail to impress. It's rather long, but isn't a hard read. The action comes fast enough that you can read 100 pages and have not even realized it. The plot is solid, especially when combined with The Regulators, and the characters are well rounded human beings. Even the evil Tak - god, demon, or something else all together - is given a personality of its own.

Don't be put off by the 690 pages in hardcover, there really are no boring stretches and the book reads smoothly. It doesn't feel like a long novel in the least even though it looks somewhat foreboding.

This is also a take no prisoner novel. Many characters die, and the ones who end up living are a bit surprising. I won't say who survives and who does not, but it is not what the reader would normally expect.

I would highly recommend this novel, but please read The Regulators first (and know that this is the better of the two).

My rating: Four and a half out of five snails.