Desperation is the companion novel to King's The Regulators, which was published simultaneously under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Forget the more-or-less literary novels of recent years, like Dolores Claiborne. These books mark the return of the Stephen King of The Stand and Pet Sematary, where King's main concerns where whether good could defeat evil and how much gore could be squeezed into (or out of) one book. In each novel, the characters and situations are altered as King plays with questions of identity and form. But both really center around a new personification of evil that goes by the name of Tak. Tak wants to rule the world. Somebody has to stop him. Somebody's eyes have to pop out. Somebody's head has to explode. Now that's Stephen King!