The Regulators

Intense and engaging right from the start, as most SK novels are. Even his worst one is still a book you can't down.Exciting as it was, the plot sometimes struck me as a little silly. Canned spaghetti, commercialized children's toys, and television westerns are the food of evil, y'all. Not that there's anything wrong with that, the man does have a sense of humor. It has a parallel-world story connection to [b:Desperation 10584 Desperation Stephen King https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1395764566l/10584.SY75.jpg 14015], but I liked this one better. I don't have strong, objective literary reasons for this, I just enjoyed the characters and interactions a bit more.

This book was written as an alternate timeline to King's other book [b:Desperation 10584 Desperation Stephen King https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1395764566l/10584.SY75.jpg 14015]. There are many parallels in characters and locations between the two. However, they are different stories and the characters have different lives. One person might be a good guy in one book and a bad guy in another.This is a cool concept, right? I like the idea that King was able to take an outline and diverge from that with two universes in which the arc happens and the way things turn out. Now, I had read Desperation several years ago and have been looking at this one on my shelf for just as long. I don't perfectly remember everything from the other, but I do believe I liked this one a bit more. They are both pretty solid 3/5 reads, I'd say.So, now that we've gotten that out of the way, and this doesn't affect my rating: Man, the more one reads SK the more the reader realizes that he really just doesn't have many original ideas. Sometimes he does and those stories take us places we've never been before. Other times, I feel like I could have just re-read a different book. In this case, I read [b:The Outsider 36124936 The Outsider Stephen King https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1524596540l/36124936.SY75.jpg 57566471] not too long ago. It feels, in hindsight, that that book was more a Desperation/Regulators spinoff than a Hodges/Holly spinoff. I hate to be negative about this, but how many “evil supernatural entity comes to ruin a small town” novels can this guy write? So, really, I won't blame this one for being super unoriginal because it was published back in 1996, but it did lower the level of enjoyment for me. Please, sir, between you and your son Joe, I think we can be done with this trope.

I've read a lot of Stephen King and considered myself a fan. I would not recommend this book to anyone other than a completionist. I thought desperation was a bit better even though it had a lot of God rolling around in it. This seemed to be a rehash of some ideas that brought us desperation and didn't really gel as well as desperation did for me.