King's Highway pt. 83: The Regulators

"His almost lifelong interest in footnotes had deserted him."

The Regulators was the "mirror" novel to Desperation, both released in 1996. Also published that year: The Green Mile. Not a bad year for the King (although the Thinner movie probably sullied things just a tad) but a great year for publishers and book-sellers. And readers, too, of course.

The two novels are parallel universes and feature the same supernatural entity, Tak, and the same characters, just re-shuffled (the primary bad guy of Desperation, Entragion, is a secondary protagonist in The Regulators, etc. Johnny Marinville is the King-stand-in-writer-guy .) Tak has the same origin in both books (it was imprisoned in the China Pit mine-shaft until the Desperation Mining Corporation accidentally unearthed it), but its powers are a little different In Desperation, Tak has the ability to control the local desert wildlife, while in The Regulators, he is capable of willing ideas into deadly three-dimensional objects: a child's toys become three-dimensional motorized killers, strange animal hybrids attack our heroes, etc.

"His remaining sight was almost gone, but there was enough left for him to see the perfectly round moon rising between the fangs of the black Crayola mountains."

In both novels, it is Tak's ability to take direct control of human hosts (causing them to rapidly deteriorate) that provides the key to defeating him. 

Okay, so first things first, this does not enjoy the greatest reputation among either critics (this Tor reread entry or the original NYT review) or King fans, usually clocking in the bottom rungs of any of the various King's Rankings out there. Whereas I'm some crazy fool who lists it as his 20th favorite King book - go figure.

Technically it's a Bachman book and not a King one. Does it need to be? I think it works for the double/mirror release, but does The Regulators have all that much in common, stystylistically or thematically, with other Bachman books? The destructive-nightmare potential of television and (if you count Regulators' minute-by-minute, live-update chapter design) a "countdown" sort of structure: that's pretty much it. Maybe it's enough. 

(And is this the only Bachman book with a relatively happy ending? I think it might be.)

What it seems to want to be, moreso than a Bachman book, is a kind of multi-media event. The kind the internet would popularize in later years. (Yes, the internet was around in '96, but, for most of us, just barely. People certainly weren't doing Lost-style tie-in stuff, at any rate.) 

King has his customary lack of success in making the diary entries/ letters sound as if they are written by actual people, or different people. None are badly written, per se, just you can always see the strings, so to speak.

If this came out now, I wouldn't be surprised if the various epistolary and "found items" elements of The Regulators were twitter entries and the story itself serialized on a website to tie-in to Desperation's release. (Maybe even a MotoKops actual cartoon - definitely Todd McFarlane-designed toys and Power Wagons.) 

If I had my way, it would be the other way around. Desperation has a helluva opening and an irresistible set-up, but... it flounders, badly, as it goes on and on (and on.) The Regulators in contrast starts just as boldly as its twinner but is much leaner and more focused.


The story - Tak terrorizes the residents of one suburban town with images he's plucked from the mind of his human host, an autistic child named Seth - might have seemed like "King on autopilot" to audiences of the time. (I get that impression from some of the reviews from when it came out, at least.) And in a way it's true that many elements are familiar (writer-protagonist, an outcast child with fantastic powers and genius beyond his outward appearance/condition, ordinary folks being terrorized by Joe Hill's toys, etc.), but to me - especially coming after the "feminist phase" of King's 90s-writings - this seems like a self-aware summation of his entire career before that point. Almost an affectionate tribute before moving on to newer pastures.

On Writing - which revealed the behind-the-scenes shenanigans of King's imbibing in the 80s - had yet to come out, so this passage where Johnny Marinville reflects on his writing retirement is interesting in retrospect:

"He could not, he said, imagine ever writing another novel. That fire seemed to be out, and he didn't miss waking up in the morning with it burning his brains... along with the inevitable hangover. That part seemed to be done. And he could accept that. The part that he didn't think he could accept was how the old life of which his novels had been a part was still everywhere around him, whispering from the corners and murmuring from his old IBM every time he turned it on. I am what you were, the typewriter's hum said to him, and what you'll always be. 

"It was never about self-image, or even ego, but only about what was printed from your genes from the very start. Run to the end of the earth and take a room in the last hotel and go to the end of the final corridor and when you open the door that's there, the one you heard on so many shaky hungover mornings, and there'll be a can of Coors beside your book-notes and a gram of coke in the top drawer left, because in the end that's what you are and all you are. As some wise man or other once said, there is no gravity; the earth just sucks." 

