The Regulators
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 Regulatorsis a gripping adventure tale about what happens when a mind fixated on TV (especially old Westerns and a cartoon calledMotoKops 2200) runs amok.  As Michael Collins writes inNecrofile,"[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."