Book to Movie: The Running Man (1987)

Book to Movie: The Running Man (1987)
Screenplay by Steven E. de Souza
Director: Paul Michael Glazer
Based on the novel, The Running Man by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman

Two years after Richard Bachman was outed as Stephen King, a movie was made based on a Bachman book. Steven E. de Souza and Paul Michael Glazer took Stephen King’s tense thriller, The Running Man and turned into a glittery action romp.

The plot barely resembles King’s vision. In the movie, Ben Richards (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a military pilot who refuses to fire on a food riot with unarmed civilians. He is put in prison, but manages to escape with the help of an underground that is fighting the all powerful Network controlled by the government.

Richards has little interest in the group’s politics and takes off, looking for his brother. When he goes to his brother’s apartment, he finds a network music writer living there instead and he takes her hostage. He tries to use her and her travel pass to escape to Hawaii, but she turns him in at the airport. Richards is taken into custody again.

Instead of prison, he’s sentenced to be a participant in the Running Man – America’s most popular game show. The two guys with whom he escaped prison are rounded up and join him.

Ben Richards is introduced to America as the “Butcher of Bakersfield” who fired on unarmed civilians despite orders not to. A doctored tape is played for the audience. They also describe the murders he committed at the airport when he was retaken. This captures the attention of Amber Mendez, the girl who turned in Richards because she knows it didn’t happen.

Richards and his friends are propelled via a rocket powered sled through a shoot to a 400 block square hunting zone. They are chased by hunters dressed as various themed characters. While down there, the computer hacker of the trio is able to tap into a network terminal and steal the access code for the Network’s satellite uplink.

Amber Mendez, curious about what the network has done to Ben Richards, sneaks into a film library and finds the doctored and undoctored tapes of Richards’ raid on the food riot. Before she can escape, she is caught and sent into the kill zone to join Richards.

Richards two friends die along the way, but Richards manages to connect with the Underground (led by Mick Fleetwood) who uses the code and the tapes Amber stole to steal the signal and show America the fraud perpetrated by the network.

Meanwhile Richards and Mendez return to the Network and the set of The Running Man. There, Richards and Running Man host Damon Killian have it out.

Insipid is not strong enough a word to describe this movie. It had nothing going for it. Puns not worthy of Loony Tunes. Costumes that would embarrass the stars of 1950s Saturday matinee shorts. A syntho-pop soundtrack of no quality and a plot as linear as a vector.

The cast did the best they could with the horrible script, but a cast with some big names could not rescue this film. Its only saving grace was Richard Dawson who was the only member of the cast who seemed to truly relish his role, hamming it up as game show host Damon Killian. Dawson was the only thing in this atrocious film that was good.

It appeared that perhaps the director and screenwriter were trying to spoof professional wrestling. If they were, they missed their target by making a bad movie. Dawson delivers a witless diatribe about the masses wanting violence and death near the end of the movie. But if you have to sum up the intent of your movie in a monologue at the end, you know you've got a weak script.

I would dare say that The Running Man may be the worst movie based on any King novel. It’s not as bad as a few based on short stories, but no movie based on a book King wrote was worse than The Running Man.

The only thing that makes this otherwise entirely forgettable movie noteworthy is that it features two future governors -- Jesse Ventura who would govern Minnesota and Schwarzenegger who would govern California.

The Running Man By Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman

The Running Man
By Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman
Copyright 1982

In the year 2025, the best men don’t run for President. They run for their life.

Stephen King once again visits dystopia and once again he visits with his nom de plume, Richard Bachman. Once again, the plot centers around games and entertainment and once again, the poor provide entertainment for the rich through their suffering. All of the plot elements that appeared in The Long Walk are in The Running Man. However, The Running Man is a little more action oriented.

The year is 2025 and Ben Richards lives in Co-Op City with his wife and infant child who has the flu and is quite ill. Richards cannot afford to buy real drugs that will help his daughter. So, he leaves the tenement behind and goes to the Network where he is screened to be a game show contestant.

In 2025, the Network is king. It governs and provides entertainment via the Freevee which killed newspapers and most other forms of entertainment. The shows produced by the network are usually life and death matters like “Treadmill to Bucks” where cardiac patients run on a treadmill while answering trivia questions. If they live, they earn.

The big show is The Running Man. It is for this show that Richards has qualified. He has to stay on the lam for 30 days while hunted by professionals hired by the network. Viewers are invited to phone in tips and can earn money if their tip leads to a kill of the Running Man.

