King Of The Shelves Author Releases Two Horror Books

“Desperation” By Stephen King (Viking, 688 pages, $28) “The Regulators” By Richard Bachman (Dutton, 476 pages, $25)

Forget killer plagues and rabid dogs: The scariest thing about Stephen King is the rate at which this guy cranks out novels.

To call him prolific doesn’t really do it justice: At a point in his career when you’d expect King to be growing more reflective to slow down a bit the author seems more productive than ever. His creative demons simply won’t leave him alone.

Take “Desperation” and “The Regulators,” released simultaneously last Tuesday - the first as a Stephen King novel, the second under his Richard Bachman pen name. King created the Bachman pseudonym in the 1970s to appease his publishers, who were wary the tireless author might be “overpublishing” his market. Once Bachman’s identity was revealed in 1984 (after the release of “Thinner”), the pen name was supposedly put to rest for good.

But Richard Bachman was always more than just a name. Bachman’s novels were noticeably different in tone from King’s: leaner, darker and infinitely more focused in their exploration of horror. The contrast between “Desperation” and “The Regulators,” which are loosely linked in theme, character and plot, points out the differences between the two styles. “Desperation” is flabbier; “The Regulators” is faster-paced, meaner and more satisfying.

In only their first week on store shelves, “Desperation” is No. 1 and “The Regulators” is No. 2 on the New York Times list of bestselling fiction.

Neither, unfortunately, catches King at his peak. There’s a sameness creeping into King’s novels, a formula he began long ago with “Salem’s Lot” (possibly his best book), that’s growing tiresome. His setups are almost always inventive and gripping; his characterizations remain vivid and earthy. But once you get to the meat of the tale, there’s a dispiriting sense of having been there before.

The first 200 pages of “Desperation” are terrific, gruesome stuff, as unnerving as anything King has ever written. The story begins on a remote highway in the Nevada desert, where husband and wife Peter and Mary Jackson are pulled over for speeding by a hulking highway patrolman. Despite his intimidating presence and oddly stiff manner, the officer seems friendly enough - until he discovers a bag of pot in the Jacksons’ trunk.

The pot isn’t theirs, but that’s beside the point. The officer places the couple in his patrol car and begins driving them back to town: Desperation, Nev., where the population is rapidly, unnaturally dwindling.

“‘You have the right to remain silent,’ the big cop said in his robot’s voice. ‘If you do not choose to remain silent, anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. I’m going to kill you. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand your rights as I have explained them to you?’ …

“… Peter opened his mouth. Nothing came out but a croak.

“The cop turned his head then. His face, pinkish with sun when he had stopped them, had gone pale. His eyes were very large, seeming to bulge out of his face like marbles. He had bitten his lip, like a man trying to suppress some monstrous rage, and blood ran down his chin in a thin stream.

“‘Do you understand your rights?’ the cop screamed at them …’Do you understand your rights or not? Do you or not? Do you or not? Answer me, you smart New York Jew!”’

King’s greatest talent has always been his ability to invest the familiar with horrible overtones: The beginning of “Desperation” is deeply harrowing stuff, playing off our simple, natural fear of authority - our fumbling nervousness when getting pulled over for a ticket - and amplifying it to an unimaginable degree. In the tiny, dead town of Desperation, the rules of law and order don’t apply: An insane policeman might as well be the devil, and a giant, physically decomposing cop is truly the stuff of nightmares (the early part of the book contains some deeply grotesque imagery).

But the evil in “Desperation” turns out to be larger than life - an ancient entity named Tak that’s a close cousin to the malevolent spirit from “IT.” As the novel’s characters, brought together by the ghoul cop to the town’s holding cells, begin to figure out what’s going on, the book loses its hold. It becomes another tale of a group of brave, ordinary souls banding together to battle a faceless evil, and King is at his best when his evil has a defined face.

“Desperation” does have one distinguishing characteristic: It’s King’s most religious book. One of the characters trapped in the town, an 11-year-old boy, actually talks to God - and God talks back, telling the kid exactly what to do. It’s a daring conceit to pull off in what is otherwise a book version of a 1950s B-movie, but it suggests King’s fascination with horror may be leading him to new, more ambitious plateaus.

God is also present in “The Regulators,” but in a much different form: The holy power ruling over this story is television. The setting is quaint, peaceful Poplar Street in Wentworth, Ohio, a street “which runs straight through the middle of that fabled faded American dream with the smell of hotdogs in the air and a few burst paper remains of Fourth of July firecrackers still lying here and there in the gutters.”

One summer afternoon, a caravan of candy-colored vans drives through the street, shotguns poking out from behind tinted windows, and blasts away at the neighborhood without explanation. The vans drive off, leaving the bewildered residents to gather their dead and figure out what happened - and then the vans come back again. And again.

Writing as Bachman, King uses the same character names from “Desperation” (an initially disorienting trick if the two books are read back-to-back). There are also clever echoes between the two novels - and, wouldn’t you know it, the evil in both turns out to be that creepy demon-thing, Tak.

But where “Desperation felt hokey and unwieldy, “The Regulators” is blisteringly sharp, because the supernatural doings are always grounded in reality: You can touch them. The novel’s structure is more satisfying, a puzzle that comes together through flashbacks, old letters and news clippings.

And the story is much less predictable: Bachman never believed in the obligatory happy ending, and “The Regulators” does not play by the expected rules. (It, too, contains some great gross-outs, including an episode involving an almost severed arm.)

But “The Regulators” also suffers from over-familiarity: At times, its unmanageably large number of protagonists recalls the unwieldiness of King’s “The Tommyknockers,” in which you couldn’t really tell the smaller characters apart. This novel doesn’t stay with you, either: Its shocks are fast and visceral (Bachman dedicated the book to writer Jim Thompson and director Sam Peckinpah, which says a lot), but they don’t take root.

“The Regulators” works best when King - er, Bachman - forgets about the ethereal evil beings and concentrates on taking a few solid whacks at that revered American bastion of “safety” - suburbia. “The Regulators” indicates that maybe King should permanently trade places with his alter-ego: At this point, Bachman is beating him at his own game.