Okay, so there are a few little things King doesn't do so well (the epistolary stuff) or does too much (autistic child with psychic powers, King-stand-in-writer-guy, which is tough because it's difficult to make an author of King's stature come across realistically in print. He doesn't even seem realistic as himself in Song of Susannah and DT Bk7, for crying out loud. It's an irony of his Horatio Alger-esque story/ position.) But there's plenty here I do like, and if you don't mind I'll switch to bullet points.

- King has said this book is about TV while Desperation is about God. That made more sense to me on my first read. This second time around it seemed less "about" TV and instead just used tropes from television (the old violent westerns of King's childhood and adolescence, and the cartoon violence of his own children's/ Seth's) in traditional-King-horror ways. 

SNAKE HUNTER: A deep-space Power Wagon assault? Could be a quick trip to that Boot Hill in the sky!

ROOTY: Root-root-root-root!

ALL: Shut up, Rooty!

Pictures of Dutton edition (including that Power Wagon above) from here.

In other words, there's less message in The Regulators (especially - as we are invited to at every turn - when compared to Desperation) and more just simple mayhem. Not simplistic, though. I quite enjoyed the subtext of a lot of what was going on. The paperboy blown away, the little redheaded girl from Charlie Brown, grown-up and bikini-clad, blown away, the real-life projections of The Wild Bunch and Bonanza, not to mention the insanity brought on by a steady diet of chocolate milk and canned spaghetti-and-meatballs: all of it adds up, Tommyknockers-style, to an ideographic (and unsettling) mirror-universe of the TV nuclear family / suburbia.

- Along these lines, King's fine eye for detail serves the book well. One scene showcases a Charles Barkley/ Space Jam fast food cup, and another has Marinville in one of the victims' houses looking over the framed photos of Corgis with amazing facts printed on them. ("SHOWED APPARENT ABILITY TO ADD SMALL NUMBERS.") And then there's stuff like this:

"He realized he was still holding the dead girl's hair. It was kinky, like an unraveled Brillo pad - no, he thought coldly. Not like that. Like what holding a scalp would be like, a human scalp. He grimaced at that and opened his fingers. The girl's face dropped back onto the concrete stoop with a wet smack that he could have lived without."

- I really liked Steven Jay Ames, "a scratched entry in the great American steeplechase." King writes the sections dealing with him with his "No problems / ZERO PROBLEMS" mantra splitting it up.

- Constant Reader might notice a few elements that were repurposed for later King books, such as Audrey's Montauk-world or Seth's dream-corridors (recalled in the Dark Tower books, as well as Dreamcatcher) or the "mental slime" left in the wake of Tak's possessions (End of Watch).

That's it for my Regulators notes. I hope it's rediscovered someday, as it would make one hell of a movie.  

 

King's Highway pt. 67: Desperation

"Life is more than just steering a course around pain."

THE NOVEL

Mining operations in the town of Desperation, Nevada unearth Tak, an ancient "outsider" demon imprisoned deep within the earth; its physical form is too big to escape, but its anime can possess human hosts and foment murder and chaos. Unfortunately, for it (and those unlucky enough to host it) it first alters and ultimately burns them out in the process. A group of passers-through (and the survivors of its rampage through town) are captured by Entragion, the lunatic-Sheriff possessed by Tak... or are they gathered together by God for the purpose of stopping Tak / keeping it holed-away far under the earth? Either way, hi-jinks, as they often will, ensue, Tak is re-sealed in his prison under the earth, and the survivors recycle back to the world.

"Desperation is about God; The Regulators is about TV." - Stephen King.

In the 90s, three themes dominate King's work: his recovery, "feminist consciousness," and God. At least two of those themes intersect in Desperation, and one of them (God) gets center-stage. And was, for this reader, handled a bit more compellingly in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. While Desperation is by no means a bad book, it went on a bit too long for this reader, and some of the "God" discussion (though not all of it) is a bit creaky. Between it and its "companion star," I prefer The Regulators. Though I don't think either would qualify as my go-to exploration of the themes their author assigns to them. (Evaluated together as one work examining God and Television, even less so)

Still, it's a fun read, at least most of it.

King examines this movie a bit in Danse Macabre; one wonders if its themes percolated in mind for years before sitting down to write Desperation. I don't know it well enough to speculate, though.

This one, on the other hand...! Granted, the "mining operations uncover ancient evil" trope is hardly unique to King's novel, but there are more than a few parallels between the two works. (And Nevada could be a stand-in for Mars; ask anyone who's ever flown over it)

The title comes both from the story's setting and something The Man with the Yankees Cap (grrr) says during David Carver's (i.e. the boy who talks to God) brief foray into The Land of the Dead, near novel's end:

"The opposite of faith is unbelief. The first (disbelief) is natural, the second willful. And (...) the spiritual state of unbelief is desperation."

