Desperation

Written by Stephen King

Narrated by Kathy Bates

There's a place alone Interstate 50 that some call the loneliest place on Earth. It's not a very nice place to live. It's an even worse place to die. It's known as Desperation, Nevada...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Audiobooks
• Release date: Feb 19, 2009
• ISBN: 9781101024942

Stephen King

Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes the short story collection You Like It Darker, Holly, Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, Doctor Sleep, and Firestarter are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. 

Reviews for Desperation

[djupstrom · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I think King might have been in a slump with this one. I had just read The Regulators and they are the same characters. Just ok.

[bookwormteri · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Bad cop, ghost town, unlawful arrests and detainment. Decomposing meat suits.

[lauriegienapp · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

as always, a good read. But this is certainly one of his more intense works. I frequently had to put the book down because I just couldn't read any more.

[eppish · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

King at a low point is much better than most horror writers. Would likely be a "horror classic" if written by McCammon or Simmons, but one of King's missteps.

[justablondemoment · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Not my favorite by king. I was pretty confused through the whole thing. King has mad imagination skills and mostly what I've read by him I was able to keep up but this one seemed like a chore trying to make sense of what I was reading.Even through the confusion I still found myself on the edge of my seat wondering what was going to happen next. Almost a 4 but had to go with 3 for all the times I said "wait...what??..."

[br13geva · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is truly amazing. It shows how multiple people can band together to not only save themselves, but to save others in the process. Of course, every good book has to have a criminal, an antagonist, a 'dirty cop'. Well, we found that dirty cop in the form of Entragian. Sure, he is a 'dirty cop', and is pretty mean in his self too. And he does have a knack for shooting people about their religion...Alright, I admit it. This was one of the very violent novels that King wrote, and I'm pretty darn sure that it was enjoyable. I like to read horror book, some by King, and others by respectable authors, such as Lovecraft and Horowitz. But this was better then most of his books, only losing to Carrie, The Stand, and salem's Lot. I hope he can continue writing, and I hope that Tabitha can as well.

[ribson_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Scary but amazing.

[bookson23rd · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm not sure what year I read this but I remember being very impressed by the eeriness and supernatural elements and wondering why it wasn't considered one of King's better novels. Then again, I'm not a King expert as I've only read 4 of his works.

[sebastianhagelstein · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I preferred this book to it's companion, The Regulators. It didn't rely as much on action though it still had a good amount when necessary.

[urthwild · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

1996 - The Regulators by Richard Bachman
1996 - Desperation by Stephen King

These 2 were meant to be companion books by King using as they did the same character names, in a similar sort of peril from the same monster. A lot of reviewers said it was lazy writing at the time but I personally loved it. It added rather to my enjoyment of both rather than detracting.

Good Times.

[mainrun · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I had a hard time giving a voice to the bad guy cop. If the dialog was more menacing, it would have worked for me. The "YEE HAW" "GOSH DARN" phrases disrupted the story. He reminded me of Andy the Robot in Wolves of the Calla. That is favorable, as Andy's cool. Once the cop's story line finished, and the new bad people took over, I thought the story worked better. Reading reviews has made me want to read the Regulators.

[stahl2ricco · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Kick ass, creepy as hell first chapter! I was freaked, even more so when I wondered what I would do in the same situation! The bad guy in this tale is Entragian/Tak, "the Bram Stoker version of Doctor Dolittle"! The place, Desperation, Nevada, a copper mining town. The situation - evil. And a boy shall lead them! God is cruel, God is love! Tak!

[csweder · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I think my favorite part of this book was that it took place in Desperation, Nevada?

[wispywillow · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Like Insomnia, this one started out amazing and then began to peter out. When it at first looked like everyone was being held captive by a psychotic cop, that was creepy because it is in the realm of possibility. (This is what makes Cujo a favorite of mine.) Not to say that I don't like the paranormal or supernatural--because I do. But it has to be done in a certain way for me to really like it. Stephen King can do it at times, but Desperation fell a little flat for me.

The most annoying part to me is the strong current of prayer and God and whatnot. And even worse is that when a character prays for something, voila--it happens. *sigh*

A friend told me that The Regulators is this story's twin, and I remember hearing Stephen King talking about it. He wrote Desperation as Stephen King, then wrote the same story as Richard Bachman. I'm rather looking forward to reading The Regulators. The story is good, it's just overwhelmed by the annoying religious bits. Perhaps writing as Bachman, King can bring the true grit out in this story.

[seldombites · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Leave on a holiday and find yourself fighting for your life and soul. This is the basis of Stephen King's Desperation. I love Stephen King. In my opinion no other horror writer can match him, and this is definitely one of his better novels. Scary, thought-provoking and uplifting, this book is difficult to put down. I recommend it to fans and non-fans alike.

[darkonelh3730 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

From cover to cover, I couldn't stop. This was just...incredible! King really blows my mind, and really can throw you right into the characters and their surroundings.