Richards meets with the producers and the host of the show who are eager to have him compete. They have high hopes that his cunning and anti-establishment behavior will generate ratings. After the meeting, he is treated to a few days of high living in a fancy hotel room with all the booze and food he can consume.

He is then set free to hide for 30 days. Each day he lives earns his family money. He must mail in two tapes a day of himself for the Network to play.

He buys fake papers and he travels, first to New York and then to Boston. Always in disguise, he hides in lonely hotels and YMCAs. In Boston, he thinks he sees the hunters outside the YMCA, so he blows the place up and slips out through a storm sewer in the basement.

After escaping from the sewers, Richards meets a kid who takes him in and teaches him about air pollution and the conspiracy run by the Network to hide science. The kid also helps him acquire a car and gives him a contact in Portland, Maine.

Richards makes it to New Hampshire and poses as a blind priest. There, he spends his days at the library, reading about pollution. His video tapes consist of his rants against pollution and the collusion to hide its effects. The Network talks over them when the program airs, so nobody hears him. Finally, after a few days, he gets nervous and decides to get out of New Hampshire and head for Portland.

He gets to Portland and meets his contact. They go to his home, but the kid’s mother calls the Network and turns Richards in. He flees, but the hunters catch up with him and he is wounded in the side and breaks an ankle before eventually escaping.

The next day with the hunters closing in and every resident in the area looking for him, he takes a woman hostage and makes her drive. Richards uses her to generate publicity about where he is, figuring they can’t kill him without killing her and they can’t kill her in public. He has the terrified woman drive to the airport in Derry, Maine.

Claiming that he’s acquired enough explosive to blow up several acres, he demands an airplane be supplied to him. When the plane arrives, he demands that the head of the hunters join him aboard the plane. Once aboard, Richards is contacted by the network. His wife and child have been murdered. Now free of family burdens, they offer him amnesty and a position on The Running Man as the new hunter.

Richards accepts their offer. He then kills the hunter aboard with him and the flight crew who all work for the Network. With the plane’s controls in his hands, he heads for the network building, coming in low. . .

All I could think about as I read this book was “Bread and Circuses.” This Roman concept held that if you gave the masses enough food and entertainment, they would be distracted from corruption and not bother the ruling class.

This book has a subtext of class warfare that is at the fore. In 2025, the rich and the middle class hate the poor. They are a burden and to pay for their burden, they must entertain.

The Running Man bears a great deal of resemblance to The Long Walk in theme and subtext (although the subtext of socio-economic class was buried much deeper in The Long Walk). However, The Running Man is quite action oriented where The Long Walk was ponderous. The Long Walk was dialogue broken with the occasional action scene. The Running Man was just the opposite. Yet, the novels were quite similar.

King wrote The Running Man in just one week. He described himself as angry and obsessed with the craft. Given the time period in which it was written, one might wonder if he wasn’t stoked with coke as well.

Of the books written under the Bachman pen name, I would rank The Running Man just behind The Long Walk. It is far superior to Rage, Thinner, and The Regulators. The Long Walk had just a little more subtlety about it that I liked.

In 1985, a movie was made loosely based on the novel. It starred Arnold Schwarzeneger as Ben Richards. It played up the game show angle (with the legendary Richard Dawson serving as host of The Running Man) and played down the class conflict. Also appearing was Jesse Ventura. Two future governors appeared in the same movie.

The Running Man the movie versus The Running Man the book reinforces the old adage, “Don’t judge a book by its movie.” The book is very good. The movie, not so much.

The Long Walk Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman

The Long Walk
Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman
Copyright 1985

Stephen King seldom delved into dystopia. While some might consider the Dark Tower a natural sequel to The Stand and therefore representative of a dystopian future, I see it as something larger. If we discount The Dark Tower, then King’s only real forays into dystopia are The Long Walk and The Running Man – both published under the Bachman name

The Long Walk is a game, played for life or death stakes. One hundred 16 year old boys line up at the Canadian-U.S. border in Maine to start walking. They must maintain a speed of four miles per hour. When they drop below four miles per hour, they are issued a warning. After they get three warnings, they get death. They can drop warnings by successfully maintaining a steady pace for an hour per warning.

Overseeing this contest is an enigmatic government figure known as The Major. He is apparently the leader of what governs the United States in this time and place. He offers each boy encouragement and gets them started.

It is this contest that Raymond Garraty has entered. The prize is vague, but seems to be the every desire of your heart and mind.

We get little backstory on Ray Garraty. We know that his father worked for the government, but was prone to drinking and shooting off his mouth. Garraty’s dad was “squaded” which one can infer to mean impressed into military service. With his father gone, the family has fallen on hard times. He wants the prize for him and his mother.

