In two of the three books King published in 1996, a new, and angry, concern emerges: God's indifference to His creation. Both Paul Edgecombe and David Carver, protagonists of The Green Mile (1996; see separate entry) and Desperation, respectively, reproach God for allowing good people to suffer. In Desperation's companion, The Regulators, these questions are not posed. God is the concern only of the Hobarts, savagely caricatured zealots, who pass out tracts on hell to their neighbors, but abuse children and steal.
It requires a careful reading of Desperation to realize how pervasively biblical, and pseudo-biblical, its language is. All the characters, including the demon Tak, find biblical parallels in events and speak in biblical cadences. To name two of many examples, Bill Harris, Marinville's literary agent, gives Steve Ames "Five Commandments": "All these commandments.....
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