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Nov 25, 2011

Lane rated it:

So, I dropped the pretention and read a Stephen King novel. True, I read several of King's works...in middle school...but I thought that it was time to give him another chance. After all, King's popularity is eclipsed only by, oh, I don't know...Jesus? Well, not Jesus...but someone popular.

I'll admit, the story was engaging. King has a way with propelling his story-lines over hundreds of pages without taking a breath. Or so it would seem. Unfortunately, the mediocrity of his prose is More...

3 comments like (7 people liked it)

Apr 22, 2011

Becky rated it:

This is probably the 4th or 5th time that I've read this book. I have always liked this story, although not as much as it's other half, The Regulators, but I have to say that this time, unfortunately, Desperation lost a little something for me. I actually downgraded it from a 4 star to a 3 star rating (OK, 3 1/2 maybe).

Maybe this is due to the fact that I'm on something of a King kick, and I've been reading a lot of his stuff within the past few months. I think, because of this, som More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Mar 21, 2010

Kandice rated it:

If I were rating this book on story alone, I would probably only give it 2 stars, but because the style in which it's written means as much, if not more, to me as story, I'm saying 3 stars. As disturbing, sad, and at times disgusting as this book was, I wanted to know how it ended, who lived, who died, and WHY. Most of all, why?, but I was left a little disapointed on that score.

The story opens with a crazy cop on the rampage. He lives in the small desert town of Desperation, and sca More...

2 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jan 21, 2010

Nicholas rated it:

I'm an indecisive rater and my rating on this will probably fluctuate with mood and memory but regardless of that this is a great read.

What I always found insulting was how easily critics, snobs, and pretentious twits write-off Stephen King because he writes stories about realistic people in fantastic situations. So what? Seriously, he writes amazingly so why give a damn what he writes about? Desperation is a perfect example of horror and fantastic writing and anyone who doesn't thi More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Dec 12, 2007

Mary rated it:

It's pretty much guaranteed that if Stephen King wrote it, I'll like it. I can't honestly say that this is one of his best books. It's certainly very menacing, and extremely tense, but it was also kind of predictable and the ending seemed a bit too easy. A lot of King endings are vaguely unsatisfying, though, and I blame that primarily on the fact that he builds up the story so much that there's really no way to end it on a satisfying note.

Still, something about Desperation got to More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Oct 07, 2007

Tommy rated it:

An excellent horror novel from Stephen King, that satisfyingly evokes classic novels from the author. This novel is full of great characters, including the detestable but redeemable Johnny Marinville, the 'prayer boy' David Carver, one of King's blessed boy characters (here used very effectively) and most especially Collie Entragin, the giant cop who serves as a terrifying host for the demon Tak.
This novel contains my favorite phrase from Stephen King; 'God grinds the axe he plans to use.' More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 09, 2009

Julor rated it:

The ook i read was Stephen King's Desperation. It is a fiction. The book is about two familys and a married couple who struggle to survive in a town in the middle of nowhere.

The book starts out with a couple on the highway in Nevada, taking a trip for the summer, when they see something strang (and gross if you ask me) about a speed-limit sign under a U.S. interstate 50 sign. After pulling off from observing the sign a white police car blasts by them, suddentlly the car comes to a sc More...

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Nov 16, 2011

Charles rated it:

Not a great Stephen King, by any means... and in the middle third, actually became kind of a drag. And then-- The thing about King is that all the apocalyptic good-vs-evil and God-vs-Devil stuff is just a bunch of highly-animated machinery he uses to put a character into a particular position. In this case, Johnny the burned-out prize-winning writer, who is self-ish and stylized to the point where no one can stand him, including himself. A total fraud, who has a chance to come back from the More...

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May 29, 2011

Monica rated it:

After The Regulators, I discovered that I had an old paperback copy of Desperation on hand, so that was the next natural readaloud for Dad. Dad said he enjoyed listening to it possibly more than any other book (I think he's forgotten a few). As far as I can tell, both novels were written concurrently, using the same monster and most of the same characters, but changing significant details about them. In Desperation only the Carver family comes from Ohio. Everybody else is from somewhere else, li More...

