Stephen King's Desperation

I was 11 years old when I first got my hands on the hardcover copy of Stephen King's Desperation. It was October of 1996. The book was released in September, but it was already a bestseller, naturally, given the popularity of King.

Also given his popularity, the book was treated with special marketing by King's publisher Viking, presented at bookstores in a special, faux-wood-paneled cardboard display. It was displayed just like this in the best bookstore in my area (albeit a 45-minute drive), at Kentucky Oaks Mall in Paducah, at Waldenbooks, a bookstore chain that no longer exists. My Mama Jan had spotted the book near the front entrance of Waldenbooks while she was shopping for clothes in the mall.

When my mother and I went over to Mama Jan's house for Halloween, I remember her dumping candy into my pumpkin bucket, then sitting me down in her den. She handed me a copy of the book. "I saw it and thought of you," she said.

At 690 pages, it was the largest book I'd ever held. I didn't know authors wrote books this long. I cracked the novel and turned to the first page. The second word on the page was a dirty word. I slammed shut the cover, lest my grandmother (a good Christian woman), spot bad words in the book she bought me. I couldn't wait to get home and read the thing.

Somehow amid the ordinary pressures and homework of my first year in middle school, I was able to read this behemoth. It wasn't always easy, and not just because it was a big book.

Our family home was always noisy. My father couldn't hear well, so he ran the living room TV at full volume. The noise from the TV's back speakers carried all the way to my bedroom at the end of the narrow hallway. It was like living in a place with roommates where there was an endless party.

The bathroom turned out to be the best place to read to avoid the racket. One school night, I stayed up late, sitting on the bathroom floor and slamming a couple Big K colas and reading Desperation's final hundred pages. Reading the book now 30 years later, I realized so much of what I missed in those final hundred pages and elsewhere.

First, a trivial point. So in the book, there's a demon that can only live if it inhabits a host body. In a desperate attempt to save itself, it hops into an eagle. I remembered it as a vulture. That's a minor point, I know, but for 30 years, I've had the image of a terrifying screeching vulture and not a terrifying screeching eagle.

More importantly, what I can see reading the book all these years later is that it is really an allegory for recovery from alcohol addiction, namely an attempt on Stephen King's part to reckon with his alcohol recovery.

The book follows these various characters who wind up in a small town called Desperation, Nevada. They all get pulled over by a state trooper for various trumped-up reasons and thrown into a jail cell. The state trooper reveals that he plans to toy with them all before disposing of them. Also, it comes to be revealed that the state trooper is inhabited by an ancient malevolent spirit called Tak. Fortunately, for our ragtag crew, there is an 11-year-old boy among them named David, who has the power to call upon God’s help.

As an aside, imagine my surprise these 30 years later, realizing read that the main character in the book is 11 years old, the same age I was when I first read the book. I wonder if that registered with me at 11. Surely it did.

I say that the book is an allegory for recovery. This is clear because the main character is a man who regards himself as a washed-up author who has trouble with alcohol and whose only possibility for redemption is to turn himself over to the will of God. The God in this book is vaguely Christian, but the talk around this God, about turning oneself over to a higher power, most closely follows the language of Alcoholics Anonymous, which King has said he has engaged with.

Unusual about this book compared to others in King’s oeuvre is that it contains no afterward from King himself. Normally, King wants to give his readers a peak behind the curtain and let them know how the book came about and what was on his mind at the time of the book's composition. I wonder if he didn't think that the messaging was so obvious that it didn't warrant comment. King has his wunderkind boy character David state out loud on the final page that "God is love." Surely that thought was foremost on King's mind during this period of his recovery.