The walkers start off and friendships and cliques form. The boys become friends and Garraty gravitates toward a fellow walker named Peter McVries. The two hold many long conversations as the walk down the road.

The odds makers favor is a kid named Scramm. Scramm is lean and fit and Garraty, while liking Scramm, is worried that he doesn’t have Scramm’s stamina.

Garraty makes other friends who brand themselves “The Musketeers” (not particularly original). They fall in and out of the group as the walk proceeds.

The loudmouth in the group is Barkovitch who proclaims that he will dance on their graves when he wins.

One boy, Stebbins, walks near the back. While cliques and groups move together, Stebbins walks alone, always. Stebbins fascinates Garraty. Garraty’s first bid at conversation with Stebbins yields monosyllabic answers. He’ll get more from Stebbins later.

And it proceeds. For many miles it goes until the first walker gets his “ticket.” From there, the conversations turn darker, but they go on. So does the walking well into the day, into the night, and into the next day.

Garraty is the hero of the crowds who line the streets of the many small towns the Walk passes through. He’s the only Maine native in the walk. His mother and girlfriend are waiting more than 100 miles ahead to catch a glimpse of him and Garraty is determined to make it long enough to see them.

One by one, the walkers fall. Some just fall down from exhaustion and are shot in the street. Some go insane and freak out. Some develop physical ailments. One kids succumbs to appendicitis. Scramm, the muscular odd on favorite, develops pneumonia. And the walk goes on.

Garraty has mental and physical crises of his own as he walks for days upon days without stopping. He finds walking with an erection to be difficult after he wanders to the side of the road, kisses a random girl, and cops a feel. At one point, he develops cramps and draws three warnings before he’s able to get going again. He also feels his sanity slipping away as the guns go off again and again.

He and McVries see each other through crises, but near the end, with just a few boys left, the whole group agrees that it’s all for one and one for all. No help allowed.

Garraty falls back to talk to Stebbins. He expects Stebbins to be philosophical or insightful. Instead, Stebbins starts goading Garraty, accusing him of having a Oedipus complex and wanting to see and kiss his mom more than his girlfriend.

Eventually, Garraty sees his mother and girlfriend. He stops and grabs Jan’s hand. He can’t let go. He is warned and warned again. McVries finally pulls him away before he’s given a ticket.

One by one, Garraty sees his friends die. It comes down to him and Stebbins. He talks to Stebbins again. Stebbins is in bad shape – as is Garraty – and reveals a secret. Stebbins is the Major’s son. The Major, according to Stebbins – has many bastard children all over the country. Stebbins says that he’s the rabbit that makes the other dogs run faster. With that, he sits down and gets his ticket.

Garraty wins! A Jeep bearing the Major drives up the road. Garraty sees it and stops walking. He starts running.

Stephen King wrote this book in 1966, many years before he’d write and publish Carrie. He says he wrote five novels before Carrie and he thought two of them were good. The first one he thought was good, written while he was in high school, was Rage. The Long Walk, written while he was a freshman in college, was the other. When it came time to publish books under a pen name, King was naturally drawn to it.

The Long Walk is a chore to read. It contains sporadic episodes of action in between long conversations. Yet it is dark and disturbing. I see it as almost prescient of what we today call Reality Television. Of the works published under Bachman’s name, it is my favorite.

One cannot really call it a character study because so many characters are developed around Garraty. Garraty is the central character, but he’s also the center for this multi-character drama. It’s not a horror novel because it contains no supernatural element. It is dystopian, but its time seems to be our own and the geography of Maine and New England are the same as ours, so it takes place in our world.

In short, this novel is an enigma. I don’t know why I like it so much because it lacks so many things that make for a good story. But I was drawn in. Even knowing Garraty was going to win (how else could the novel end) I was compelled to read. The Long Walk was a unique reading experience.

Roadwork By Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman

Roadwork
By Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman
Copyright 1981

The third Bachman book written and the third published is regarded by many of Stephen King’s fans as the worst of the Bachman books. It was King’s first published “mainstream” fiction, predating the novellas of Different Seasons by a year. In Roadwork, we find Richard Bachman’s strongest and most sympathetic character.

Barton Dawes is 40 years old. He has a job and a home. Unfortunately, imminent domain in the form of a highway project is going to claim both, and Dawes isn’t mentally equipped to handle it.

At the industrial laundry where he works in middle management, he’s the guy in charge of securing a new facility for the laundry before the highway claims it. The company has an option on an existing factory and all Bart has to do is sign the papers. For reasons he can’t explain to himself, he can’t do it.

