Rating: 
Summary: Worlds Colliding
Review: Not only is this book a satisfying and long-awaited continuation of young Jack Sawyer's story, it also can be considered, by those who are positively clamoring for it, a glimpse of a fifth installation of the Dark Tower series. Many faithful King readers had already noticed stark similarities to the Territories of the Talisman and the Gunslinger's Mid-World; in Black House they come crashing together, not in great quantity, but enough to fasten some loose ends. If you're reading this, Stephen King, your Faithful Readers eagerly await Dark Tower V.
Rating:
Summary: Back In Black
Review: I like Stephen King, once in a while, he's one of my favorites, I really wanted to read this one, I got it immediately when I saw it in the library. I was extremely dissapointed with his last book, Dreamcatcher, which was one of the worst books ever written. With this book I can forgive Mr. King for his stink bomb Dreamcatcher. Perhaps the reason why this book was good was not by Stephen King but it was because of Peter Straub, he may have done the best writing in Black House. The story which is mostly for people who haven't read the Talisman or this book follows Jack Sawyer who was just 12 years old in the Talisman, he is now 32 and has a job in the police department, he has heard that there were murders by a man called the fisherman he eventually finds the fisherman but he wasn't committing the murders in his own mind. But a demon from the territories who lives in a "Black House" and has possessed the fisherman. He is sent there to stop the demon and drive him out of the territories, This is a good book in all parts and I applaud those who will still read his books even after reading the abismal Dreamcatcher. I recommend this to anyone who wants a good scare or the readers who read the Talisman Grade: A
Rating:
Summary: jack sawyer lives!
Review: I still remember the first time I read "The Talisman It was my sophomore year of college and I was stuck on a loooong road trip with some not very imaginative people--trapped in a light blue buick with girls who never, ever read anything that wasn't a textbook. Fortunately I came prepared-- I settled myself in and started what would become one of my favorite books of all time. I promptly secured a copy of "Black House" the first day it was available at my local bookstore; I was hoping it would be as captivating as "The Talisman," but being a sequal and all I was trying not to get too worked up. So I read the book. I read it in one night. Jack Sawyer may have grown up but he still retains the qualities of his boyhood. He is still on a journey, he still has his integrity and he still has the spirit that Lily Cavanaugh, Queen of the B movies, instilled in him. The idea of the territories and our world being two sides of a coin is one of the more compelling aspects of "the Talisman." This idea is expanded upon in "Black House" and fits in well with the whole beam-tower-gunslinger thread that has been woven throughout Mr. Kings' stories in connection with the "Dark Tower" series. Suffice to say--if you enjoyed "The Talisman" you will enjoy "Black House." Be prepared to catch up with some familiar characters, as well as meet some wonderfully dynamic new ones. Mr. King, Mr. Straub--thank you!
Rating: 
Summary: Bad book! Bad bad!
Review: Bad book! Bad bad!Almost as if two very different writers crafted two novels, put their words on playing cards and -- shuffled. Hey, I love most of Stephen King's books. It took me 126 pages to even stop hating this novel. Is it possible the editor was asleep at the wheel? Or was the project simply too tough?
Rating: 
Summary: Really Dark Tower 5?...
Review: I had just recently picked up The Talisman and I LOVED it. Behold my surprise when I found out that a sequal was coming out very soon. I ran to the store as soon as it came out and bought it. It was a good book, but also frustrating. I have been an avid reader of the Dark Tower Series for some time and I have been on pins and needles for the next installment. I feel that this was, in some ways, the next installment. Sure, some characters from The Talisman are in it and even some of the original plot was evident, but I feel that this was more of a setup for the next Dark Tower. Sure, King has a history of bringing up Dark Tower allusions in other books (i.e. Hearts in Atlantis, Insomnia), but this was teasing pure and simple. I love Black House but I would love too see Dark tower 5 even more. King and Straub write well together and Straub seemed extremely willing to write within the King Universe. Perhaps he could help with Dark Tower 5?
Rating:
Summary: Travellin' Jack is back in "Black..."!
Review: Stephen King and Peter Straub, both incredible writers in their own right, have re-formed the Dynamic Duo to bring us "Black House"...the title a reference to "Bleak House" by Charles Dickens (and the story itself done in a daring narrative style all its own, like Dickens's story)...a sequel to bestelling book "The Talisman". While Dickens story is an assault on the British Court System, showing the interconnectedness of all levels of society--from Lord and Lady Deadlock to orphaned Esther Sommerson to Jo the street-sweeper--so do King and Straub show the interconnectedness of all levels of existence. And of course, they all rotate around and are hinged upon the Dark Tower, of King's previous series. References to King's earlier works is only one of the many pleasures of devouring this newest effort. Not without it's gruesome moments ala King and Straub, "Black House" delivers on many other levels as well. Introducing a cast of equally memorable characters (on this level of existence), such as Henry Leyden, the blind disc-jockey, "Black House" is a hellraising, incredible feat, and should be read by everyone...immediately.