This state is perhaps best encapsulated by the character of Johnny Marinville, whom we'll get to in a bit. 

TAK 

The novel charges out of the gate with Entragion's gathering of the protagonists.

"'That's when I started to think he must be crazy, because (nothing he said) made sense.'

'I see holes like eyes,' Mary said.

Billignsley nodded. 'Yeah, like that. My head is full of blackbirds, that's another one I remember... They were like Thoughts for the Day out of a book written by a crazy person."

Played with considerable relish by Ron Perlman in the 2006 TV adaptation.

Perhaps it's just a bit of King Fatigue (i.e. that inevitable feeling after tearing through the guy's catalog like this over the last eight months), but King's overused-villain-tropes collide in the character of Entragion/ Tak. He's got the seeing-through-animals/ mind-reading of Flagg with the inexplicable-racism/anti-semitism/what-have-you of... well, of every other King villain. Why would an ancient demon sound like a MSNBC caricature of "the enemy?" If it's meant as an amplification of latent prejudices in Entragion himself, a) we get no text-support for that, b) why is it an aspect of every King villain, novel to novel? and c) why do these attitudes remain as Tak leaps from body to body? 

The bottom line is, King's villains need more variety; they all tend to act either like Norman Daniels from Rose Madder / Big John Rennie from Under the Dome, or like Flagg/ Leland Gaunt, wherever and however they appear. That and the alien-presence-throwing-a-tantrum/no-emotional-control appears way too much. (One can almost hear the Star Trek voice-over... "These bodies... these emotions... how do you humans stand it?" In fact, doesn't Mister Gray say as much, in Dreamcatcher?)

At other times, Tak is less predictable, and therefore far more interesting, as when he tells Johnny Marinville after his capture:

"You have never written a truly spiritual novel. (...) It is your great unrecognized failing, and it is at the center of your petulant, self-indulgent behavior. You have no interest in spiritual nature. You mock the God who created you, and by doing so you mortify your own pneuma and glorify the mud which is your sarx."

(Although it's a bit odd, considering later he seems as ignorant of "the God who created (Marinville)" as he claims Marinville to be here.)

That aside, Entragion's sporadic violence and non-sequiters are certainly menacing. (His addition of "I am going to kill you" to the Miranda read-em-their-rights speech is particularly effective.) I also enjoyed the can-tah, i.e. the wood carvings unearthed that are talismans for the evil spirits.

The Dark Tower connections come in two forms: Tak itself (the Outsider/ Todash demon, similar to the Outsider spirit of Bag of Bones) and the Desatoya Mountains. Also the setting for "The Little Sisters of Eluria," and the spiders of Eluria are very much in evidence here, as well. As given broader discussion here:

"Both stories take place in deserted, demon-haunted mining towns located in the Desatoya Mountains.  In both tales, the demons desire bloodshed and death.  But most remarkable of all, despite the differences between the demons of each story, both speak the same language."  (Furth) (...) Between that and the brief mention -- in both the novella and the comics -- of "Tejuas" being some 200 miles away, it seems that The Little Sisters of Eluria has major hints about how connected Roland's world is to our own.  At the very least, it seems it must be some alternate-universe version of it, probably one in the future."

That's something my mind kept turning back to while reading this. I wouldn't mind another book elaborating on these connections/ this chronology. (Added to my wishlist for further Dark Tower projects.)

Finally, what would one of my blogs be without a word from Kev:

"The imprecise nature of Tak is important. King suggests that Tak might be the literal Devil (going so far as to name the mining company that disturbed Tak's prison Diablo, meaning devil in Spanish) and that Tak exists in Hell. But suggestions and sketches are all King allows, unwilling to define Hell in literal terms. This is to the book's credit."

Agreed. Although assigning Tak the usual anachronistic prejudices as all-other-King-villains takes a chunk out of said credit. The temper tantrums are more understandable, but still somewhat repetitive.

Perlman with Matt Frewer (David Carver's father) in the TV adaptation.

GOD

Upon its release, The New York Times observed:

"God is the edgiest creation in Desperation. Remote, isolated, ironic, shrouded behind disguises, perhaps "another legendary shadow," this deity forms a sly foil, and an icy mirror, to Tak. The adjectives frequently attached to God (here) are 'strong' and 'cruel.'"