His home is also in the highway’s path and Bart is reluctant to relocate. Most of his neighbors have taken the city’s money and moved on. Bart’s only son lived in that house and he would later die of a brain tumor. That home is the only place his son ever lived in his short life.

Bart makes some large firearm purchases. Again, he really doesn’t have a plan of any sort. He just wants them around.

The day comes and goes for the option on the plant and Bart buffaloes his bosses just long enough to make sure another company gets it. The laundry is going to have to go out of business. Bart is fired. His wife, Mary, is devastated and leaves him. Bart is left alone in the home he once shared with a family in an empty neighborhood he once shared with friends.

Bart takes to long drives during the day to pass the time. One evening, he picks up a female hitchhiker and takes her home. They end up sleeping together. Before the girl sets out for Las Vegas, she gives him some high grade mescaline. He puts it in his pocket and forgets about it.

Bart has decided to take action and tries to buy explosives from the local mobster. The guy thinks Bart is nuts and won’t play ball. Bart uses Molotov cocktails instead and burns the equipment and construction office at the building site.

Christmas comes and goes with Bart still separated from his wife. They’ve been invited to a New Year’s Eve party as a couple and decide they should go. They arrive separately and on the way, Bart decides to consume the mescaline. He starts tripping hard and Mary is horrified that he’s taking drugs. A drug counselor who happens to be at the party takes him home.

After the first of the year, Bart is the last resident on his street and the city is anxious to get him out of his house so they can clear it. An attorney stops by and Bart hassles the man without mercy before coming to an agreement that will have Bart out of the house on January 20. He cuts Bart a check for more than $60,000.

Bart takes half and sends it to Mary. He tries to donate a large amount to the free coffee house the drug counselor operates. He won’t take it. He knows Bart is suicidal.

He has one final conversation with Mary where they agree to divorce. They look back on their lives nad the loss of their only child. Mary tells Bart that while she was able to move past it, he was not. She wants Bart to move on. They end up saying I love you one last time.

Bart takes the rest of his cash and buys high grade explosives from his mobster buddy who’s finally decided to help him out. He also pays the guy to find the girl with which he had the tryst and to give her some cash. He wires his house with the stuff, loads his guns, and waits for the city to come move him out.

The attorney shows up with a couple cops and Bart fires on their cars with an assault rifle. He assiduously avoids hurting anyone, but does plenty of shooting, hoping to attract the attention of the media. The reporters shows up and one manages to sneak into the Dawes home. He interviews Bart and Bart talks about how heartless and senseless eminent domain is. When the reporter leaves, Bart blows his home and himself to pieces.

It is later revealed that the highway extension was not necessary. It was done to spent federal grant money that would have had to have been returned had it not been spent.

I’ve read this book a few times from a few different perspectives. I read it when I was 20 and thought it was a passable story, but I was not that taken with it. I read it when I was in my mid 30s with a child of my own and found myself sympathetic with Bart for having lost a child. I read it at 47 and found myself strongly identifying with Bart.

Bart was functional after the death of his child. But that tragedy made him resistant, even paranoid about change. And change was occurring in both his home life and work life, caused by the construction of a single highway. Bart put in more than 20 years in that plant. Bart lived in his home for more than 20 years. Major change is not easy to deal with at middle age – a reality lost on me when I was 20 or even 35.

Bart is not an anti-hero, but he is not a heroic figure. In many ways, he’s quite selfish. He put many of his coworkers out of work when he did not secure them a new plant. He destroyed his wife’s way of life when he lost his job – the wife that had learned to depend upon him and nobody else through 20 years of marriage. Despite that, he remains sympathetic because he’s already suffered life’s greatest loss and God and the government want more.

The book has one other major charm for me. It is chock full of 1970s cultural references. Set in 1973, the energy shortage is referenced many times. Names like Dick Cavett, Merv Griffin, and Johnny Carson pepper the prose. Not only does King weave a sad tale of loss, he captures the zeitgeist of a decade that had just fallen into the rearview mirror of time when he wrote this book.

King himself, in his essay, Why I Was Bachman, says Roadwork is probably not a very good novel. King was a younger man then. His perspective might have changed and as he enters senior citizen status, I must believe that, were he to go back and read what he wrote when he was in his 30s, he might be surprised at how well he captured the fear and hatred of change that comes with middle age.

Rage by Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman)

Rage
by Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman)
Copyright 1977

In 1977, Stephen King was told that publishers were unwilling to release more than one book by an author for fear of market saturation. King was cranking out novels at a feverish pace in the late 1970s, so he decided to release books under the nom de plume, Richard Bachman.

