Rating: 
Summary: Coulda Been A Contenda
Review: This could have and should have been a great book. The Talisman concept was great, and King and Straub seem to have recaptured the magic of their early careers. However, this book was prevented from being five stars by a terrible ending and by too much reliance on one's knowledge of King's Dark Tower series, which it is unlikely most mystery lovers, as opposed to pure King lovers, have read. So, I give it five stars for everything up to the ending and 1 star for the ending, averaging out to three. I do hope, however, that the ending at least means we will be seeing more of Jack at some later date. One last thing, though. Since the Territories were involved here, how could there be no wolves, oh, pardon me, wolfs.
Rating:
Summary: The Talisman it ain't. Not by a longshot.
Review: OK, it IS Stephen King and Peter Straub and, compared to almost all other horror authors out there, whatever they write is bound to be superior.What was so disappointing to me is that it just is not up to the standards that we set for King & Straub. Or, I suppose, that they set for themselves. The Talisman was an edge-of-your-seat, highly suspenseful, often scary, frequently touching and always riveting kind of story. Black House is just boring. It takes at least 100 pages for King & Straub to get beyond describing the county Jack Sawyer now lives in. There is one scene that involves five characters, and King/Straub describe the scene from each different character's perspective--I'm talking SEPARATELY, so it goes on forever and ever and ever, even though the reader already knows the outcome on the first page of this excruciating discription of one incident. It was also poorly edited, which I for one find very annoying. There are many inconsistencies throughout the book, as though the authors simply weren't paying close attention to what they were writing. Really this should be OK--it's a pretty long work & these guys are there to be creative, not technically correct--but their editor (if they even have one) should have to pay back his salary. All in all, it's a decent read--as I set when I started, King & Straub are both fabulous writers, so even their most mediocre work is better than the best of most others--but it's not what I'd hoped for and expected, that's for sure.
Rating: 
Summary: A Lot more King in This One
Review: I loved THE TALISMAN several years ago and admit to having held a nagging curiosity about the people and critters of that work. TALISMAN seemed to be a Peter Straub creation, I thought with SK Licking the old edit pencil. BLACK HOUSE is A King Book and a real Baddie(That means real, real good). Following ol'Travellin Jack in and out of this world brought back some points in the first book that time had fuzzed up a little. Believe it or not less than a hundred pages into BLACK HOUSE, I put it down and re-read THE TALISMAN. When I resumed BH and saw things starting to point to The Dark Tower, I really grabbed on. I am a Tower Junkie, and not ashamed to admit it. Jack and his band of quasi-desperadoes got way to close to the domain of the Ageless Stranger in this one. I found myself remembering Jacks train ride through the Blasted lands and felt like he was paralelling Roland The Gunslingers ride through Mid-World on the whacked out Blain. The Book is a stand alone piece of work without the added plot dealing with Rolands World. If you had never read those four books, you would still have a great terrifying ride to BLACK HOUSE. Read it, and if your curiosity gets the better of you, read on and on and...
Rating: 
Summary: Jacky Falls Flat
Review: I am an ardent fan of Stephen King and Peter Straub. Their first collaberative effort, The Talisman, was a wonderfully dense, multi-layered feast. So, I eagerly anticipated The Black House arrival on the scene. I was disappointed. The first several chapters were stiff and verbose. Black House lacks the fluidity and ease The Talisman had. The magical aura of otherness, of enchantment are missing, as well as any really likeable characters. There is an undertone of bitterness and cynicism, not found in earlier books. Still for die hard fans like myself, it was worth the read.
Rating:
Summary: Come on in. You'll be glad you did.
Review: Black House is Stephen King's best book in the past ten years, granting the exceptions of Hearts in Atlantis, which I think might be his best book ever, and The Green Mile, which probably comes in a dead heat with this one. Black House is also easily the best Peter Straub book since 1993's The Throat. In fact this new collaboration, a sequel of sorts to King and Straub's 1984 fantasy epic The Talisman, is nothing short of a horror fiction tour de force, the dark literary equivalent of the Beatles getting back together. You don't need to have read The Talisman to enjoy this new book, however. In fact, the tone of this new one is sufficiently darker than the first book that it feels not so much like a sequel, but rather an updated re-imagining of the life of the main character, Jack Sawyer. If you've read any of King's Dark Tower books, or the many books that tie in with the Dark Tower cosmology (practically anything King's written in the past ten years) you'll be right at home in Black House. You could actually consider Black House book four-and-a-half in the Dark Tower series. Anyone who's been waiting patiently (or not so patiently as the case may be) for the fifth installment owes it to themselves to read Black House. This book offers you a glimpse of how King might actually finish the Dark Tower series for once and all. In many ways, this book feels like the volleyball equivalent of a set-up for the final smash over the net that the last installment in the Dark Tower story promises to be. Aside from its Dark Tower connections, Black House also happens to be a hell of a tale on its own merits. The story concerns the grown up child Jack Sawyer, who once traveled across an alternate version of our country known as the Territories in order to save his ailing mother in The Talisman. Twenty years have passed since that adventure unfolded (The Talisman was released in 1984, but set in 1981) and Jack now resides in the idyllic town of French Landing, Wisconsin, where he has no conscious memory of the fantastic events that befell him as a boy. Jack's now a prematurely retired police detective in his early thirties who has moved east from Los Angeles to try to find some peace in his life. Jack is soon enlisted by his friend, the Sheriff of French Landing, to help track down a particularly brutal child murderer known as the Fisherman. Some odd things have been happening in Jack's personal life recently. Once he unofficially joins the investigation of the case he begins to see how these strange events might have some bearing on helping him find the identity of the Fisherman. He also realizes that the roots of these strange events might lie in the long-forgotten events of his childhood. He discovers that in order to solve this case, he's going to have to remember what it was like to be a child, and he's going to have to be able to believe again in places and things that he hasn't believed in for a long, long, long time.