[bridgey_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Desperation - Stephen King ****Another offering from King that follows brilliantly in the Stands shadow of showcasing Good vs Evil. However, Desperation does not have the arduous journey across desolate and ruined lands. Instead it all takes place in a small town just off the loneliest highway in America. The theme of Good vs Evil runs throughout the novel but as usual, nothing is entirely clean cut, as a number of the characters agree 'God is Cruel'. King treats us to what he does best, assembling a rag tag bunch of characters and throwing them into a life or death situation. I won't go into the storyline any more than that as I wouldn't want to spoil any of the twists and turns of the plot.In my opinion this ranks up there with his best works such as the Shining and Salem's Lot. The way the story starts makes the reader feel that this could easily happen to them, and when the supernatural side kicks in you just get sucked into turning every page until you reach the end. A large book, but the pages just disappear. TAK!

[srboone · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The flipside of The Regulators with King displaying his knack for character creation. This is what keeps the bstory going through its lulls. I enjoyed it more by reading it in conjuction with The Regulators.

[sturlington_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Travelers are waylaid to the mining town of Desperation, Nevada, where they are imprisoned and slaughtered by a monstrous entity wearing the skin of a traffic cop.This is a parallel novel to The Regulators, published under King's pseudonym of Richard Bachman, in that it has the same characters and premise but the story unfolds very differently. I liked The Regulators more because it was different from King's usual fare, but this is a terrific read as well. In the venerable Stephen King tradition, a small group of ordinary people must work together to battle an extraordinary evil and make a stand for the white.Read upon release (1996) because King is one of my favorite authors.

[paperbackpirate · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's been awhile since I've read an actual horror story, which is what Desperation is. It begins with an unsuspecting couple driving down a highway in Nevada through "the loneliest place on earth" and getting pulled over by a crazy police officer who seems to have the power to summon and communicate with coyotes, vultures, and any other animal that crosses his path. WTF?! The police officer continues making up reasons to arrest people, beating them up, randomly killing but mostly collecting them up and taking them to jail in the mining town of Desperation.It is up to the prisoners to band together and fight the police officer and the evil entity that has overwhelmed the town. Right away you feel as though Desperation is shrouded in some kind of dark force that has been uncovered in the mine. The only one who seems to be stronger than the dark force is a little boy who is able to pray to God and receive instant miracles throughout the story. Handy!For a Stephen King story it dragged a little for me, but if you're looking to be grossed out, creeped out, and freaked out this book is a good choice for you.

[ctmsludu · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Desperation was a book full of blood, gore, and God. This book is a great read but not recommended to children and those with a weak stomach. Overall the book is full of action and suspense that also gives you a fright. This book is an utter gore-fest or even sea of blood but a great book anyway.

[ctmsalve · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Demon possession is no new topic in the world of literature, hundreds if not thousands of books have been written about exorcisms and human "hosts". The way Stephen King artfully crafts Desperation is entirely new and creative.Desperation, Nevada in the middle of a barren desert on the edge of abandoned Highway 50, something is very different about this small town. From the very beginning those traveling along this rural highway knew something was very very wrong, with a dead cat nailed to the speed limit sign. It only got worse for the 9 traveling into the town. Each one was framed, arrested, held captive, and then many were executed by a crazed cop possessed by an evil demon, Tak, their only hope being a child savior David Carver. They all suffer great loses throughout but David's perseverance keeps them all together in a common goal of survival.Stephen King incorporating a largely theological story-line greatly enhanced the plot. The idea of both a cruel but just God allowed David to continue and lead the others from a certain doom. This also allowed a point for which the characters could unify in a higher belief, both the readers and the characters knowing that without such a point much of the book would have been even more unbelievable. God vs a god is also an aspect unique to this book and made it much more interesting by having humans almost as pawns in a much larger and more important game.Multiple point of views gave a much more in-depth description of the events occurring in the story. Since there is no "fly on the wall" narrator, events are in a real world perspective. However no specific character is telling the story either but every character speaks for themselves, which may seem confusing but greatly enhances the story.It is no surprise that this story is so incredible being that Stephen King is completely surrounded by literature, meeting his wife, and fellow author, Tabitha Spruce inside a University library. This is why I rate Desperation 5 out of 5 stars.

[thessaly_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Not bad, not great. I don't mind King's characters, but sometimes the way he phrases things can be a bit repetitive and by the end I was skimming.

[chromiumdomium · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very enjoyable, but somehow predictable. I enjoy Stephen Kings writing very much but struggled to complete this book for some reason. Nonetheless, it's a good read and quite the page turner. I wonder if it's just me beginning to predict endings too easily, that made me get a little jaded with this one!

[barpurple · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Not going to be one of all time favourites, but not a terrible book. There's something about the setting of a desert and long roads that forces a horror writer into a certain type of story. The problem with that is it gets a little dull for the readers. This tale of an acient evil lucking in an old mine should have been creepy, but it fell short for me.

[watertiger_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Stephen King had a brain fart. It turned out to be this book. Even if you are a die-hard fan... this will be disappointing.