Rage was the first of what would be five novels released under the name Bachman before Bachman’s secret identity was revealed by a book store clerk. It also the only book authored by Stephen King to be out of print, pulled by King himself.

The book opens by introducing the reader to Charlie Decker, a high school senior who is essentially a good person, but is severely socially maladjusted. Earlier, he beat a math teacher severely and was being counseled by the school psychologist.

After a visit to the principal’s office, Charlie retrieves a pistol from his locker, returns to his algebra class and shoots and kills the teacher. Another teacher responds to the ruckus and Charlie kills him as well. He then holds his classmates hostage.

The hostage situation evolves into a confessional and encounter group where several of the students confess dark secrets and fears. Charlie acts as a facilitator. He stages a blow by blow fight between two girls who exchange insults until one concedes and apologizes. He also antagonizes one classmate who won’t participate.

Ted Jones is the popular guy in the school and fancies himself a leader. Since Ted won’t participate, Charlie is able to coax other students to reveal some of Ted’s dark secrets. Ted is enraged and Charlie is wary that Ted is going to try to take him down.

School officials communicate with Charlie via intercom whilst police and parents gather on the school lawn. Charlie uses his hostages to humiliate and belittle them by forcing them to answer embarrassing questions lest he shoot someone.

At one point, a sharpshooter takes a shot at Charlie. It is a direct hit in Charlie’s chest. However, upon leaving his locker, he took his combination lock and put it in his chest pocket. The lock deflected the bullet.

Finally, Charlie tells the principal the whole ordeal will be over in about 30 minutes. He and his hostages must finish, “getting it on.” He invites his hostages – most of whom sympathize with him – to teach Ted Jones what it means to be a kid in a kid versus adult world.

Charlie releases his hostages and is taken alive. He is committed to an asylum. We also found out that Ted Jones never really learned any lessons. He, too, is in an asylum where psychologists do not have high hopes for his recovery from his nervous breakdown.

Interspersed within the story are flashbacks in Charlie’s life that reveal how he became so cynical and disturbed. A protective mother and a father who is at first domineering, and then dismissive. Charlie’s sad childhood led him to the hostage situation.

Rage is an interesting novel. Of King’s published body of work, it is probably the least well written. The psychoanalysis is rather foolish and immature. The flashbacks often interrupted the narrative at the wrong points.

However, it moved at a rapid pace and Charlie was an interesting character. The narrative read like a much darker version of the classic 80s movie, The Breakfast Club. It explores the social layers of the typical high school culture and deconstructs them. I found Rage a much more realistic and interesting deconstruction of teenage society than The Breakfast Club.

Rage was originally published as a paperback in 1977 and later included in the compilation of early Bachman works called The Bachman Books.

Laying one’s hands on a copy of Rage is not easy today. In 1996, Stephen King had his publisher pull it from publication after Michael Carneal shot up a prayer meeting in East Paducah, Kentucky. He had a copy of the novel in his possession. Already linked to three earlier school shootings, King felt a social responsibility to take the novel out of print.

Rage is a decent novel and far better than later Bachman works like Thinner and The Regulators. It is too bad the psychologically unstable among us had to draw something from the prose other than a good story because they’ve robbed fans of suspense literature of a good book.

Book to Movie: Thinner (1996

Book to Movie: Thinner (1996)
Director: Tom Holland
Screenplay by Michael McDowell and Tom Holland
Based on the novel, Thinner by Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman)

Thinner was the second of Richard Bachman’s books to be made into a movie – the first being The Running Man. Thinner was a better movie than The Running Man, but still was not a particularly good movie. Of course, the source material wasn’t that good either. In many ways, this average movie improved upon the novel.

The book opens after Billy Halleck (Robert John Burke) has faced a judge and cleared of all charges in relation to the death of the old gypsy woman. The movie opens prior to the accident. We establish that Billy Halleck eats too much and his wife is on him about it. We also establish that gypsies are in town and, while Billy Halleck could care less about the gypsies, his buddies the town judge and town police chief are mighty angry.

The chief runs them out of a city park while Billy and the judge look on. Later, on their way home from a party with Billy’s gangster buddy, Richie Ginelli, Billy and his wife discuss his weight problem. Inexplicably, she starts performing oral sex (in the book it was a handjob) to “take his mind off of food.” Billy is climaxing when the woman steps out in front of him. He hits and kills her. She leaves smear of blood on Billy’s windshield.