Rating: 
Summary: King in transition, Part 2
Review: Stephen King and Peter Straub, Black House (Random
House, 2001) The first thing you notice about Black House is the
cinematographic nature of the third-person omniscient
narrator. Everything is described as if the reader
were a cameraman making a movie of the book. In the
same way as Cormac McCarthy, it's a style that takes a
little getting used to. Once you've settled into the
narrator's rhythm, however, the book moves right
along. Unfortunately, also as with McCarthy, there are going to be a lot of people who never settle into that
rhythm, and the book's readership will probably suffer
for it. The second thing you notice is that, while this book
is a sequel to The Talisman, there wasn't much reason
for it to be. Most of the Talisman references therein
are gratuitous, and seem to be there for the sole
purpose of tying the events in this book to King's
regining obsession, the Dark Tower. (No, it's not a
spoiler. King's been saying this novel will tie in for
quite a while now.) The novel suffers for it, though
it does raise the intriguing question of whether Mr.
Straub's next novel will also be set in Mid-World. Third, if you're a closer reader than average, you'll
probably note that the interplay between King and
Straub is somewhat looser here than it was in The
Talisman. Both of them were quite fond of challenging
readers to figure out where King's bits left off and
Straub's began, and vice versa, in the first novel. In
this one, it becomes obvious pretty early on that the
two had no bones about drawing the lines in places,
though it's still tough sometimes to figure out who
wrote what; but when chapter 25 begins with "But
enough of that.", you know one of them is taking a
friendly shot at the other. All that aside, the subject matter the two of them are
working with is good enough, and heads right up the
alleys of both. A Wisconsin serial killer (despite
what you're probably thinking, no, Ed Gein has nothing
to do with this) who models his murders on the career
of Albert Fish is at work, and The Talisman's hero,
the now 31-year-old Jack Sawyer, lives in the same
town. Jack, a reitred homicide detective, is asked
repeatedly by friends and intimates to look into the
case, and after a while it becomes obvious that Jack
will have to get involved, as the case will take him
back to The Territories (which are, of course, part of
the Dark Tower's world). Straub returns to the mystery-style subject matter that graced his most
successful books, and King gets to deliver the nasty
crime scene descriptions that have made him
successful. (These crime scenes go way beyond Straub's
threshold of taste; even the most extreme bits of The
Hellfire Club pale in comparison here.) Still, as I mentioned in my review of Dreamcatcher,
we're still in the middle of a transitional King
phase, and the quality herein is along the same lines
as that in Dreamcatcher-- better than the
early-eighties stuff, but a cut below his best work.
Straub could go nowhere but up after Mr. X, and he
certainly did so here. Oddly, though, Black House
compares to the string of novels starting with Koko
and ending with The Hellfire Club in the same way it
compares with the great King releases-- it's not as
powerful as, say, Mystery, but it's a worthy addition
to the Straub oeuvre anyway. A must-read for King and Straub completists and Dark
Tower followers. Oh, yeah, and did I mention there's a
Hearts in Atlantis tie-in, too? For everyone else,
it's optional; go by your feelings regarding
Dreamcatcher and act accordingly. ***
Rating: 
Summary: Jack is back . . . and he ain't no fun anymore
Review: I read the Talisman as a child, and I was knocked out by both the story and the prose. It immediately went to the number one spot on my 'Top Ten Best Fantasy Books of all Time' list. And it has never been knocked from that spot. I consider it to be the best book that Stephen King ever (co)wrote and I re-read it about once a year. So when I heard that a sequel to the Talisman was coming out, I couldn't wait. I don't usually buy hardback, preferring to wait for the more economical paperback, but I had to have this one right now. I read it cover to cover, in one sitting. And it was a major disappointment. The book was written in an odd third person plural {like a voice-over by 'we', if that makes it any clearer for you}, and it was very distracting. The prose didn't seem to help the story, it seemed to hinder it. And where is that much-loved King wittiness, that sly humor? I couldn't find any. I almost put the book down in the first three chapters and that is rare for me. I read so quickly that I can usually slog through just about anything, waiting for it to get better. I struggled on, and it did get a bit better. A few of the characters were great. I think Jack stayed a little two-dimensional for me, but the blind Henry was wonderful, as were the bikers with IQ's off the scale. If I hadn't read the Talisman, I really wouldn't have known what was going on. The Territories were barely even a part of this book, which was a major disappointment, and there were too many cryptic references to other books. And here is the worst thing of all for me: The damned Dark Tower has crept into this book, too. I suppose I'm in the minority, but I hate the Dark Tower series and I don't care if he ever writes another one. I hate the characters from it and I hate the premise. And I really, really hate the fact that this book is more Dark Tower than Black House. The climax of the book was resolved too quickly, and it leaves one with a sense of unreality (a funny thing to say, I guess, after reading a Stephen King novel) and there might as well have been a huge sign at the end touting the next in the Dark Tower series. I would have liked more Territory involvement, I would have liked more character development, and I don't know what else. Whatever the missing element is, it ruined this book for me.
