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Geschreven door Richard Bachman, een pseudoniem van dhr King.
Amazon.com
An evil creature called Tak uses the imagination of an autistic boy
to shift a residential street in small-town Ohio into a world so bizarre
and brutal that only a child could think it up. It's as two-dimensional
and gaudy as a kid's comic book, but for this reviewer, The Regulators
is a gripping adventure tale about what happens when a mind fixated
on TV (especially old Westerns and a cartoon called MotoKops 2200) runs
amok. As Michael Collins writes in Necrofile, "[Stephen] King offers
his readers a glimpse of the true evil of popular culture ... which
has no design or intent, only an empty need to sustain itself. King
is, I think, about the canniest observer of what America is, and that
he generally writes horror ought to give us pause from time to time."
From Publishers Weekly
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-fictiona-
-
l) 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 well?the 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.
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