From there, the movie very closely follows the book until the end. Unlike many King adaptations, they went with what King wrote rather than retool the ending for movie audiences.

The movie was not bad in its execution. The script was solid. The acting (other than Burke in a fat suit just wasn’t convincing as a fat man) was par. The special effects were solid and not overdone. It was just not a particularly exciting or scary movie.

The movie was different in its treatment of the deteriorating relationship between Halleck and his wife. This is thrown out there by King a few times in the book, but he never really develops it into a cold, deep hatred that would inspire a man to kill his wife in a horrific manner to save himself. The film develops that cold hatred by having Billy conjure an affair between Heidi and the doctor. Again, this was mentioned in the book, but not developed.

Give credit to Holland and the makeup department for making Taduz Lemke (Michael Constantine) as ugly and bitter as he was in the novel. If there was anything that lent this novel a major creep factor, it was Lemke’s appearance.

Thinner is an average movie based on an average novel. Neither really deliver any major thrills or creepiness. While there is nothing so bad in the movie to make a viewer groan, there is little there to excite him either.

Thinner By Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman

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The Regulators By Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman)

The Regulators
By Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman)
Copyright 1996

Released as a companion novel to Desperation, The Regulators takes the characters (or the character names) from Desperation and places them in the Columbus, Ohio suburb of Wentworth, and subjects them to Tak’s less than tender mercies.

It’s a sunny summer afternoon in the bucolic suburb when three garishly painted vans make their way down Poplar Street and start shooting up the place. The neighborhood paperboy is the first to die, followed by suburban housewife, Mary Jackson, racing home from an afternoon delight session. Others are badly wounded. As they bullets fly, the other residents of Poplar Street take refuge in two houses.

While the residents of Poplar Street cower in horror, Audrey Wyler lives in her own little hell contained within her home of Poplar Street. This is where Tak has taken up suburban residence, brought here in the body of young Seth Garin, an eight year old boy afflicted with autism.

The reader learns that Seth was traveling through the Nevada desert with his family when they passed the city of Desperation. As they pass Desperation, Seth, who is usually silent and can only talk in short monosyllables, begins begging in full sentences to be taken to Desperation to see the mine there. Shocked by this miraculous development in Seth, the family heads to Desperation. There, they get a tour of the mine – including the old China mine where Tak is imprisoned. Seth runs inside where Tak enters his mind apparently rendered susceptible by his autism.

Upon returning to their home town of Toledo, Ohio, The Garin family dies in a series of tragic accidents. Seth is taken in my his aunt Audrey and uncle Herb. After just a month, Tak forces Herb to commit suicide. Audrey is left alone with a monster who eats Chef Boyardee products, drinks chocolate milk, and watches a kids show called MotoKops 2200 and an old spaghetti western movie called The Regulators. It is from these two programs that Tak redevelops Poplar Street into his own version of the old west, protected by the cartoon characters from MotoKop 2200.

In the home of Peter Billingsley (a retired veterinarian as he was in Desperation) Collie Entregian (a former Columbus cop fired for political reasons) and Steve Ames (now a guy moving across country for a new job who got lost getting off the interstate) decide to make for an area called the Greenbelt which is a wooded area behind the houses on the other side of Poplar Street. They hope to pass through there undetected by the MotoKops in the vans and get to an unaffected area where they can call the police.

In the house next door, a pair of teenage twin boys have the same plan and head for the greenbelt. Neither group is aware of each other.

As they make their way to the greenbelt, they noticed that the neighborhood is being transformed. What was once suburban Ohio is being transformed into the old west. Hitching posts appear. Houses are converted into cabins. Cacti grow where trees once blossomed. Sand replaces grass.

The expedition to the Greenbelt goes badly for everyone. Collie Entregian is killed by a shotgun blast from one of the twins who did not know who he was. Steve is attacked by a mountain lion and badly injured. The twin who did the shooting commits suicide. The group makes it back to their respective houses just as the MotoKops return to shoot up the neighborhood some more.

Tak has the ability to control some people who are weak and can control Audrey when he wants to, although it requires a great deal of energy. He hopes by killing the people of Poplar Street he will gain power and expand his influence.

To escape Tak’s control, Audrey flees to a place in her mind where it is 1982 and she is vacationing with her best friend, Jan. When Tak is in control of him, Seth has his own place in his mind where he flees. When they are in these places, they can communicate without Tak knowing. Audrey develops a plan to free Seth of Tak.

While preparing his chocolate milk, she fills it with a laxative. She knows that Tak can’t stand to be around when Seth performs his bathroom activities. Seth is soon afflicted with diarrhea and heads for the bathroom. Tak steps out of Seth’s body, waiting for him to finish.

