Desperation By Stephen King :: essays research papers

Desperation, a recent Stephen King novel, is not just a book, but an experience that leaves the reader frightened, paranoid, and questioning his moral beliefs. Picture, if you will, a lone, crazed Nevada policeman who pulls over vehicles on a lonely desert highway and forcefully takes away their occupants. Whichever of them he doesn’t kill immediately, he locks up in the jail of the small desolate town of Desperation. Among those captured are the vacationing Carver family, whose RV is sabotaged on its way to Arizona. Already incarcerated is Tom Billingsley, a once well-known member of the now slaughtered community of Desperation. They are soon joined by formerly famous, currently old and overweight writer, Johnny Marinville, who is riding across the country on his Harley-Davidson gathering material for a book of short stories. How to escape Desperation isn’t the only unanswered question, though. How could and why would one man single-handedly murder the population of an entire town? How does he have such control over the minds of the animals? Why are they locked up when he could have killed them like every one else? Whatever it is that possesses the body of officer Collie Entraigan can’t last forever, though. After several days his body is falling apart at the seams, and he is bleeding from every orifice. Weirder yet, he is growing several inches a day and is bound to burst soon. Will he? Or are the occupants of the local Desperation jail just backup bodies that the possessor will use when it wears out its current one? If so then what is it? More importantly, who’s next?An intriguing aspect of this book is that there is no real protagonist. King leaves the reader in constant suspense. Frequently changing views, the story follows one character or group of characters for one chapter and then in the next chapter, follows another, often intertwining the time sequences. The overlapping action is interrupted only by flashbacks that allow the reader to sympathize with a particular character’s actions or feelings. These flashbacks are so intricate that it is difficult to believe they are fictional at all. They go into such detail of the life-altering experiences of everyone involved that the reader gets a sixth sense as to how the characters will react to certain situations. Telling the story in this manner allows the reader to see why every character acts the way that he does.