Rating:
Summary: A blockbuster horror novel!
Review: "On September 15, 1981, a boy named Jack Sawyer stood where the water and the land come together..." --Opening line of The Talisman (1984). In The Talisman, 12-year-old Jack Sawyer ventured into "The Territories" on a magical quest to save his dying mother and her "Twinner." Now twenty years later, Jack returns, in Black House, on a holy crusade to save French Landing, Wisconsin--not to mention the world and all the parallel universes--from the demonic designs of the Crimson King. Published on Sept. 15, Black House is one of Stephen King and Peter Straub's darkest descents into evil. It conjures up images of Edgar Allan Poe's poem: "Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore / Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!" .... Lord Byron once wrote: "'Tis strange--but true; for truth is always strange / Stranger than fiction." Well, truth is not always stranger than fiction (consider Black House) but often it is more terrible and horrible than anything novelists concoct.
This much having being said, Black House is indeed a frightening tale. In a secluded area outside French Landing, a town in western Wisconsin, "Black House" is "a worm-hole in the apple of existence," a portal or doorway into other dimensions and other universes. Accompanied by three of his friends, Jack Sawyer must venture into--and through--Black House in an effort to rescue 12-year-old Tyler Marshall. Ty has been abducted by "The Fisherman," a psychopath who has killed--and eaten!--several other children in Coulee Country. The novel is rich in colorful characters: Henry Leyden, a blind disk jockey whom you will come to love, and to whom Jack Sawyer reads chapters from Charles Dickens' Bleak House; Wendell Green, everyone's favorite muckraker, an arrogant pipsqueak "news hawk" whom you will come to hate; Dale Gilbertson, the honest but inept sheriff of French Landing; and an atypical motorcycle gang known as "The Thunder Five"--Beezer, Mouse, Doc, Sonny, and Kaiser Bill--who, surprisingly, study the postmodern philosophy of Jacques Derrida. King is, once again, in rare scatological form. His descriptions of "slippage" is rife with the foul-smelling odors of decay, decomposition, disintegration, deterioration, and death. If you have a sensitive nose, dear Constant Reader, you might want to shy away from this novel's rot and stench, or perhaps smear some Vicks Vapo-Rub in your nostrils before you crack its pages.
King and Straub also have a field day muttering supernatural superstitions and metaphysical (magical and mystical) mumbo-jumbo. To enjoy their far-fetched tale, you will need to put in serious overtime work in "the temporary suspension of disbelief." As Henry Leyden would put it, "Even a blind man can see that!" In our scientific, secular, and disenchanted world, a world not without its horrible criminal acts, King and Straub continue their project of rehabilitating the concept of evil. Although their dark vision ostensibly mimics Christian dogma, on closer examination it emerges as a perverse, profane, and pagan parody of such theology. In spite of its bizarre plot, escapist horror fiction of this type provides a momentary respite from the all-too-real horrors of our terroristic world. For comic relief, the authors sprinkle their story with hilarious gallows humor and sardonic asides that will make you chuckle. Fans of King and Straub will devour this one; it's a blockbuster.
Rating:
Summary: Black House
Review: If you loved The Talisman, of course you have to read this book. If you didn't read The Talisman - read it! It's a fabulous adventure and you won't have to wait twenty years for the sequel! I thought The Talisman read like pure Stephen King, and the ONLY disappointment with this book is that it switches back and forth between the two authors' voices, which I found jarring. I intensely disliked the overview bird thing, I thought it was tedious and irritating. I love King's straightforward style and wanted to stick with it! But that doesn't detract from the excitement of revisting Jack and all those wonderful memories from The Talisman. It's a must-read for Stephen King fans and everyone who loved The Talisman. I hope, if there is another sequel, that it will be written like the first one - all Stephen King's style. But again, this is a minor irritation and I definitely recommend the book.
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