Audrey seizes her opportunity. She grabs Seth from the toilet and flees next door, leaving Tak alone and without a body or mind to enter. Seth, knowing that he is the cause of all of the misery, telepathically tells a girl hiding there (Cammie Reed – mother of the twin boys) to kill him and Audrey. Cammie, distraught with grief and full of rage, kills them. Tak enters Cammie’s mind, weakened by her insanity brought on by grief. However, there is enough of Cammie left that Tak can’t completely dominate her. Tak rages and makes threats, but is not strong enough to act. Finally, unable to do anything, Tak destructs, blowing Cammie’s head apart.

The world of Wentworth, Ohio is restored to what it once was, except many people are now dead. The survivors are left to resume whatever lives they can.

The book concludes with a letter from a woman staying at the Mohonk Resort where Audrey spent that week in 1982 with her friend, Jan. The letter is dated 1986 – ten years before the events on Poplar Street in Wentworth, Ohio unfolded. The letter talks about the ghosts of a woman and a boy that haunt the place. The woman has found a picture. In that picture are stick figures of a boy and a woman holding hands, standing outside a small house. The reader is left to assume that, in another plane of existence, Seth and Audrey are living happily ever after at the Mohonk Resort.

The Regulators was a horrid book that was little more than a marketing gimmick to boost sales of the pair of companion novels.

In the book liner, there is a fictional backstory of how the deceased Richard Bachman’s widow found the manuscript and submitted it for publication. The author’s photo is actually a well known, old photo of Stephen King taken when he was in college.

While Stephen King excels at character development, his alter ego apparently shuns it. The characters in The Regulators were paper thin. They had no backstory, no personality, and no apparent motivation beyond the thin plot. The reader is given absolutely no reason to care about these people at all.

Tak, as a villain, is not developed either. The reader is given zero information as to Tak’s origin, motivation, or ultimate goal.

The plot, such as it was, was haphazardly put together and was incredibly linear. The mishmash of spaghetti westerns and children’s sci-fi action adventure was poorly executed. The reader is left wondering why the MotoKops were even a part of the story. It would have been much more effective to have the bad guys from The Regulators movie shoot up the suburb.

The only entertaining part of the book is an interlude between chapters where the Desperation mining engineer, Alan Symes, recounts in a deathbed letter, of his encounter with the Garin family when they showed up and asked for a tour of the mine. That was well written and Alan Symes, who is the most minor character in the book, becomes the best developed and most sympathetic.

The Regulators was a painful book to read and is, by far, the poorest of the Bachman works. I panned Desperation in my review or it. But compared to The Regulators, Desperation is a masterpiece. There is scarcely anything good to say about the book and it should have never been published. It ranks very near the bottom of King’s body of work and was his worst book prior to the publication of Lisey’s Story 10 years later.

Casual fans of horror should avoid this book. If you’ve never read Stephen King before, please do not read this book. If you are a King fan, read it if you must. But know that when you are done, you’ll wonder if the master of horror fiction lost his senses sometime in the mid-1990s.

Blaze by Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman)

Blaze
by Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman)
Copyright 2007

Clayton Blaisdell, Jr. is a studious and large boy living with his alcoholic father in Maine. One day, Clayton annoys his father who throws him down the steps not once, not twice, but three times, giving the boy permanent brain damage and a large dent in his skull. Dad went to prison and young Clayton (“Blaze” to his friends) went to an orphanage. Blaze was no longer studious. Brain damage left him with marginal intelligence.

Flash forward many years later, and Blaze is a small time con artist on his own since the recent death of his pal, George Rackley who was the brains of their operation. Before he was stabbed to death at a craps game, he hatched a plot to kidnap and ransom the infant son of a wealthy Maine family. Blaze intends to move forward with the plot.

George had always been the brains of the duo who ran numerous cons and occasional robberies over the years to support themselves. Without George’s guidance, he would not have the know how to carry out the plan. However, George talks to Blaze in his mind, chiding him and coaching him as he plans and executes the kidnapping.

Blaze makes preparations. He buys everything he needs to care for a baby and takes it back to the dive flat he inhabits. He then buys a ladder, gloves, and other tools he will need to carry off his plan.

Blaze travels to the mansion of a shipping tycoon and breaks in. He finds the sleeping baby and takes it. On his way out of the house, he is discovered by the child’s grandmother who has come down to check on her cat. Blaze punches her in the face, damaging her brain. She will eventually succumb to those injuries, making Blaze a murderer as well as kidnapper.

