The Regulators - Stephen King [0]
by Hodder Stoughton
Thinner
The Bachman Books
By Stephen King
Carrie
'Salem's Lot
The Shining
Night Shift
The Stand
Christine
Pet Sematary
It
Misery
The Tommyknockers
The Dark Half
The Stand: the Complete and Uncut Edition
Four Past Midnight
Needful Things
Gerald's Game
Dolores Claiborne
Nightmares and Dreamscapes
Insomnia
Rose Madder
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
"Leaving on a Jet Plane," Words and Music by John Denver, Copyright
© 1967 (Renewed) 1995, Cherry Lane Music Publishing Company, Inc.
(ASCAP), International Copyright Secured. All rights Reserved. Reprinted
by Permission of Cherry Lane Music Company.
Copyright © 1996 by Richard Bachman
First published in Great Britain in 1996
by Hodder and Stoughton
A division of Hodder Headline PLC
The right of Richard Bachman to be identified as the Author
of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
10 9 8 7654321
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means without the prior written
permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated
in any form of binding or cover other than that in which
it is published and without a similar condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious
and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,
is purely coincidental.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bachman, Richard, 1947-1985 The regulators
1 .American fiction — 20th century
I.Title 813.5'4[F]
ISBN 0340 67176 9
Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Polmont, Stirlingshire
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Mackays of Chatham PLC, Chatham, Kent
Hodder and Stoughton
A division of Hodder Headline PLC
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
Thinking of Jim Thompson and Sam Peckinpah:
Legendary shadows.
EDITOR'S NOTE
Before his death from cancer in late 1985, Richard Bachman published five novels. In 1994, while preparing to move to a new house, the author's widow found a cardboard carton filled with manuscripts in the cellar. These novels and stories were in varying degrees of completion. The least finished were longhand scribbles in the steno notebooks Bachman used for original composition. The most finished was a typescript of the novel which follows. It was in a manuscript box secured with rubber bands, as if Bachman had been on the verge of sending it to his publisher when his final remission ended.
The former Mrs Bachman brought it to me for evaluation, and I found it at least up to the standard of his earlier work. I have made a few small changes, mostly updating certain references (substituting Ethan Hawke for Rob Lowe in the first chapter, for instance), but have otherwise left it pretty much as I found it. This work is now offered (with the approval of the author's widow) as the capstone to a peculiar but not uninteresting career.
My thanks to Claudia Eschelman (the former Claudia Bachman), Bachman scholar Douglas Winter, Elaine Koster at New American Library, and to Carolyn Stromberg, who edited the earliest Bachman novels and validated this one.
The former Mrs Bachman says that, to the best of her knowledge, Bachman never travelled to Ohio, 'although he might have flown over it once or twice'. She also has no idea when this novel was written, although she suspects it must have been late at night. Richard Bachman suffered from chronic insomnia.
Charles Verrill
New York City
'Mister, we deal in lead'
— Steve McQueen
The Magnificant Seven
Postcard from William Garin to his sister, Audrey Wyler:
CHAPTER ONE
Poplar Street/3:45 p.m./July 15, 1996
Summer's here.
Not just summer, either, not this year, but the apotheosis of summer, the avatar of summer, high green perfect central Ohio summer dead-smash in the middle of July, white sun glaring out of that