The Regulators by Richard Bachman

Richard Bachman is a pseudonym used by Stephen King, initially, I think, so that he could write and publish works out of type from that which made him most famous. Or maybe they’re the stuff he wrote before he became famous. Not sure, but in my experience, the Bachman novels are some of the most typical Stephen King novels around.

And The Regulators is not a good example of that type. It’s a bit of a mess -- with too many characters to keep track of; long on gore and short on psychological horror.

Johnny sees everything, hears everything, feels everything; input floods him and his mind insists on lining up each crazy increment, as if something coherent were happening here, something which could actually be narrated.

This is on page 71 (of 489), and even by then I had had enough. Are you trying to tell us something, Bachman? Is something coherent happening here? Is this something which can actually be narrated? It sure doesn’t seem that way to me.

And then there are long stretches of the story that are told in newspaper clippings or as entries in someone’s journal. In order to add to the realism, press clippings are shown as mocked-up newspaper articles, and the journal entries are set in a script-style font.

Sometimes he goes into the den to watch TV, but not even Bonanza held him long today.

Do you see what happened there? Bonanza is the title of a TV show, and so it is properly italicized or underlined when shown in print. Many computer programs “know” this, and can add that feature automatically. You know who else knows that? Book authors and editors, generally speaking. But you know who doesn’t know that? Most people when they’re writing in their journals. And those journal writers who do know that, probably wouldn’t bother to underline Bonanza in their entry about how their son had been possessed by a malevolent spirit.

Later on, this happens.

A little old for that, but it must have been a bad morning at chez Hobart.

Chez. You know, French for “at the house of.” And you know, that’s a foreign word, so it is properly italicized in straight text, or underlined in italicized text. That’s definitely that kind of thing your average journal writer would do. To underscore their sarcasm, I guess?

Look, it’s a nitpick, I know, but it really destroyed the whole gimmick of the journal entries for me. They were supposed to seem real, but every time something was underlined, all it told me was that it wasn’t real.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.