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Apr 18, 2011

Matthew rated it:

This book went much more quickly than I had anticipated.

Before reading Desperation, the only Stephen King text that I was familiar with had been "Survivor Type". I adored this short story years ago, and have read it a handful of times since 2008 (when it was introduced to me by my senior lit teacher in high school). However, it never drew me to Stephen's other works.

I probably never would have picked up a Stephen King book on my own. I'm simply interested in reading More...

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Apr 04, 2011

Mari rated it:

Say what you will about Stephen King, but you’ve got to hand it to our man in Maine: sitting down with one of his novels is never a struggle. Having read a number of his books, I’ve gradually come to think of him as being a bit like an old friend: a charming, chatty old friend who, for the price of a paperback, will happily sit down with you and tell you one of his numerous stories, stories whose occasional nastiness seems quite at odds with their mild-mannered narrator. On this level, Desperati More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 11, 2011

Vince rated it:

Desperation plays out like a scaled down version of King's The Stand. In it the reader revisits many familiar themes from King's other works - good versus evil, salvation, redemption, faith. In this novel, however, the scope is smaller. Instead of tackling a global saga as he did with The Stand, King focuses this story on a nearly deserted town in Nevada that is now inhabited by an evil presence and its few hostages.

Do not let the grandness of the themes fool you, however. This is More...

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Sep 06, 2010

Benjamin rated it:

I read more than 100 novels each year and have read most of King's stuff. Obviously, with so much output from one writer, there are bound to be hits and misses. This one was a near miss, in my opinion but that means it still succeeds and is definitely worth the read.

I had not yet read The Regulators, the companion volume, when I picked this one up so I wasn't sure what to expect. I came away with the feeling that I had experienced a pretty good King novel. It is far from his best but More...

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Sep 04, 2010

Sophia rated it:

Another dark tale from the master of horror. Honestly, this wasn't King's best or scariest, but he is still able to infuse that sense of pervading dread throughout this tale of a mixed jumble of ordinary people randomly caught in the battle between good and evil (or is it so spontaneous?) and the constant struggle within the individual to rise to the occasion, to sacrifice and be brave, when it's so easy to indulge in what is our lesser, selfish nature. I find it amusing that some of the King cr More...

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Jul 07, 2010

Colin rated it:

[writer's warning: this article is almost wholly concerned with comparing this work to the other work of Stephen King. Those not interested or well-read may want to skip it]

Upon my second read through of Desperation, I found myself pleasantly surprised—almost shocked. When I read the novel the first time (I assume it was somewhere between finding King in 1994 or ’95 and my high school years, when I first plowed through the bulk of his catalog), I was left feeling it was part of his ( More...

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Nov 23, 2009

BarkLessWagMore rated it:

Cleaning out some old gems of mine. I tried reading this one many years ago and remember giving up midway. I have it on audio from the library and hope to get through it this time but I don't know . . . the thing is 18 discs long!

Later: Well, I managed to get through all 18 discs but I think I'm a glutton for punishment. If I had been reading this the traditional way I would've given up early on. Some of the characters were okay but mostly they seemed all too familiar. There wa More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 01, 2009

Amanda rated it:

Not one of my favorites. I don't really know why. It didn't lack for strong characters or excitement or anything. I just didn't like it as much. Maybe it was too brutal for me. This is one of the strongest Dark Tower tied books. There are references everywhere. And though the same characters that inhabit the Regulators are in Desperation...the circumstances are totally different. What was particularly interesting about this book was God. This is the first Stephen King book where God played a suc More...

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Oct 02, 2009

Ryan rated it:

The book I chose for my project is “Desperation” by Stephen King, who is my favorite writer. King got his inspiration from a cross-country drive he took in 1991, during which he ran across an old beat down town in the middle of the desert call Ruth, Nevada, near Highway 50. All the inhabitants were dead. His imagination went wild and he actually convinced himself that the sheriff had killed the town. He slow began to think of a plot for a new book. About three years later, he went on anot More...

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May 17, 2009

Isaac added it

Desperation and the Regulators together comprise a literary experiment. Both concern a writer named John Mainville, who is menaced by a supernatural evil from Nevada that possesses and destroys the people around him. The dramatis personae in the two books have the same names, though they are not the same characters--except for the supernatural villain, who is identical.

