Welcome to the sequel of Desperation. The primordial demon Tak is back and he wants it all. Happening in a quiet neigbourhood in 1995, the story follows a massive cast of characters as they fight off, get killed and also succeed in stopping the evil forces overthrowing their town.

Have a look at the following images and tell me that they don’t look like a Dali fever dream. Cactuses, grinning faces, flying wolves, MotoKops Power Vagons.

The Regulators tells the story of

the peaceful suburban life on Poplar Street in Wentworth, Ohio that is shattered one fine day when four vans containing shotgun-wielding “regulators” terrorize the street’s residents, cold-bloodedly killing anyone foolish enough to venture outdoors. Houses mysteriously transform into log cabins and the street now ends in what looks like a child’s hand-drawn western landscape. Masterminding this sudden onslaught is an evil creature who has taken over the body of an autistic boy whose parents were killed in a drive-by shooting several months earlier.

I love-hated this book and I can say I skipped over some parts as they were boring and didn’t actually bring anything to the story. With such a massive cast of characters, it’s a bit hard to keep track of everyone without an entire seating chart and I believe this is why the book started with a map, so you know who they are and where they live.

The plot is pretty straightforward but it takes a while to unfurl – different coloured vans, the ones from a kid’s TV show, appear on a peaceful street and start gunning people down. The phone lines don’t work. The vans keep coming back in rounds and killing even more people off.

So from the cast we started with, it gets halved in gruesome ways by mid-book. You can only tell the people apart by their hair – the ponytail dude, the crazy two-toned haired store clerk, the red-haired one with the face blown in and of course, the auntie with the red hair who manages to warn everyone where the issues were coming from.

So if you’ve read The Shining, you know the boy Danny had a special gift, a shine if you say – in this book Seth was the same – Autistic or not, he was well loved before his body received the weird parasite Tak from an abandoned mine in Desperation, CO. Seth’s shine is what allows him to still maintain a telepathic connection to his aunt and warn her on how to get the demon out and how to manage to kill it.

I skipped over the scenes where the other cast members were killed in the forest or wandered around aimlessly. They didn’t bring anything to the story and could have been left out.

What I did like were the interceded letters received after the fact – discussing the events on Poplar street or adding additional background to what happened to the boy Seth. The creepy collapsed mine, the desert which was now appearing in the middle of summer on a green street – the fascination with westerns.

What I struggled to get – and had to read a few times – was at the end of the movie a letter in the 1980’s from a newly wedded wife to her sister talking about a ghost sighting in the Catskills that looked like a woman with a boy wearing cowboy boots – resembling the Aunt and Seth which materialised different objects – a doll, a bowl of spaghetti, toys. And a mention of the “Overlook Hotel” from The Shining. It made me chuckle a little for Stephen King to be so self-referential.

None of this was real, after all. It was just a refuge in her mind.” (The Regulators Quotes)