Book #60: The Regulators by Richard Bachman
The Regulators by Richard Bachman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is the first novel that I have read that Stephen King wrote under his Richard Bachman pseudonym, and the writing style seemed about the same as his other books, with the usual pop culture references and unrelentingly gruesome content.
The book starts with a drive-by shooting incident in a suburban area, also flashing back to a similar incident in a town nearby. It's a book that doesn't feel supernatural at first, but then it just gets increasingly bizarre, not least because the perpetrators apparently have no faces.
In the middle of all of this is an autistic boy, Seth, who seems to be possessed by a vampire-like creature called "Tak", and it gradually becomes clear what his involvement in all the events is.
I found this book difficult to begin with; it seemed very slow moving, and I also noticed that each chapter would end with something that occasionally seemed unrelated to the main plot; many of these were a character's journal entries (one of which was about thirty pages long). There were also excerpts from the screenplay of a film called "The Regulators"; I have no idea if this is a real film, but seeing that the credited writer was "Alan Smithee" told me all I needed to know, and sure enough it was filled with atrocious, cheesy dialogue.
I did gradually start to get more into the book around the halfway point, when I started to figure out what was happening. Some of the plot elements felt like things that Stephen King re-visited in later books, for example Doctor Sleep and Dreamcatcher (Tak put me in mind of Mr. Gray). I think I would have given this four stars, if it weren't for King name-checking himself in the final chapter. I'm hoping he didn't do that with all of his Richard Bachman novels.
View all my reviews