True."God is cruel, and God's cruelty is refining" is a recurring motif, particularly in the last act. Continuing from the Times review:

"Mr. King boldly refracts his supernatural horrors against some haunted American legacies. Tak, we are told, was released from the earth when modern strip miners of dubious legality accidentally blasted open an old gold lode, site of a fabled 1859 cave-in that buried alive 57 Chinese laborers. After accumulating the bitter freight of 19th-century racism and capitalist greed, Tak slides forward to the Vietnam War: David Carver's dream scrambles together an Ohio tree house his friends call ''Viet Cong Lookout'' and a Saigon bar of the same name where John Marinville drank as a correspondent in the 1960's. (...) When Tak, near the end of the novel, lodges his spirit inside an eagle, his equation with the alien impulses within the American psyche appears complete.

Yet just when Mr. King convinces us of the intensity of his Gnostic meditations, (...) he tosses everything away. Desperation concludes with an uplift that is entirely false to its own dark energy. David Carver has God all wrong, we discover in the final lines. For "God is love." How this bromide dispels Vietnam, the enslaved Chinese miners, the devastated earth or the massive millennial fervor of nearly 700 pages devoted to a ''cruel'' God and his rival demiurge, Mr. King doesn't say."

Except, he does. I'm not sure how the reviewer, here, missed the explictly-spelled-out wrap-up that God is all these things, but the rosy "Oh, God is love" ending described here is simply not the way the novel ends. I'm not saying King is entirely successful with this (he is a bit more elegant on this topic when he returns to it in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon) but throughout, it is quite obvious that the "nature of God" here is more Taoist than anything. It's a mixture of the personal-God of Catholicism, interacting with humans and helping them along within the "free will" covenant, and the sort of emptiness described (among other places of course) in the Tao Te Ching:

"There was something formless and perfect before the universe was born.

It is serene. Empty. Solitary. Unchanging. Infinite. Eternally Present.

It is the mother of the universe.

For lack of a better name, I call it the Tao.

(...)

Man follows the earth.

Earth follows the universe.

The universe follows the Tao

The Tao follows only itself." (ch. 25)

So, like or dislike King's thoughts on the subject, but the NYT reviewer is simply incorrect. Compare with the "The Other" mentioned in It, or in other places such as "The Beggar and the Diamond:"

"Uriel looked at God (as nearly as anyone - even an archangel - can look at that burning face, at least) uncertainly. "Have you given me a lesson, Lord?"
"I don't know," God said blandly, "have I?"

Or from the end of TGWLTG:

"How much of it was real?"
"All of it," he said, as if it didn't really matter. And then, again: "You did a good job."
"I was stupid to get off the path like I did, wasn't I?"
He looked at her with slight surprise, then pushed up his cap... He smiled and when he smiled, he looked young. "What path?" he said.

False idols also come into play. Tak's can tahs and can taks "reveal people's baser natures and devolve them into dangerous, obsessive behavior." (Kev again)

In this way, they are the opposing idol to the Sköldpadda seen in the Dark Tower books.

Personally, I see this sort of "God" as just another character/ deity/ presence of the Dark Tower-verse and not a theological assertion, but, as with anything that deals with faith, the supernatural, or religion, one's own views will color one's interpretation. I don't know if an atheist or a Jesuit (or a Buddhist, or a snake charmer) would have any trouble connecting to the story, and that is certainly a testament to King's storytelling abilities.

"As always at these times when he felt really in need of God, the front of his mind was serene, but the deeper part, where faith did constant battle with doubt, was terrified that there would be no answer... People could make shadows, minor tricks of light and projection. Wasn't it likely that God was the same kind of thing? Just another legendary shadow?" (David Carver, pg. 458)

I could've done without the miracles performed by David Carver aspect, as well as the Communion via Three Musketeers wrapper. But meh.

Shane Haboucha (David Carver) and Annabeth Gish (Mary Jackson)

"Your God loves drunks and hates little boys!" - Brian Ross's Mom (I didn't write down the page, sorry.)

JOHNNY MARINVILLE

aka Tom Skerritt aka George Bannerman from The Dead Zone aka Evan Drake from Cheers

"Once you'd been accepted as a bona fide literary lion, someone would be glad to go on publishing your words even after they had degenerated into self-parody or outright drivel. Johnny sometimes thought that the most terrible thing about the American literary establishment was how they will let you swing the wind, slowly strangling, while they all stood around at their asshole cocktail parties, congratulating themselves on how kind they were being to poor old what's-his-name." (Johnny Marinville, pg. 72)

That cracked me up. I don't see it (or Johnny's parting shot: Fuck the critics) as a self-assessment of any kind, but it's an insight that means more to me coming from a bona fide literary lion such as King.

