Black House

If you're one of King's constant readers you will agree that The Talisman was all King. Black House seems all Straub.

The narratvie reads like a screenplay, which at times is drudging.
You look and look and sometimes you find King, buried in a sentence here and there ... here and now.

But (and here I'll use Black House style of narrative) as we float over Straub's neighborhood, and as we float over the Safeway, which
seems to have a sale on toilet paper, we reach Mr. Straub's home. He is scratching his head with one hand while the other tentative hand is resting on the keyboard of his computer. He's stuck. He can't seem to come up with the next sentence. Then he 'flips' and there is King, next to him, and he whispers into Straub's ear, and Straub has the next sentence.

So as we read Black House we know it's Straub, but the haunt of King is evident throughout the novel. It's Straub's writing style, but it's King's imagination. Oh, and the DT tie-in's are executed masterfully.

I had my doubts that even Stephen King and Peter Straub could come up with a worthy successor to The Talisman. It's probably a mental condition, but when I love a book, I don't like to see it messed with, whether it's on film, TV, or in a sequel.

I suppose I should have known better. The two authors who created The Talisman outdid themselves with Black House. It couldn't have been easy, given how high they set the bar with Talisman, but they somehow managed to re-create the world of Jack Sawyer and make it more vivid, colored by Jack's experiences over the intervening years, seasoned by the Jack's adulthood. Things that were possible, believable, and straightforward to him as a child have changed, and threaten the life Jack has made for himself--or tried to.

The authors have a definite talent for bringing to life the struggle to find a balance between adult life and what came before. He captures the bittersweet knowledge that you can never go all the way back to childhood, and intensifies it to a painful degree with Jack's fight against the inevitable, and his essential humanity when faced with threats against the innocent.

The book is all the more fascinating for its balance of plot and character. The internal workings of characters' minds has long been a brilliant facet of King's work, and Black House does not disappoint; these are not characters in a book but people we know after a very short time--we know how they think, how they react, how they decide, and how they feel. King doesn't tell; he shows. Straub lends the book a deeper level, a richer conflict. If this book is Jack Sawyer's mind, King is id and ego; Straub is superego.

Written by either of these authors, Black House would be a great read. Written by both, it's far greater than the sum of its parts. Black House is the best and most horrific of both, taken to a superior level neither could achieve alone.

Maybe I am being a little harsh but I had such high expectations... There was way too much explanation of superfluous situations and people that have little to no impact on the plot. Unfortunately, this will probably be my last King novel. Once a big fan, I now just want him to get over his need to connect his books together (w/the Gunslinger series). Does Straub even get to contribute? King is all that is heard in this book where "Talisman" had a more colaborative voice.

In addition, I too found the "love at first sight" of Jack and Judy unbelievable and unnecessary, unless there was more to the relationship that got axed in the editing. Come on, Travelin Jack and a married mental patient....They have always portrayed Jack as on the straight and narrow having an internal moral compass. Now he is hiding evidence and having an affair. I just did not buy it.

If you picked up this book expecting a horror novel, well you ALMOST get one. Serial killer aside, this book is "just another tie-in" to the Dark Tower. Those of us waiting on pins and needles for the days of IT, Needful Things, and the early gripping shorts of Night Shift to return find our hopes bashed cruelly against the rocks once again. Welcome to the world of "rabbits the size of kangaroos!" whoopie! :-(

There are some gruesome elements, but they seem like afterthoughts rather than well built up scares. The sense of terror present in other works is reduced to a deep sense of nausea. Bring bag with you, you may _really_ vomit after reading this. Gore, aside, there are no psychological elements to "spook" the reader as in The Shining or IT. You will not come away being any more afraid of child eating murders than you are today.

The style of presentation is amateurish, not reflecting anything King has done before. The passive term "we", indicating the unseen narrator and the reader, appears far too much for my taste. It's overuse in this novel limits, rather than expands, the role of the reader. You are carefully dictated exactly what to see and what "you/we" think about it.

The characters in this story have very little compelling or "real" qualities. For instance, the bizarre and illogical relationship of Jack and Judy. After meeting Judy, his co-worker's wife who is in an insane asylum where she is recovering from the kidnapping of her child by a cannibal serial killer, he is somehow madly in love after five minutes. Without any buildup or common sense, the authors just expect us to accept that there was love at first sight for both of them -- "magically" of coarse. By his second encounter, he asking the head doctor to borrow his office for little "nookie" and a mind trip to "Faraway" with his drugged and unstable true love. Nothing in Jack's character to this point indicated he is anything but an alter boy, and possibly not even heterosexual... much less the type to be writhing on the floor of the loony-bin with married women who had their children kidnapped a few days earlier. The relationship simply doesn't make any logical sense, and nothing in the text helps make it any more sane to the reader. You can't help but feel like Judy is a victim of Jack, which I hope wasn't the actual intention of the authors.

The contrast of gore to the happy-go-lucky world of Faraway (The Territories) is interesting, but the attempt of pulling elements of The Talisman into this book didn't work too well. The main character could have been anyone, not necessarily Jack Sawyer pining over his dead movie-star mother and the traumas of being a twelve year old. In some ways Jack reminded me of Tom Hanks in the movie "Big", he is an adult physically but still a little boy in his mind. This was probably intentional, but if anyone is out there hunting a serial killer like the Fisherman, I certainly hope they are slightly more of an adult mentally.

Finally, the tie-in's to The Dark Tower are just too much. First, King should recognise that he has made a name for himself in horror and, just as there are problems for cross genera actors, some of his fan base simply isn't interested... not even a little. Unlike, putting in a reference to "Castle Rock", all the recent novels shove a whole mythos of gunslingers and kangaroo rabbits at you like smashing a square peg in a round hole. It doesn't matter if it works, at this point it is just a marketing ploy.

Chances are if you are a fan of the Dark Tower series the gore will turn you away, and if you are a fan of horror the kiddie-esque la la land of Faraway will do the same. This book is a no win situation. Do yourself a favor and dust off a classic King novel from your shelf and give it a read instead.

It's no secret that I'm a "Tower junkie," which is to say I really enjoyed the entirety of Stephen King's Dark Tower series. All of his books touch on the Tower in some small way, but three books in particular (Hearts in Atlantis, Insomnia, and Black House) can be considered the main tie-ins.

I listened to the entire Dark Tower series (save The Gunslinger) on audiobook, and I didn't see any reason to stop the trend with the non-series novels. Plus, Frank Muller (sadly deceased) was a fantastic narrator, and I relished the opportunity to hear more of his work.

Black House doesn't make too many pretensions at being anything other than a Stephen King novel. Demon-infested cannibalistic serial killer? Check. Oversized enchanted raven that drives people mad? Check. You get what I'm saying.

I'm not saying any of that is a bad thing if you're a fan of the genre. The problem is that I'm really not; I relished the amalgam of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and post-apocalyptic western found in the DT series, but straight horror just doesn't really do it for me. Also, I've never found King to be particularly readable, just hard to put down. As I understand it, that's a fairly common criticism.