Synopses & Reviews
Nevada is mostly a long stretch of desert you cross on the way to somewhere else. And with someone else, if you're lucky...because it's a scary place.
Headed down Route 50 in the brutal summer heat are people who are never going to reach their destinations. Like the Jacksons, a professor and his wife going home to New York City; the Carvers, a Wentworth, Ohio, family bound for a vacation at Lake Tahoe; and aging literary lion Johnny Marinville, inventing a gonzo image for himself astride a 700-pound Harley.
A dead cat nailed to a road sign heralds the little mining town of Desperation, a town that seems withered in the shade of a man-made mountain known as the China Pit. But it's worse than that, much worse. Regulating the traffic there is Collie Entragian, an outsize uniformed madman who considers himself the only law west of the Pecos. God forbid you should be missing a license plate or find yourself with a flat tire.
There's something very wrong here, all right, and Entragian is only the surface of it. The secrets embedded in Desperation's landscape, and the evil that infects the town like some viral hot zone, are both awesome and terrifying. But as young David Carver seems to know though it scares him nearly to death to realize it so are the forces summoned to combat them.
Review
"With this astonishing work, King again proves himself the premier literary barometer of our cultural clime....[A] deeply moving and enthralling masterpiece of the genre." Publishers Weekly
Review
"[F]abulous storytelling....Knockout classic horror: King's most carefully crafted, well-groomed pages ever." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Desperation is pure King, a rollicking good tale skillfully told of repugnance and godliness doing high-screech battle." San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"[A]s pell-mell an action thriller as any [King] has written and one of his sweetest performances....If King wants to show how to inject religion honestly and effectively into the normally crass horror genre, he succeeds beautifully." Ray Olson, Booklist
Review
"Surreal, tragic, scary...builds to an epic climax. Terror that resonates long after the book is finished." The Washington Post Book World
Synopsis
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...
About the Author
Stephen King, the world's bestselling novelist, was educated at the University of Maine at Orono. He lives with his wife, the novelist Tabitha King, and their children in Bangor, Maine.