Marinville's is an interesting case to consider. On one hand, his character-arc is rather straightforward. He is on a quest of redemption and realizes his salvation in heroic self-sacrifice. The traditional Christian motif, in other words. On the other, he is King's "in recovery" talisman for the novel, and in several sequences, the recovery-thoughts dovetail nicely with the God-thoughts:

"Above that - and all sides as well - the desert wind howled. It was a sound that cooled Johnny's blood... but he could not deny the fact that there was something strangely attractive about it. God made you hear that sound. That sound says quitting is okay, that quitting is in fact the only choice that makes any sense. That sound is about the lure of emptiness and the pleasure of zero." (pp 369-370, emphasis mine)

Emptiness here meaning both the oblivion of intoxication and (perhaps) the Taoist emptiness of God.

I was rather lost by the late-innings "reveal" that Marinville was killed in Vietnam. I guess it wasn't meant as literally-killed, but it was unclear enough for me to go back and re-read several sections. I guess it has something to do with the omnipresent timespace of "God," i.e. the Vietnam-connection between Marinville and David Carver, but it just was unclear to me.

MIRROR, MIRROR

As I'm sure no one here needs to be told, this was released simultaneously with The Regulators by Richard Bachman. For a side-by-side comparison of each character, see here. Ultimately, though, I didn't find there to be any illuminating connection between the books. One reader mentions how Desperation details Tak's revenge for the events described in The Regulators. Could very well be. But if there is one explicit and defining rationale that ties the books together, I didn't find it in either text; one gets the impression it just "seemed like a cool idea."

THE MOVIE

Perlman with Henry Thomas (Peter Jackson) and director Mick Garris.

Here we have the typical directed-for-TV-by-Garris/ adapted-by-King collaboration, i.e. way too literal/ uncompartmentalized and all-too-sanitized-for-mainstream-dissemination. (My above comments re: stereotypical-King-villain-attributes aside, the material is improved by changing "New York Jews!" (i.e. what Entragion angrily calls the Jacksons) to "unisex Blue State swingles." It makes as much sense for an ancient demon to give a crap about red state/ blue state as it does for Jewish/Gentile, but the phrasing cracks me up. Changing "Fuck the critics!" to "Fuck Ann Coulter!" (or whatever exactly Johnny Marinville says) is less successful, though no less amusing.

The shots of the American Southwest were quite nice, so a (rare!) tip of the cap to Mick Garris, or more accurately, Christian Sebaldt, the cinematographer. 

And both Annabeth Gish

and Steven Weber (Steve Ames, here with Kelly Overton as Cynthia Smith) were fine.

The NY Times review of this contains this interesting observation:

"In one of movie's several climactic scenes, Tak — a Chinese demon, remember, though at some point sense has been abandoned — booms at Marinville, "The heart of the unborn commands you to stop!" To which Marinville shoots back: "Adam Sandler demands you stop! Ann Coulter demands you stop!"

Like the iconography, and the vocabulary, and the tone, the ideology of "Stephen King's Desperation" is all mixed up. This first-rate movie is also a chthonic mess. Mr. King has once again slammed his hand flat on all the buttons, and everything is lit up."

I agree that lines / juxtapositions like that work against the film rather than for it. But to characterize this as a "first-rate movie" is a bit wild. For example:

Man, that's funny. I recommend watching that first ten or twelve seconds multiple times; the hilarity is cumulative. Mick and Stephen, when they get together, just can't resist that bad  make-up and pop-out crap like this but here, it's a real LOL. I must have said "TAK-A-LA!" in response to my cat's endless-meowing a million times this past week.

That's almost an "I Am Kirok!" moment, i.e. a perfect storm of an actor doing seventy-five in a schoolzone / plain-ol' sci-fi weirdness. Almost but not quite - neither the script nor the rest of the film is hitting on "I am Kirok" cylinders. Still, as evidenced below, someone else has at least begun the process of "meme-ing:"

Perlman does a bang-up job as the psycho-sheriff, and a less (or a lot more) self-consciousness film could sincerely transform the whole thing into a cult classic. But, in its present form, it's just not there.

Finally, I enjoyed this:

An effective (and unexpected) way of demonstrating the backstory. All in all, it's probably the best thing Mick Garris and Stephen King have ever collaborated on, or that the former has ever done. 

But, as an adaptation, however unofficial, of the book, I'll stick with Ghosts of Mars.

NEXT: Under the Dome or 11/22/63. (The End of the Highway approacheth.)