The starting place for discussion of The Regulators must be the elaborate network of parallels with its companion novel, Desperation. The two are linked by patterns of imagery. Both feature a monster and human opponents with identical names, but different lives and attributes.

What, exactly, has King accomplished in his unprecedented pairing of the two novels? Readers might ask whether any other authors they have read have written pairs or groups of fictional works at all similar to King's bold experiment.

It may be fruitful to compare King with William Faulkner. Members of the Sartoris, Snopes, Compson and other Mississippi clans interact and evolve over Faulkner's large body of novels and stories. Clearly, for both King and Faulkner, some characters have such depth and reality that they cannot be captured in any single work of fiction. There the similarities end. Faulkner's characters are rooted in a...