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Summary
Author Notes
Richard Bachman is a pseudonym of author Stephen King. Bachman was born in New York. He spent several years serving in the U.S. Coast Guard and the merchant marine before settling down on a New Hampshire dairy farm.
Bachman published four novels in paperback between 1977 and 1982. The hardcover novel "Thinner" was published in 1984. In 1994, Bachman's widow discovered a carton containing a manuscript of the novel "The Regulators," which was published posthumously in 1996. The last Bachman title, Blaze, was publshed in 2007.
Bachman died in 1985. His identity remained a well-kept secret until a bookstore clerk confronted King with his suspicions that King was Bachman. The clerk, Steve Brown, could not believe that Bachman and King were not one and the same. Brown located publisher's records at the Library of Congress and discovered a document naming King as the author of one of Bachman's novels. Afterwards he sent a letter to King's publishers, with a copy of the found documents, and asked them what to do. Two weeks later Stephen King phoned Brown personally, and suggested he write an article about how he discovered the truth, allowing himself to be interviewed. This led to a press release heralding Bachman's "death" supposedly from "cancer of the pseudonym," and an article written by Brown in the Washington Post.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Why revive the Bachman byline more than a decade after Stephen King was found lurking behind it? Not for thematic reasons. This devilishly entertaining yarn of occult mayhem married to mordant social commentary is pure King and resembles little the four nonsupernatural (if science-fictional) pre-Thinner Bachmans. The theme is the horror of TV, played out through the terrors visited upon quiet Poplar Street in the postcard-perfect suburban town of Wentworth, Ohio, when a discorporeal psychic vampire settles inside an autistic boy obsessed with TV westerns and kiddie action shows and brings screen images to demented, lethal life. The long opening scene, in which characters and vehicles from the TV show Motokops 2200 (think Power Rangers) sweep down the street, spewing death by firearm, is a paragon of action-horror. The story rarely flags after that, evoking powerful tension and, at times, emotion. The premise owes a big unacknowledged debt to the classic Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life"; echoes of earlier Kings resound often as wellthe psychic boy (The Shining), a writer-hero (Misery, The Dark Half), etc. But King makes hay in this story in which anything can happen, and does, including the warping of space-time and the savage deaths of much of his large cast. The narrative itself warps fantastically, from prose set in classic typeface to handwritten journals to drawings to typewritten playscript and so on. So why the Bachman byline? Probably for fear that yet another new King in 1996 in addition to six volumes of The Green Mile and Viking's forthcoming Desperation might glut the market. Maybe, maybe not. But one thing is certain: call him Bachman or call him King, the bard of Bangor is going to hit the charts hard and vast with this white-knuckler knockout. Main selection of the Literary Guild, Doubleday Book Club, Mystery Guild and Science Fiction Book Club. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Bachman/Stephen King in overdrive, fast as he can type and laughing with bloodglee. King says that The Regulators and Desperation (see below) are companion volumes, like Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. And The Regulators, set on one suburban block in Wentworth, Ohio, employs many characters from its mirror novel, set in Desperation, Nevada--but often in far different roles: Bad cop becomes good cop, and Peter Jackson, shot to death early on in Desperation, reappears here only to die as a zombie impaled on cactus spikes. A shining Bachman/King (The Running Man, 1985) gimmick acts as armature for this horror fantasy. When his parents and brother and sister are murdered in a drive-by shooting, Seth Garon, an autistic six-year-old (his mirror character in Desperation is vastly verbal), is adopted by his aunt, Audrey Wyler, and her husband Bill, and taken to live on Poplar Street. Not only autistic, Seth has also been invaded by Tak, an evil entity once buried in a silver mine, who emerges and brings to Poplar Street futuristic vehicles based on images from a Saturday morning animated cartoon, MotoKOPS 2200, as well as characters drawn from reruns of Bonanza's Cartwright saga, and from a 1958 B-movie Western, The Regulators. Poplar Street turns into a killing field as nasty MotoKops blast away at houses and their terrified inhabitants and strange wild beasts with bodies as outlandish as a child's drawings haunt the block. Can Audrey and Seth, helped by aging novelist John Marinville, take on Tak and save Poplar Street from the Saturday morning TV grislies? Television takes a beating as Bachman gooses his cast with forced vulgarity and dumb jokes, and a lovely whimsy clanks off like a 12-ton robo-toy. Read Desperation first and The Regulators may come off in the spirit Bachman/King intends. (First printing of 1,250,000; $2,000,000 ad/promo for The Regulators and Desperation combined; Literary Guild main, Mystery Guild, and Science Fiction Book Club selections; author tour)
Booklist Review
It is a summer afternoon on Poplar Street in Wentworth, Ohio, and the 14-year-old who delivers the local shopper is biking his route. A weird-looking red van waits, motor running, at one end of the block. When the vehicle coasts down the street, the "fun" begins. Its windows roll down to let shotgun barrels protrude. The boy is blasted off his bike, the first of many victims of a wave of assaults by a strange company of cartoonish, futuristic shock troopers and western-movie cowboys. What's more, telephones, electricity, and wristwatches are dead all up and down the block; nobody from the next street over in either direction seems to notice the gunfire and burning buildings; and when some of the besieged neighbors try to get to an adjacent street, they discover their surroundings transformed from suburbia to a western desert landscape resembling a child's drawing. What in hell is going on? Actually, as the "documentary" interstices between chapters gradually illuminate, something from close to hell, if you identify hell with the earth's molten interior, is what's going on in this variation upon the old Twilight Zone episode in which a little boy with psychokinetic powers terrorizes his family. Stephen King revives his alter ego Bachman, who "died" in 1985, for a rip-roaringly violent thriller whose main action takes place in little more than an hour and a half. Whew! (Reviewed July 1996)0525941908Ray Olson
Library Journal Review
Stephen King dusts off his nom de plume for this tale of the supernatural. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.