Ok, I understand that Richard bachman is a pseudonym. Stephen king wrote a novel, followed by a novel by bachman.
They both have too many similarties to not be interconnected in some way.
Can someone please the connection’s? How they tie in?
If you’ve read King’s essays and books on how he writes, you’ll find that one of his ideas about writing is that stories should grow organically out of the situation. He seldom plans exactly what’s going to happen all the way through ahead of time, believing that this can force characters to behave in ways that don’t feel right to the reader. In other words, the plot should grow out of the character’s actions more than the character’s actions being determined by the plot.
The Regulators takes a certain set of characters and supernatural villain and plops them down in an affluent suburban residential setting.
Desperation takes the same set of characters and main villain and puts them in a much different setting, a small, poor, southwestern desert town.
It’s like a roleplaying game in which the same characters are placed in two vastly different dungeons run by dungeon masters with different agendas, and played by different people.
Your explanation kinda makes sense to me.
But kinda not.
Anybody have any other insight to offer?
Actually, The expanation offered by Number Six is very good. Read them both. Fun books, even though I got a feeling that SK was experimenting, rather than telling a story. I’d start with Desperation. But YMMV.
Tak.
I got the feeling that ‘The Regulators’ was a very vivid and possibly supernatural dream that one of the characters in ‘Desperation’ had at some point during that story. I can’t decide whose dream it is, though…
Not quite… The characters in the books are ‘the same set of characters’ only in the sense that they have the same names. They’re different ages, with different personalities, and different relationships in each book.
I read desperation then The regulator’s.
Does anybody think the villian’s in The regulator’s are kinda… lame?
I can only agree with the gaspode on one thing:
TAK!
Actually a very interesting analysis. But if you ignore King’s essays and books on how he says he writes, or how he wishes to think of himself as a writer, and just concentrate on the fiction that he writes, I think it may be a little different.
When I read them both (back when I dutifully read everything SK puts out), I think it may have been the first time I realized that King’s true love isn’t writing; he just likes making stuff up. That’s why his books are such reeling, cluttered, disjointed train wrecks.
The duel publication of DESPERATION and REGULATORS was SK’s acceptance of the fact that he either lacks the ability or the inclination to write with any discipline. That, coupled with an apparent lack of editorial input (what editor in his right mind would mess with SK’s proven commercial success?), leads to embarassingly self-indulgent stunts like releasing two books based on the same half-formed idea at the same time.
King is fairly up-front about his lack of pretension. I don’t think he sees himself as an heir to Hemingway, or anything as gradiose as that; although he did write a recent non-fiction piece with the cringe-inducing title of On Writing, so perhaps I’m wrong about that. Still, I think the best explanation for the “connection” between the two is that he just enjoys typing a lot. So when he came up with an idea that could be taken in two different ways, he went ahead and finished both, published both and moved on.
What I’d really like to know, is if someone pressed him on it, could he actually remember the details or differences between these two throwaways? I stopped reading SK because I was left with the fealing that there was a complete lack of personal investment in any of his recent (last 15 years?) work. I may be wrong of course, maybe he really is into all this “organic” crap. But his stuff seems anything but organic to me, I think “pre-fab” is a more apt metaphor.
wow, Diletante, how do you really feel about King’s writing? :rolleyes:
Anyway…
The way I have always thought about The Regulators/Desparation is that they are the same events as they happened in parallel universes. The characters have the same names in different, warped roles. The relationships between the respective characters are similarly warped. Just as Bachman is the parallel universe King, The Regulators and Desperation are parallel universe versions of each other. The themes, the events, the story arc, the characters, are all equivalent to each other.
One interesting game you can play is to try to match up the main characters. (I’m ignoring minor characters not pertinent to the core of the stories). They actually don’t quite match up…or do they? In Desperation, God is a character with no equivalent in The Regulators. And in The Regulators, Seth is a character with no equivalent in Desperation. Or…is the Seth-character the parallel universe equivalent of the God-character in Desperation? If you’ve read them and are familiar with Seth – you can certainly see a parallel between the two as All-powerful Creators…
That’s how I’ve seen it anyway. I have no idea or expectation that this was King’s intent, but as has been said, symbolism is in the mind of the reader, not the writer.
-mok
Coincidentally, I live down the street from the mythical setting of The Regulators, “Wentworth” Ohio. At least, I live down the street from the real-world equivalent of the parallel-universe setting of Wentworth.
Perhaps to an adult. In my opinion, not at all lame in the mind of a seven-year-old autistic boy, which is kind of the whole point, right? 
-mok (not tak)