Seth Garin

Seth Garin is a fictional character from the Richard Bachman Novel "The Regulators."

Seth is one of only a very few central characters from The Regulators who doesn't appear in Desperation, a related novel.Seth's "soma" (the combination of his physical body and internal spirit) is frail and autistic, and indeed cannot even form coherent words most of the time -but Seth's "pneuma" (his projection of himself on the Astral Plane) is a brilliant boy who possesses above average intelligence even by genius standards.

Powers and Abilities

Seth Garin, bereft of Tak's influence, was an apparent telepathic sender and receiver -telepathic 'sender' in the sense that his family members could feel his presence within a range of several yards, and which Tak itself sensed from miles away (as the family drove towards home on a miles-distant highway that passed near Desperation, Nevada). Seth was able to 'receive' Tak's entreaties even from that distance; Tak had promised the boy the ability to make his cowboys-and-Indians fantasies come true, and Seth eventually got to within close enough range (in the Rattlesnake No. 1 Shaft, the same location that Tak was imprisoned in the pages of Desperation), for Tak to infect and become part of Seth. Seth's most powerful ability, however, was to psychically induce inner peace to another human being; Audrey Wyler wrote in her journal that the feeling that Seth transmitted to her (after one particularly brutal session with Tak in which he made her hit her head on a wall over and over and over again) was that of utter peace and serenity.

The gestalt of Seth Garin and Tak was a psychic vampire, which "fed" on the psychic energies of sentient beings, not to sate its appetite (Tak itself displayed no apparent need for nourishment of any kind), but to effect a variety of other powers. Tak could feed slowly on a victim at close range -as it first did with the members of Seth's immediate family, and later Audrey Wyler's husband Herb (eventually psychically draining him and then sending him off with a telepathic command to kill himself); later on, as Tak-Seth's powers grew, it could feed much more quickly, as it demonstrated with an unnamed homeless person and with Peter Jackson. Its preferred method of feeding, however, was to syphon the sudden release of psychic energy that happened to its victims at death, whether those deaths were directly or indirectly caused by him/it.

Fueled by siphoned-off psychic energy, Tak-Seth displayed a vast range of powers.Tak-Seth was able to read minds at close range, and could sense the relative location of other humans at a much further radius. Tak-Seth was able to override the motor functions of humans within a close range, and implant powerful subliminal suggestions to human beings at an even greater range; it was Tak who pushed Jim Reed over the edge after the teenager accidentally shot and killed Collie Entragian. Psychically pushed over the edge by Tak, the boy then killed himself.Moreover, Tak-Seth was able to start bending reality itself to its will; it successfully, eventually transformed Poplar Street into a mixture of the TV show "Bonanza," a classic Western movie called "The Regulators," and a fictional cartoon (i.e., within the Book "The Regulators" itself) called Motokops 2200, warped by the perceptions of a child's view of reality and Tak's appetite for chaos and destruction. The houses and buildings of Poplar Street were changed into cartoony versions of the Wild West, the created animals and plants were malformed, deadly versions of a child's drawings, and the toys of the Motokops cartoon series, as well as several characters from the aforementioned Westerns, became the Regulators, hellish beings bent on the eventual deaths of every remaining member of Poplar Street. The street was also somehow placed into its own pocket dimension; at one point some of the characters attempted to escape Poplar Street via one of the back alleys only to find that all of the roads and paths off Poplar Street lead, figuratively, to nowhere -outside of Poplar Street was only a child's idea of what a vast cowboy movie desert would be.

The Defeat of Tak

Tak was outsmarted by the brilliant mind of Seth Garin himself; as mentioned previously, his physical body was autistic but his spirit on the Astral Plane was possessed of an above average intellect even by genius standards.

Seth's plan was multi-fold:

First, he subtly influenced and distracted Tak over time, "whispering" to Tak so subtly that Tak thought Seth's suggestions to be his own inner thoughts.

Second, he allowed Tak to read "some" of his thoughts when he was speaking telepathically (and physically) with his aunt Audrey; this led Tak to falsely believe that he could read all of Seth's thoughts whenever he wanted to.

Third, Seth engaged in brief and infrequent psychics displays of resistance to Tak's power (such as the various times Tak-Seth wanted to physically experience and engage in sex with his own Aunt); this led Tak to not only believe that he was stronger than the boy was on the Astral Plane (which was true), but also that Seth had a very limited range of control over Tak's powers (which, as it turned out later, proved to be untrue).

Fourth, he was able to psychically create a retreat for Audrey Wyler within her own mind; her ability to mentally sequester herself there prevented Tak-Seth from siphoning psychic energy from her as it did with her husband Herb.

Finally, when the time was right, he tricked both Tak and his aunt Audrey and successfully executed his master plan; he tricked his Aunt Audrey into believing that he was going to help her escape with him (he alone knew that Tak's ability to track him down and find him was beyond Audrey's ability to physically escape), while simultaneously, temporararily fashioning a psychic barrier to block Tak from re-entering Seth's body. (Tak had the idiosyncratic quirk of hating to stay in Seth's body whenever the boy had to defecate; Seth asked Aunt Audrey in advance to spike his chocolate milk with laxatives). Then, while Tak was expending energy to re-enter Seth, the child (in his Aunt's arms) sent a murderous impulse to one of the survivors, Cammie Reed; she then promptly let fly two rifle blasts which killed both Seth's and Audrey's physical bodies.

At the end of the novel, the reader is informed that Seth, apparently and secretly able to use Tak's abilities at least as well as Tak itself could all along, used Tak's energies to punch a hole through dimensions, through which he transported both his and Audrey's astral essences at the moments of their deaths. These two essences emerged in the real world (i.e., the real world in which the reader lives and the real Stephen King writes novels), as a pair of near-corporeal spirits that are occasionally glimpsed at a romantic retreat.

According to the various witnesses over the years who have glimpsed them, the woman is an eternally young, attractive woman in her early to mid-30s, and the boy is an eternally young child of six or seven years old who bears a striking, familial resemblance to the woman and is always seen wearing cowboy boots.Moreover, according to the psychic emanations that everyone feels when in the meadow in which the ghosts 'live' ...they are both eternally happy.

References

*The Regulators by Richard Bachman
*Desperation by Stephen King

External links

*imdb title|id=0129871|title=Desperation
* [http://www.king-stephen.com/Desperation.html Notes] concerning the book "Desperation."
* [http://www.malakoff.com/skdr.htm Bachman Notes] concerning the book "The Regulators."