 Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to another Stephen King book review. I took some time off from doing these. I was trying to get through a certain book that I've been struggling with. I'm still struggling with it. I'm 400 pages into a 700 page book and I can't seem to make any more progress. But I'm going to jump back into it now that I've taken a break. I've rejuvenated myself by reading one of my all-time favorite Stephen King books or Bachman books, The Regulators. You know, see that? I hope so. There you go. But yeah, if you don't know how these two books right here go together, I always get them confused. So these are the covers side by side. They are companion novels. They are not the same novel told differently. They have the exact same cast of characters. But one of these is drastically better than the other. Spoiler alert. It ain't Desperation. Desperation, I usually give about three stars. It's alright. It's a little heavy-handed on the religious material. But The Regulators is completely devoid of that. So if you're someone who doesn't like religion in your books, this one is the one for you. I do suggest however reading both of them for the complete experience. But yes, this was published under the Richard Bachman name at one point in time. Well actually, I think it's just a joke. I'm not actually sure that it is a real quote. But in here it says, author of the best-selling novel, Thinner and four thrillers that have sold millions in an omnibus edition entitled The Bachman Books. The late Richard Bachman has been described as Stephen King without a conscience. And if you've read any of the Bachman Books, you'll know why this fits in with the Bachman Books if you've read this one. This is a non, this is a spoiler-free review. But I will be doing a Thursday Theorist tomorrow. So those of you who've been chomping at the bit and asking me every week when Thursday Theorist is returning, it's returning tomorrow with your Regulators episode. But this one, if you've read it, you'll know basically the end, roughly the end. It kind of fits into the Richard Bachman bleakness of it. But other than that, this really doesn't feel like a Bachman Book. And I don't think that King intended it to be a Bachman Book when he wrote it. In fact, what I think happened with this one is he was writing it, it got way out of control. It just got uber batshit crazy. And he was like, I'm never going to be able to sell this. And if I do, it's not going to work. So let's go ahead and put it in a trunk. Kind of like he did with Blaze, which will be, at some point in time, we'll be getting to that as well. But I think the book was sitting off there and he had all these great characters in his head. Tom Billingsley, Steve Ames, Kali Intregian, however you pronounce it, all these the carvers, the reeds, all these great characters that show up in desperation. I think he just reused them in desperation. I may be completely wrong. He may have written desperation and then written regulators is kind of like a, maybe some kind of an experimental thing. But, and it does help if you've read desperation first, I feel. But I think you can read the books in either order. It doesn't really matter. You see more of a conclusion in the desperation than you do in the regulators. This book is so much fun. I don't know why it gets the shit that it gets from Stephen King fans. If you are a Stephen King fan, and by Stephen King fan, I mean you like his exposition. You like the way he builds characters. You like his, his disturbing content. You, you like all that stuff. Why, and you don't like this book. Why don't you like this book? We need to have a discussion down there in the doobly-doo. But because of that, I want to go ahead and throw this out there. There might be spoilers down in the comment section, so please beware. If you do have spoilers to post down there, do me a favor and put spoiler alert at the top of your comment before you say anything else. Say spoiler alert for any books that you're going to talk about, whether it be regulators, desperation, or whatever. And this just goes for the channel period. Please do. If you're going to say spoilers, please say spoiler alert. Nothing worse than scrolling through the comments, trying to find some solidarity, or trying to find a conversation, and all of a sudden stumbling across, you know, something that's going to ruin the book for you. Okay, so now that I've asked that question, why don't you like the regulators? I don't understand. If you are a huge Stephen King fan, if you were a Stephen King fanboy, fangirl, fan, whatever, why don't you like this book? It is superbly gory. The deaths and the gore in this book are amazing. Probably some of my favorite throughout the entire Stephen King universe. It is now my favorite Bachman book. In fact, if I could calm my OCD and call it my favorite Stephen King book, I can't because it says Richard Bachman and not Stephen King on the cover. I know how ludicrous that sounds, but that's how I feel. It would be in my top five. I would probably bump out the wastelands in my top five and put this one in my top five. But I don't understand why Stephen King fans don't like this book. Most of them don't like this book. It has a 3.6 star average on Goodreads. And I'm also wondering if part of that is because there still might be people out there who don't know that Bachman is King or maybe it's because Stephen King references himself in the book. I won't tell you where. That'd be a spoiler. But there's so much going on in this book. There's the amazing character development. Everybody, even though it never stops from page one, it never lets up. It is a speedy-ass 475 pages. That's for sure. But I think one of the main issues that I might point out if I were going to start being nitpicky is maybe at times there's some ambiguity with whose head you're in because the book's written in a nomination narrative, which means that the narrator can head hop in the middle of a paragraph. In fact, there's two scenes where I was confused with Kim and Cynthia. What happened to who? Even though I've read it before and I knew how the story played out, I did get lost there for a second. But with King putting it under the Bachman name, I mean he had to have known that he could do basically whatever he wanted to and not risk ruining the good King name kind of deal. Another thing is I was talking to my buddy Gregor Zane who's a terrific author. He does write stuff on the weird or bizarro side of things, but he is just a fantastic author period. If you go into exactly what this book is, we were discussing this, he said it's a bizarro novel and it is. You're dealing with the wackiest shit Stephen King has ever, ever written, aside from maybe certain little elements and tommy knockers. Other than that, this is the most whacked out shit, even more than anything in The Dark Tower. This is the most whacked out shit he's ever written. But that's the fun of this book and I don't understand the hate that it gets. I feel the same way about Leasy's story, but for a completely opposite reason. There's so much heart and passion in that book. I don't understand why King fans don't like it. With this one, like I said, it never lets up. There's so much fun to be had. And this is also the closest thing that Stephen King has ever written to a straight out genre experience, other than the other Bachman books, if I'm honest. Most of the Bachman books feel like genre books, except for maybe road work and rage. With the long walk, that feels kind of like your speculative fiction and then you have the running man, which is not sci-fi, that's more speculative fiction, also more of a futuristic kind of story. With this one, this one's just batshit crazy. And I love every minute of it. The scenes, especially with the, oh how can I say this without spoiling anything, the scenes with the animals. So it's on the cover, so if it's a spoiler, then I'll be damned because it's on the cover. You've got doggos, you've got birdos, and the scenes with those in it are great. But the ending, this is one of Stephen King's best endings. You see how passionate I am about this book. And if you're a Stephen King fan, even if you're not a Stephen King fan, I would ask you to either revisit it or read it for the first time, because it is truly leagues better than desperation. It doesn't go on near as long as that book does. It doesn't drone on about the theme of religion. The bad guy is up there with, if you're a fan of Pennywise, he's up there with Pennywise. In fact, we'll be talking about that more in Thursday Theorists Come Tomorrow. But yeah, have you read Regulators? I would love to hear from people who didn't like it, like I said earlier in the video, but even if you did love it, I would like to hear from you too, because I would like some solidarity here. I was going through reviews and I was like, no. What? No. Huh? None of these stuff makes any sense if you're a Stephen King fan. But anyways, until next time, I am an E, you have been U, this has been another Stephen King book review. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye bye!