One character in '' Desperation'' ''looked King's trademark characterization by references to movie or music stars suggests his deep identification with American pop culture. Television talk shows or any casual New York conversation: random carnage, obscure wasting illnesses, sinister technologies and the accelerating sense of a world gone wrong.Įven Mr. King's fiction cut across the fears behind opinion polls, The household derangements and the matter-of-fact malevolence inside Mr. Perhaps evil God and insinuate that Gnosticism into the rituals and commodities of everyday America. King's peculiar knack as a novelist is to strip away much of the complexity and nearly all of the art from a terrifying vision of an unknowable universe ruled by a limited, Norman Mailer, William Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon. King is the latest (if least literary) manifestation of a Gnostic strain that has surged through American literature from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe to recent writers as various as James Merrill, His situations and characters, moreover, intersect an anxious, alienated culture with He has discharged over the 22 years since the publication of ''Carrie'' span a surprising variety of incident, subject and tone. The 30 horror novels (five carrying the same ''Richard Bachman'' pseudonym as ''The Regulators'') King harnesses a formidable facility for originating unforgettable situations and characters. Although his novels seldom advance a single memorable King's omnipresence, and the stunt quality behind his triple play, can obscure his genuine achievements - as well as trivialize what he loses with this push for product.

King also issued a lower-key six-part serial, ''The Green Mile.''

Apparently indisposed to coast on the bloody laurels of this double apocalypse, over his summer vacation Mr. Regulators'' - mammoth novels released on the same day under different names from separate publishers yet featuring interlocking plots and dust jackets - rehearse Armageddon with violence and sensationalism rarely approximated

Millennium fever possesses popular culture like a doomsday virus, and no writer is chasing the pathology more determinedly or baroquely than Stephen King.

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