While committing the crime, the dimwitted Blaze leaves behind several clues that will assist police in tracking him down.

He returns to his hovel, stows the car out of sight in the garage, and takes the baby into the shack he and his buddy George once shared. Blaze is clueless about how to care for an infant, but George pipes in occasionally with helpful advice. Blaze becomes attached to the child.

Blaze tries to fashion a ransom note to ask for the $1 million he and George had always dreamed of scoring. Finally, he decides to instead call the family and demand the money be dropped in a briefcase from an airplane. He makes the call and escapes just moments before the police arrive at the phone booth, having traced the call.

The police now know who they are looking for. A parking garage attendant near Baby Joey’s home provided a physical description. Blood left at the scene provided a blood type. The large purchase of baby goods from a commissioned salesperson by a large guy with a dent in his forehead also made an impression. She remembered his name, having read it on of his driver’s license when he opened his wallet. There is now a statewide BOLO for Clayton Blaisdell, Jr. AKA “Blaze.”

Eventually, George tells him the police are onto him and he needs to get gone from the small apartment. Blaze steals a new car and gets gone from his apartment. With no money, he has nowhere to flee. He decides to return to the orphanage where he spent most of his life. The building is now abandoned and secluded. Without heat in the Maine winter, the baby soon falls ill. Blaze is terribly worried and George has gone silent with his advice.

Police figure out where Blaze is holed up with the kid. They prepare to storm the place, but thanks to George, Blaze is one step ahead of him. He flees out into the deep snow and finds a cave where he builds a fire, hoping to warm the baby whose health is deteriorating.

Police stumble onto Blaze’s hiding place and open fire. One of the bullets chips the stone in the cave and one of the chips grazes Baby Joey’s face, lacerating his cheek. The normally calm and reserved Blaze is enraged and he returns fire, killing two cops. He makes a break for it, hoping to get to a logging road where he can sneak back to a main highway.

The police track him down and shoot him. Blaze is shot twice, but continues to stagger forward with Baby Joey protectively cradled in his arms. Finally, an FBI agent delivers the decisive shot and Clayton Blaisdell, Jr., the enormous man who was once a small boy who enjoyed books, falls dead in the snow. Baby Joey is returned to his family suffering from a cold, but otherwise no worse for wear.

In between chapters about Blaze’s misbegotten kidnapping venture are stories of Blaze’s childhood at the orphanage. We read about the few close friends he made there and how those friendships ended tragically. The Clayton Blaisdell backstory is as nearly extensive as the main plot and the book is really two separate stories interwoven.

King makes clear at the beginning of the book that the story is a “trunk novel.” It was written about the same time as Carrie. It was submitted to his publisher with the vampire novel and the publisher opted for ‘Salem’s Lot. While most of King’s early material was later published under the Richard Bachman pen name, Blaze – just 173 pages -- remained in a trunk in the King home. He “discovered” the manuscript in 2006 and decided to rework it into a Bachman book.

According to King, he revised it to remove many of the 1973 cultural and technological references which no longer worked in the story. But he did not “update” it. The novel takes place in an indefinite period in the past. Cell phones are not mentioned. The car Blaze steals is a 1970 Mustang – a car easily spotted in 2006. But the story contains nothing to fix it to a point in time.

King is also up front that the book developed into a thinly veiled homage to Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. The ghost of George Thomas Rackley is nearly identical to the cynically wise George Milton and the mentally slow and hulking Clayton Blaisdell is nearly a direct copy of Lennie Small.

As a King novel, it ranks in the middle of his works. It is unusually short at just 304 pages. The story telling is taut, unlike King’s usual sprawling narrative. It contains none of the terror of his horror works and lacks the poignancy that is characteristic of his mainstream stories. But it is a well told story with an interesting central character.

As a Bachman book, it is the best King published since Richard Bachman suffered his death by exposure in 1986. It is superior to Thinner, although it lacked its frantic pace, and is far superior to the atrocious The Regulators.

Blaze is never going to hold a place among King’s prominent novels. Many casual fans have never heard of it. But fans of the master of horror should read it. It’s an easy read and enjoyable. It is also a mix of the young Stephen King who told simple stories, and the mature King whose craft was honed to mastery.

The book also contains a short story called, Memory. The story is about a wealthy construction contractor whose body is badly damaged when his truck is run over by a crane on a work sight. His brain damaged, his body racked by pain, and his moods unstable, he drives away his wife and many of his friends. King clues us in that this short story is a taste of the novel that will soon follow Blaze -- Duma Key which is very much about King's own experience with painful rehabilitation from an accident.