[jefware · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Another evil man in charge of a small isolated town. Yawn...

[pjwetzel · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The genius of Ender's Game is its simplicity. The story naturally fits this style because the main character is a child. And the entire premise of the book is rooted in the observation that children show more skill at unraveling complex spacial relationships and at reacting instinctively and decisively to complex changing circumstances than mature adults. (Think of the Rubik's Cube puzzle - it took me, at age 35, fourteen hours to solve it the first time, whereas there are kids who have picked it up and solved it in minutes.) The simplicity of the theme goes beyond a child's perspective though: don't expect anything but the barest essentials of visual description or context. This is primarily a ride through a mind-scape: What it feels like to be Ender Wiggins and think like a child prodigy. More on that in a minute.Ender's Game is dripping with intensity, but what I found most remarkable is that Card paints the tale with true believable emotion at the same time. This is pretty amazing considering it is basically what I call "Primitive Grunt Fiction" - that is, its all about self-preservation and using brute force to enforce it, the basest of animal instincts.The story is about a kid who becomes a whiz at video games and uses that skill to remotely control a real military mission. Wonderful and believable (assuming you accept the zero-delay faster than light communication without which the entire premise breaks down). But a huge portion of the story takes place in an artificial enclosed zero-gravity "Battle Room" in which the characters use the walls and exits as key tools of their strategy. Wait a minute - space doesn't have walls. In the battle room the kids are the 'ships'. They propel themselves by intertia alone. Wait a minute - space ships have internal propulsion. Bottom line - sorry, but it's a real stretch to believe that confined "battle room" training would be the centerpiece of a training program for space warfare. Swallow hard and suspend disbelief.Now back to the mind of a child prodigy. Card proclaims in his introduction that he never felt as though he thought like a child--and he uses this hopelessly-skewed first-person observation to justify projecting fully adult thought processes into his child character. Yes, survival instinct is fully functional at that age. But psycyologists will tell you (and research confirms) that a child's ability to project the long term consequences of his/her actions is not. Some of Ender's behaviors exhibit mature, critical forethought to a level that even most adults don't achieve. For me, that destroyed the realism of the story. But once one decides to overlook this flawed premise, they can settle back for an enjoyable ride. It's one of the classics.

[daedalus18 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Mr. King prides himself on not being a writer who plots his books. He counts some of the books he has approached with an outline or predetermined structure as among his least favorite projects (Insomnia is an example - which I take exception with, because I really like Insomnia).Desperation is ultimately what I think is a good example of how that free-flowing, go-where-it-takes-you style can flop. A good opening - cartoonish, but intentionally so - fast pace, some promise of brutality, very foreign to his typical New England digs. In opening chapters, the hills literally and figuratively have eyes (throughout, as well - but the direct references dwindled as the book moved on) - something I think set the stage for a drama comparable to The Hills Have Eyes. Senseless, ugly, "What are you going to do about it?" brutality that strikes at fragile family members and lovers alike.It moved on to become a story about whether God is love, or cruelty. The Christian God, of course - this is mainstream pop-culture American writing, don't you know? When you say God in the US, you best not mean any of the hundreds of gods it is okay to be atheistic towards, and instead be referring to John 3:16 fanatical sign-waving-in-a-stadium God. An SK book is no place to pay lip service to diversity, at the end of the day. Mostly white, nearly always straight folks - the ones who don't shy away from shopping their local Rite Aid for books to read on the beach.I didn't hate it. I've come out the other end of some of SK's books hating them for their poor endings and untied loose ends - this ties up fairly neatly. I don't think SK liked it all that much, about 4/5ths of the way through he gives this description of a writer who feels too old to care about what he's offering his publishers:"He was getting on, and if he wanted to take himself a little less seriously, surely he had that right. There was no need to shoulder each book like a backpack filled with rocks and then sprint uphill with it. That might be okay for the kids, the bootcamp recruits, but those days were behind him now. And it was sort of a relief that they were."I can't read that and not think of it as other than self-referential. I'm grateful that he changed his tune after his brush with death in '99, though - some really mature writing has come since this book - seemingly from the mind of a man who realized that he couldn't really retire if he wanted too. He needs to do this - and if you are going to do it, you should give a better effort than what Desperation is made of.Little cursed statues, demons in rotting dead flesh, supernatural communication, faux religious significance, stormy backdrop (the crux of other books he's written before and after - Duma Key, Pet Semetary, The Shining, The Stand, on and on). Most of his staples are here. Gunslingers are here (with more than one DT reference). It is a decent read for people who already like SK a lot. Not a great example of his work, though, at the end of the day.A saving grace could be its relationship to The Regulators, a 'mirror-book' released by his long-known/embraced pseudonym and released simultaneously. I haven't read it yet, though - so I can't comment on whether it gives more pleasure to the reader to have both books under their belt.

[rdexter_8 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I couldn't put it down. Lost lots of sleep reading this deep into the night. Another excellent story by Mr. King!