The books are, in other words, alternative histories. In Desperation, Mainville is a washed-up literary novelist on a More...

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Jul 07, 2011

Nicholas rated it:

It's hard to review this book on its own, separate from the Regulators, but I believe it can be done. First the similarities though. King intended the books to be companions, and there are elements here introduced in other King books, like The Talisman and Black House, that suggest many of the characters in both Regulators and Desperation are indeed Twinners - people who are pretty much the same, but had small changes in their lives in parallel realities that resulted in some pretty profound dif More...

3 comments like

Sep 17, 2009

Jahmilla2010 rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

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Oct 26, 2010

Mweene rated it:

I don't know why Stephen King wrote this book. Maybe he was suffering from that thing they call writer's block and instead of just letting it run its course, he decided to write this book. Let me put it this way; there is nothing in this book, not a single word or paragraph or sentence worth reading. I read this book and somehow the memory of his other more creative books encouraged me to keep going. The violence is gory for sure and at times just plain disgusting but instead of backing it up w More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Aug 03, 2011

Lucy rated it:

This is the second Stephen King book I've read after Carrie and I really enjoyed it. The 800 odd pages just melted away. The story is, as the title suggests, about desperation. A tiny backwater desert town called Desperation, the desperation of a group of people put in extreme life-threatening circumstances by an apparently pre-ordained set of events, the desperation felt by religious believers as to the nature of God.

In a nutshell, it's a terrifying, well crafted story. Although there More...

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May 24, 2011

Nicole rated it:

From the start of this book-I knew what to expect. Stephan King novels never fall short of gruesome, explicit (in my opinion he LOVES the f-bomb) and completely strange. This novel DOES not disappoint (in that sense)

This book starts off how most horror novels do; nice couple cruising down a creepy highway (or a newly bought house or a abandoned warehouse etc.) They have a truly strong loving bond (and at this point YOU KNOW that it will not last long). So as they are cruising they More...

0 comments like

Mar 21, 2011

Judy rated it:

At times I felt myself immersed in it and at other times I was bored. The book is about a Cop in a small dessert town that is taken over by a demon (or some sort of evil entity)and then wreaks havoc on the inhabitants and a few people driving by. It was kind of fun at first. I liked the dessert setting of the book and I also liked the character of the cop and how he's completely taken the law into his own hands. King doesn't stick with that character, however, as the demon changes bodies. I thin More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 13, 2010

Jason rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

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Jan 18, 2012

Dan rated it:

This book was good, but not great. It had its laugh out loud moments, its stand up and cheer moments, and its let get on with it moments. It took me a while to get into it, and then I was engaged until about the last quarter, though the ending was pretty good. My favorite scene that will stay with me the most from this story full of horrific happenings is actually a flash back that could be a short story all its own. I will say that I'm glad I finished this book, because I enjoyed the climax, bu More...

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Dec 17, 2009

Christopher rated it:

Several unsuspecting travelers are abducted along the highway by a seemingly psychotic police officer and taken back to a small town jail. Things go downhill quickly in the small town (things were already fairly bad), and the group of abductees must team up to fight an evil force that has invaded the area.

Ok, so it's basically standard Stephen King fare by this point. A group of survivors that must band together to survive. An ancient evil. A young child that seems to be gifted More...

6 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 06, 2012

William rated it:

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this based on its mixed reviews. The story flowed well and was suspenseful. I thought that it weighed a little much on the religious theme (to me Stephen King and religion are like oil and water)but it seemed to do well enough to keep my attention. I place this one in the good job category for King.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 23, 2011

Lins rated it:

I enjoyed this exploration of good vs evil, God vs SomethingElse... it was well charactered, well prosed, and well, thrilling. At times I felt a little like Stephen King was channeling Clive Barker, but at the same time making it his own. The descriptions of the desert were excellent, having lived on the edge of the desert for a while, I was reminded of it vividly. And the Big Bad was excellently turned out, really quite well written. The ending was... well tied up, and made sense, even if my li More...

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