Several tales ago, Stephen King brought an author and his evil, supernatural twin to life. Now, wandering the dark lanes of his two favored American settings, the small town and suburbia, King has produced a new entity: separate novels that are themselves evil twins - of one another.
The books, as usual, are bloated and verbose in places. Yet once again it matters not, because they are so absorbing, so vivid in their accounting of the malevolence of normalcy that they succeed anyway.In "Desperation," King tells the story of pure evil belching forth from the desolate Nevada desert to consume a town and anyone who crosses its path. "The Regulators," ostensibly written by Richard Bachman (King's literary alter ego; the author notes say Bachman died in 1985 of "cancer of the pseudonym"), is badness on a smaller scale.
The characters of "Desperation" are brought together in the typical King way - evil throws them into the same lot, and through adversity they forge a bond. Even more than "The Stand," "Desperation" takes us into the belly of an outpost of America that is malevolent and dusty with the ghosts of grisly deaths past - the sort of rural paranoia reflected in recent TV shows like "The X-Files" and "Nowhere Man."
We meet David Carver, an 11-year-old who has been blessed - cursed, perhaps - with the presence of God inside him. We meet John Marinville, a writer who, besotted for much of his life, has gone into the desert on a Harley to gather material for a book and finds his defining moment.
And we meet in Officer Collie Entragian yet another incarnation of American evil whipped up by King - a foe who can take his place among the creatures of "It," "The Tommyknockers" and "The Stand" as a menace older than the United States but still, inseparably, part of the fabric of the weaknesses, vices and fears of late 20th-century America.
King has long dealt with small towns as alienated islands. For years it was Maine, and the evil dwelled behind such quaint names as Castle Rock and Derry. But then, with "The Stand," King turned west, and now one of his stories is as likely to take place there as in his Yankee back yard, home of the original American ghost story.
Why does rural America - especially the West - so fascinate King? Much of it is a barren landscape, true. And the echoes of ancient cultures and evils seem to lie just below the surface - closer, perhaps, than in places like the Midwest or the Northeast.
But there is, too, a sense of alienation about the West in King's work, as if what is responsible for modern America's decay emanates from there instead of from the cities, and that we must confront that decay to purify ourselves.
"The Regulators" is something entirely different, just as unsettling in its own way but made more so by its topsy-turvy relationship with "Desperation." King has seeded each novel with nuances of the other - everything from character names and traits to a Ryder truck to a 3 Musketeers bar.
In the Bachman book, which is set in the Carvers' hometown of Wentworth, Ohio, all the characters from "Desperation" are residents of a suburban block. But they are not themselves; they function as entirely different people.
Marinville is no longer a famous writer, only a sort of famous one. The Carvers have switched places, and now the parents are the children and the children are the parents. It's as if someone took the people of "Desperation" and jumbled them up in a lottery machine like so many ping-pong balls until they were all commingled.
This book underscores the folly of suburban living. While "Desperation" requires a defining event to bring people together, their counterparts in "The Regulators" are all arranged complacently in a row on the same tranquil street, sitting ducks for the approaching evil.
And, appropriately enough, the muse that incarnates the evil (the same evil as in "Desperation") is none other than television.
King's striving to create a uniquely American landscape of wickedness takes our expectations of American icons - the small town, the dusty highway, the desert, the suburb - and turns them on their ear. The familiar always manages to seem menacing even when it isn't - a crucial element of horror that King has mastered.
The covers of his two new books are very different; one depicts a rural town, the other a suburb. But, set together, both form a strange, connected panorama. Each is a window on the other's universe, and while King's is ultimately proven orderly, Bachman's is not - nor will it ever be.
And that's what good fiction is all about - creating different, plausible universes. This time around, King happens to have created two.