Desperation - Stephen King

I bought the hefty-looking Desperation from a market stall recently, knowing that the least I would get for my 95p would be a decent pennies-to-pages ratio. Having now compiled more or less all of Stephen King’s novels, I’d still only managed to read about a third of them (though not through lack of trying!) and on this occasion made the naughty decision to judge Desperation by its cover and dive into straight away. It had a certain dark, minimalistic quality to it and would hopefully add to my understanding of the Dark Tower (to which many of King’s standalone novels make reference) before I would eventually embark on that mammoth series. Desperation was ...  Read the complete review

The copy I'm reviewing is a hardback copy priced £16.99 published in 1996, should be out in paperback for considerably less now. I've had this book since it was first released eight years ago, I have tried to read it twice before but both times gave up at about the same part. This time I'm on a bit of a Stephen King binge and was determined (not desperate!) to finish this one once and for all. When you come to a book you've tried to read twice before and given up on you do have certain reservations and niggling concerns, so I approached it with caution, thinking at all costs keep reading! ...  Read the complete review

I picked up Desperation, by Stephen King in search of some release from exam stress....but unfortunately for my exams I found it very hard to put down. The title of the book refers to a lonely Nevada town, where strange things have begun to seep from an old mine shaft with a horrible history. The characters are introduced one by one, each with their own story of how they ended up in Desperation, and in the clutches of terror. The story follows their attempts to understand what has happened to them and their struggles to escape their maniac captor who seems to have control over the desert animals. The basic storyline involves the big ...  Read the complete review

This is definitely one of my favourite novels, I finished it in four days simply because it sucked me in and wouldn't let go! The story generally goes like so; One by one, three groups of people get taken off Highway 50 in the middle of the Nevada desert by a supposedly insane cop. They are promptly taken to a desolate Desperation and locked up in cells in the towns municipal building. These people obviously feel they must escape before they are killed like some of their relatives already have been, and the fact that one of the group, an eleven year old boy name David Carver, has a sort of direct line to God certainly helps. The group soon find out that ...  Read the complete review

This is a novel of sacred horror (King's first), and explicitly so. Like the second panel of a diptych, Desperation employs, with one major exception, the same characters as The Regulators, and the same source of horror: an evil force named Tak. (The novels aren't sequential, however; people who die in one can live, then die, in the other.) The exception is David Carver, 11, who, with a handful of other passers-through, including a major writer who's recently embraced sobriety, is trapped in the desert mining town of Desperation, Nev. There, Tak stalks them by possessing humans and turning them into homicidal maniacs, and by unleashing armies of ...  Read the complete review