Nightmare Fuel / The Regulators

• The most graphically detailed description of an exploding head since Scanners.
• The scene where Tak "sweetens up" Audrey will make you never want to eat honey again.
• Utilizing the power of the autistic boy he had come to possess named Seth, Tak warps reality itself and turns the Ohio neighborhood into a distorted Western filled with green blobs of cacti, black crayola crayon drawn mountains, gigantic Christmas light-like stars, and sawtooth mountains twisted by Tak from the little boy's childhood fantasies, along with monstrosities straight out of his host's coloring book. Said monstrosities consisted of:
  • No Face, a sinister faceless being who came from a fake sci-fi series called Motocop 2200, who drives by the neighborhood killing and shooting anyone in his path.
  • a mountain lion that looked so awful that Johnny (one of the survivors) felt his eyes hurt just staring at it, and which uttered a womanish shrieking cry before attacking
  • a bird that looked like it had been drawn by a child (with different length wings and uneven number of talons on each foot) pecking at the corpses
  • The band of killers drawn from Seth's imagination of his favorite spaghetti western, The Regulators and Moto-cop cartoon characters, shooting everyone in the neighborhood in their four vans.
  • A child's version of a gila monster from The Regulators, with a head looking like an "escapee from Jurassic Park" and orange eyes. The gila monster tears apart one of the survivors that had drunk himself into a deep sleep from the horrors and stress.
• During the shooting, Marielle has one of her arms nearly shot off, leaving it to hang like a thread. Later, while trying to stitch up her wound, Entragian accidentally angers Marielle, who struggles with him until her arm is completely severed.
• After the first shooting, Johnny sees a red haired woman named Debbie Ross lying face down on the other side of the screen door of the building he was taking refuge in. When he asks her to respond and gets no reply he checks her hand and finds a small pulse. Excited, he grabs a handful of her hair, brings her head up to get a better look at her "face" and gets this:
  The girl's face came up, except it didn't, not really, because there was no face there. All he could see was a shattered mass of red and a black hole that had been her mouth. Below it was a litter of white that he at first, thought was rice. Then he realized it was her teeth, what was left of them. The two men screamed together in perfect harmony."
• And when he tries to call the phones for help, all Johnny gets is the voice of a little kid reciting lewd rhymes.
• What Tak does to his other unfortunate victim, Peter Jackson. When he lures him to Seth's home, he injures him and then Mind Rapes him by eating his thoughts away, turning him into an Empty Shell/Stepford Smiler. He then sends the mentally broken and dying man to help find his "friend" by forcing him to walk across the hideous child-drawn, monster-filled wasteland. In the end, he finds his "friend" (actually a dead bum who had been shoved so hard into a nearby cactus grove that his eyes had popped out of his sockets and his bloody mouth twisted into a loopy grin), and talks to it like they were best buddies. And as his senses deteriorate, Tak uses his physical state as an opportunity to make a cactus grow and stab him in the back, paralyzing (and hopefully killing) him. What's worse is that even in his state, Peter still had enough mind left to be aware of who he was and even some sense of fear while going on the demented endless walk in search of his "friend", but was already too far gone to have done anything about his situation.
• And remember, Tak does all this explicitly For the Evulz and to feed of his victim's pain.
• While most of the novel is more of a fight-for-survival style horror story, the flashback to the China Pit takes on a completely different tone. Instead of the violence, gore, and hopelessness found the the main story, it feels more like a ghost story. The moment when Tak actually possesses Seth and Seth's father hears two voices coming from within the mines is especially creepy.

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