What makes Black House particularly satisfying is the breadth and depth of rich thematic subtext that lies just below the story's surface. It soon becomes clear that the role of the imagination in our lives is the book's controlling metaphor. Everything feeds into the idea of imagination as a means of transport from where we find ourselves to where long and ache to be. As Jack remembers the first time that he ever visited the Territories, while listening to old jazz records his father was playing when he was a young child (you can't get much more Straub than this), it becomes obvious what it really means to be transported to the Territories. It doesn't happen often, surely, and most adults have willfully forgotten how to do it. But as Jack's new adventures in Black House make it clear, it's only by having the faith to travel that you're going to end up where you need to be. Another interesting angle to the imagination subtext lies in the ever-present symbolism of borders. Everywhere you look in this book you find borders of one type or another. From naturally occurring borders, such as the great river that French Landing lies on, the Mississippi, to the Black House itself, an eerie, headache-inducing border between worlds. There's also a reference to the "night's Plutonian shore," Edgar Allan Poe's term for the great border between life and death. There are also the social borders that abound between many of the characters, as well as the borders of personality that exist in our own minds There's a great passage towards the beginning of the story that describes the "slippage" that often occurs along borders. In places where two worlds meet, there's bound to be a powerful friction. All of this makes perfect sense in light of the way Black House was written: two separate imaginations coming together to travel to a common place that neither could have gone to on its own. And there's a great heat generated by this collision of imaginations that sets the story on fire and keeps it burning brightly to the very last word on the last page. There's no problem of the wandering aimlessness here that has plagued some of both King and Straub's recent longer works. Black House is a long book, but it doesn't read like one. Straub and King seem to be good for each other, strengthening one another's occasional weaknesses and compounding one another's strengths. When I first heard about this book, I was a little worried that it might not live up to having both authors' names on the front cover, but believe me, it does. Black House manages to be truly creepy, compelling, and at times moving and profound while never outstaying its welcome. Imagine that.
Rating:
Summary: Slow at first, but great in the end!
Review: I admit, this was really hard to get into. I don't want to jump right in and give this book a bad review simply because it wasn't what I expected. If you are interested in this book, I suggest 2 things: First, make sure you've read the Dark Tower series. It'll make much more sense. Second, don't think of this book as a sequel to the Talisman. It doesn't really involve the Territories much and I'm actually okay with that now. The Territories was done so well in The Talisman that I want to keep the memories of that the same. You can tell King and Straub really just wanted to have fun with this book and see what they could do with it. It just made sense to tie it into the DT series and really fit well. I'm now very anxious to read the next installment of it, seeing as how King is really getting into it again. I have a feeling Jack will show up again somewhere along the way in the future. Maybe meet Roland and the gang. Anyway, it was a slow moving book at first but well worth the time in the end. I really enjoyed this book and couldn't see taking a star away from the review simply because of it's slow beginning. After all, a book should be taken as a whole, not parts, right?
Rating:
Summary: A good read after the first 200 pages.
Review: King once again shows his uncanny ability to say very little with a whole lot of words. This novel is VERY much like King and very little like Straub. All the Kingism's are there: psuedo-poetic (though intellectually insulting) descriptions of setting, strong feeling of narcisism throughout, and brief tie-ins to other popular literature. I like a lot of King's work; even with these shortcomings, he can still spin a good tale. With Straub's partnership, The Talisman was one of his finest works. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Black House. King and Straub provide us with an excellent array of original characters (and some not so original ones) and create an incredible tapistry on which to weave a story. Except the authors refuse to begin that story until half-way through the book! I'm not saying that the chapters of brooding and exposition are not well-writen, but they seem out-of-character for the rest of the story. This book is a great read for fans of the Dark Tower series; it ties up some loose ends and puts the tale of Roland and Company in perspective. I really do like the Dark Tower set, but I am afraid Black House does not live up to its tradition of truely original fantasy.
Rating:
Summary: Black House
Review: It's not The Talisman but I enjoyed how the authors begin to tie in some of the Roland (Gunslinger) plot to the continuing story of Traveling Jack.
Rating:
Summary: Who wrote what part of the book???
Review: I've just finished Black House, and here's what I think: Stephen King wrote at least 90 % of that book!!! I'm sure Peter Straub wrote the very first chapter -- it just doesn't read like Stephen King's masterful prose -- and very few others, but SK did the main job on that novel! To my mind, it's not really a collaboration at all . . . I think SK just wanted to have Peter Straub's name on the cover as well (possibly because The Talisman sported both names on the front), and thus invited him to contribute a few thousand words to this admittedly moderate mystery/fantasy novel.
I wonder whether they split the money 50-50 or, more fairly, 90-10. What do you think?
Rating:
Summary: It didn't have to be so good!
Review: But it was....so very good! After reading the Talisman, I along with lots of others couldn't wait for the sequel to be released. Of course I was going to buy it. "Black House" surpassed my expectations. This is a wonderful story of fantasy and horror, of good and evil, of friendship and committment, of courage and fear, of love and hate. This is a book that is written so superbly that it draws you in and doesn't let go. The authors write about the characters in such a way that you feel like you know them, you feel like you know what they are going through. You love them, you hate them, you want to give them a high five or a slap upside the head, but you are there with them. No, it didn't have to be this good, but thank-you Mr. King and Mr. Straub for making "Black House" so very very good.
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