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Desperation

Audiobook
1 of 4 copies available
1 of 4 copies available
Stephen King's #1 national bestseller about a little mining town, Desperation, that many will enter on their way to somewhere else. But getting out is not easy as it would seem...
"I see holes like eyes. My mind is full of them."

For all intents and purposes, police officer Collie Entragian, chief law enforcement for the small mining town of Desperation, Nevada, appears to be completely insane. He's taken to stopping vehicles along the desolate Interstate 50 and abducting unwary travelers with various unusual ploys. There's something very wrong here in Desperation...and Officer Entragian is only at the surface of it. The secrets embedded in Desperation's landscape, and the horrifying evil that infects the town like some viral hot zone, are both awesome and terrifying. But one of Entragian's victims, young David Carver, seems to know—and it scares him nearly to death to realize this truth—that the forces being summoned to combat this frightful, maniacal aberration are of equal and opposite intensity...
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  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from March 30, 2009
      From the vault of horror master King comes a terrifying tale of Desperation, Nev., a place ruled by a maniacal man in uniform and haunted by deadly secrets. In true King fashion, the story features a small cast of likable yet deeply flawed protagonists that may or may not make it to the final page in one piece. Narrator Kathy Bates, who won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance in the film adaptation of King's Misery
      , takes the reins and holds listeners rapt from start to finish. Bates has the inherent ability to make anything, no matter how over the top, sound realistic and immediate. A Signet paperback.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Stephen King trudges with amiable doggedness through twenty-one and a half hours of terror and mayhem, courtesy of ye olde psycho cop of Desperation, Nevada. Despite his lack of showmanship and technical facility as a narrator, King has a compelling vocal personality of boyish, twangy mischief. Like flies to wanton boys are we to Stephen King. He seems less interested in spooking us than in inviting us to play with him in his lethal sandbox. The tape, therefore, gives King fans an important insight into his authorial intent, one lacking in many of the TV and film versions of his ghoulishness. Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from October 2, 1996
      If the publishing industry named a Person of the Year, this year's winner would be Stephen King. Not only is he writing the first modern novel to be serialized in book form (The Green Mile), but with the publication on Sept. 24 of The Regulators (Dutton; Forecasts, June 17) and Desperation, he becomes the first bestselling author--maybe the first author ever--to issue three new major novels in one calendar year. And there's more. With this astonishing work, King again proves himself the premier literary barometer of our cultural clime. For if The Regulators is a work of secular horror, this is a novel of sacred horror (King's first), and explicitly so. Like the second panel of a diptych, Desperation employs, with one major exception, the same characters as The Regulators, and the same source of horror: an evil force named Tak. (The novels aren't sequential, however; people who die in one can live, then die, in the other.) The exception is David Carver, 11, who, with a handful of other passers-through, including a major writer who's recently embraced sobriety, is trapped in the desert mining town of Desperation, Nev. There, Tak stalks them by possessing humans and turning them into homicidal maniacs, and by unleashing armies of coyotes, spiders and scorpions. The terror is relentless--this is King's scariest book since Misery--though the storytelling is looser than in The Regulators to allow room for spiritual themes. For united against Tak are not only David and his pals, but also God, who moves through the boy. King's God is the God of Job, implacable, beyond human ken. As the savageries inflicted upon David and others multiply, they must discern: What is God's will? And, how can God's will be done, when it seems so cruel? Near the story's end, the writer muses that horror "isn't the sort of stuff of which serious literature is made." King knows better, and so will anyone who reads this deeply moving and enthralling masterpiece of the genre. 1,750,000 first printing; BOMC main selection; simultaneous Penguin Audiobook.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

Languages

  • English

Levels

  • Lexile® Measure:820
  • Text Difficulty:3-4

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