Desperation

Nevada is mostly a long stretch of desert you cross on the way to somewhere else. And with someone else, if your lucky......because it's a scary place. Headed down Route 50 in the brutal summer heat are people who never going to reach their destinations. Like the Jacksons, a professor and his wife going home to New York City; the Carvers, a Wentworth, Ohio, family bound for a vacation at Lake Tahoe; and aging literary lion Johnny Marinville.

A dead cat nailed to a road sign heralds the little mining town of Desperation, a town that seems withered in the shade of a manmade mountain known as the China Pit, But it's worse than that, much worse. Regulating the traffic there is Collie Entragian, an outsized uniform madman who considers himself the only law west of the Pecos. God forbid you should be missing a license plate or find youself with a flat tire.

There's something very wrong here, all right, and Entragian is only the surface of it. The secrets embedded in Desperation's landscape, and the evil that infects the town like some viral hot zone, are both awesome and terrifying. But as young David Carver seems to know-though it scares him nearly to death to realize it- so the forces are summoned to combat them.