Desperation - Stephen King

Full disclosure: I am a big Stephen King fan. He likes his American Heroes, his Average Joes, his Good versus Evil simplicity. He runs these characters through the meat grinders of his stories with clean prose and gruesome imagination. Ordinary, everyday life in Kingland is always moments from mutilation and chaos.

Desperation opens clean and strong. The simplest situations can be the most unnerving, more so than a ragtag bunch straggling through an apocalypse. Two people pulled over by a gigantic cop on a desert highway - a setup loaded with potential.

There are a few nods to the Dark Tower series, which is in many ways the hub of King's oeuvre. It's rewarding to find those connections, and he never overplays his hand. In some ways, he couldn't overplay it even if he tried - by 1996, he had only published the first three of seven Dark Tower books. By his own admission, he didn't know where the story would end up, and he hadn't fully fleshed out the pillars that held up his multiverse.

While the Evil in Desperation is unexplained in its origins, the Good is directly attributed to God. King's Good usually comes down to Innocence, or America, or Love in the end, and his poor protagonists take a beating but pull themselves through. Not so this time around - prayers are answered, God speaks, hands are guided, the whole nine yards.

King's not afraid of putting God into his stories. His priests aren't always evil, his churches are often sanctuaries. (I'm sure he sells well in the Bible Belt.) Despite the obvious relish he takes in mangling the human body, some things are actually untarnished. In Stephen King's world, a hero can be unironically pure.