Hello everybody and welcome to the Stephen King cast, One Man's Musings on the Works of Stephen King.

Each week I will review one entry in the bibliography of Stephen King in the chronological order of publication.

And this week I'm reviewing one of the eight publications that saw release in 1996 and one of two publications that were released on the same day. Nineteen ninety-six was an incredible year for Stephen King.

March through August saw the monthly publication of the Green Mile,

and September saw the release of two novels on the very same day,

one written by the late Richard Bachman, and one written by Stephen King himself.

The two novels function as a mirror image of the other, two what ifs.

What if two authors with two writing styles were given a premise and then asked to write a novel around it?

Because of the clearly different styles, it's natural to get two distinct versions, and that's what we get with Richard Bachman's The Regulators and Stephen King's Desperation.

I'll never forget rushing out to the bookstore to get these books. I'll never forget seeing the books on the front display and realizing that when I put them next to each other,

they formed a full picture.

Knowing that between Desperation's 700 pages and the regulators' 480 pages, I had over

a thousand pages of new Stephen King material to digest, and I was a happy constant reader indeed. Desperation is one of those Stephen King books that

I just instantly fell in love with. It was so right up my alley and this was definitely one of the

books that I was very much looking forward to getting back to reread for the purposes of this podcast.

And it's one that I have read, I've read it at least once before.

So at the very least, this is the third time that I've read Desperation.

And this time around, I'm still picking up on things that I missed the first two times

around.

But this is a great

examination of good versus evil, of having faith in the most desperate times. So I can't wait

to get into it, but before I go any further, I want to share a listener email. This one comes from Tina.

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