The Regulators by Stephen King

The Regulators by Stephen King
512 pages
Finished 1/29/08













In case you can't tell, I am on a bit of a Stephen King tear. I'm trying to build up my collection - I've always been a King fan, but haven't read much of it lately. Thanks to Half Price Books, I'm now all over it.

Anyway, at one of my last trips I picked up Desperation, and I liked it quite a bit. I had seen on the book that there was another book (The Regulators) that I thought was a sequel of sorts. Turns out the books are more "companions" of each other. You can read them completely separately, and really aren't missing anything. I got David to take me to HPB again this past weekend, and decided to check out the Stephen King section again for funsies (even though I had picked up a couple of King's books already from the dollar section). I saw The Regulators and snatched it up right away, even though I honestly had forgotten about the book.

The coolest thing about these two books are the characters - simply because the characters names, and a number of their main traits, are recycled between the two books. I didn't realize this when I first started reading Regulators, and I actually had David go grab Desperation for me out of the office so I could compare names (and yep, they matched). It was a little confusing at first, and then I realized that I had to separate the two stories - just because someone was a bad guy in one book, didn't necessarily mean he/she was a bad guy in the other.

I really liked Regulators - more than I liked Desperation, even. I was reading some other reviews, and it sounds like most people think Desperation is the better of the two, but I'd have to beg to differ on this one.

Four stars.