Rating: 
Summary: Black House
Review: Coauthors King and Straub, together again (The Talisman, 1984), take a Wisconsin Death Trip into parallel universes. The Fisherman, who copycats long-dead serial killer Albert Fish, has been chopping up little kids in French Landing, Wisconsin, and sending letters to the children's parents identical to those Fish sent parents 67 years ago-letters never made public, so how does The Fisherman do this? The local police chief asks for help from Jack Sawyer (hero of The Talisman), a Los Angeles homicide detective now in retirement. As a child, Jack flipped into the Territories, the parallel world in The Talisman, but has since forgotten his trip. What about the all-black Black House in the woods? Well, only Charles Burnside (Alzheimer's) and Tinky Winky Judy Marshall (just plain crazy) know the Black House is the doorway to Abbalah, the entrance to hell-and Judy's son Tyler is apparently the killer's fourth victim. Jack's new buddy, blind Henry Leyden, a radio deejay with four discrete identities no one knows are his, can't talk Jack into taking the case. But when little Irma Freneau's gnawed foot arrives in a shoebox on Jack's welcome mat, Jack flips and lands in the Territories. The Territories confer a sacred magic and, in Jack's case, absolute luck that lets him win his every bet or endeavor. Tyler, it happens, is telekinetic, and has been abducted by the Crimson King. All universes are held in place by the Dark Tower, the great interdimensional axle the Crimson King wants to destroy. Jack must save Tyler from the furnace-lands below Black House-and here the novel strives for depth, though interest dwindles. Those not knowing King's Dark Tower series or The Talisman will follow all this easily enough. Many admiring King's recent, subtler work, though, may find these blood-spattered pages a step backward into dreamslash & gutspill. First printing of 2,000,000; Book-of-the-Month Club/Doubleday Book Club/Literary Guild/Quality Paperback Book Club main selection
Rating:
Summary: It's Stephen King......... People!!!
Review: I am amazed that readers review this book with comments such as "It's too bizarre" or "It's too grim" and "It's too scary"!
Hey, this is Stephen King not Charles Dickens or Dr. Seuss. If you want to be comforted read a cozy love story or a western novel. This book is MEANT to be scary. Its a horror book!
I found it an easy read and quite frankly....alot of fun! It's certainly IS creepy and the characters are described with that uncanny realism theat King is so good at. The book illustrates madness and human frailty along with some down right interesting, albeit weird, people.
Read the thing and get a little frightened. But lighten up! It's only fiction. ENJOY!
Rating: 
Summary: Not the best but danged good!
Review: Not the best, but danged good anyway. I think King & Straub hurt themselves a bit by choosing an odd present-tense "screenplay" like approach to the prose, and then using the roayl 'we' upon occasion to boot. The attack feels a little pretentious at times, unfortunately. Still, I enjoyed the book, particularly when the protagonists arrive at the mysterious house in question. The blur of lines between reality (and 'worlds') mutes a great deal of the violence. One of the most colorful, explosive pieces of pulp to emerge from 2002, although another real contender, at times even better, is Harry Shannon's wild and wooley "Night of the Beast." It gives 'Black House' a run for the money. In short, this one is worth it for King fans (where 'Buick 8' may not be...)
Rating: 
Summary: Black House
Review: I only got to page 40 in this book and I was totally shocked. I used to love to read Stephen King or Peter Straub but haven't for quite some time because their writing became too bizarre for my taste. This book was horribly gruesome in just the short time I read it, describing, in detail, abductions and mutilations of young children. Anyone who thinks this book is worth reading is "warped!"
Rating:
Summary: More unpleasant than scary
Review: In "Talisman", a young boy named Jack Sawyer journeyed to parallel earths in a quest for the mystical Talisman that will save his mother from certain death. (Sawyer's mother, an aging B-movie queen in our world, is an actual queen named Laura Deloessian on a storybook earth called "the territories") "Black House" returns us the character, now an older, financially secure and famous retired homicide detective inexplicably relocated to a picturesque but quiet Wisconsin town called "French Landing". (The move seems incredible given how the narrators spend so much of the books opening painting a detailed but unfavorable impression of it). Sawyer's completely forgotten about his past adventures, finding enough dark evil in our mundane world. In "House", the quiet life of French Landing is shattered when the town's children become targeted by an horrific serial killer dubbed "The Fisherman". Despite help from the state police and vigilante aspects of the town's police, the Fisherman runs amok. Sawyer is reluctantly brought into the case. Unlike "Talisman" (whose magic still blesses Sawyer) "House" spends much time building up the characters who populate the town ("Talisman" was more of a road-novel), both friendly and otherwise. We meet the flustered police chief; a blind DJ with more alter-egos than a room full of superheroes; a housewife who shares Sawyer's affinity for alternate worlds; the corrupt manager of a rest home; a seemingly senescent resident of the home; an obnoxious local reporter/creep and a gang of hyper intelligent bikers - but Sawyer is the story's focus. As he delves into the case, Sawyer's memories of the Territories slowly and painfully re-awaken, and he learns of a tie between the Fisherman murders and an imprisoned cross-dimensional monster who threatens to escape his multi-versal cell, and also discovers that the children themselves possess a latent power making them very desirable to the dark lord.This was an incredibly disappointing novel - I don't care how many Amazon.com reviewers loved it. In every way this book insults your intelligence and commits the most cardinal sin of all for a horror novel: it's not remotely scary. Instead of being scary characters, King/Straub's are just very unpleasant - there's little definition to the human serial killer, once he's unceremoniously revealed as such - we learn more about his hygiene than his connection to the otherworldly evil terrorizing French Landing. Rather than scare us, the narrative works up our own prejudices. As you'd suspect, the human killer is only a vessel for a more powerful force that, once actually confronted by our heroes, goes down without much of a fight. Until Jack and his loyal followers get around to braving the "Black House" - a sort of nexus between the many parallel worlds - King/Straub focus our attentions on an outrageous creep of a reporter named Wendell Green who spares no indignity to grab the story or picture of the century. (Green could have been a great plot device, but the authors relegate him to cheap comic relied - every time the creep gets on the verge of one-upping our hero, Jack turns the tables on him; rather than somebody who could become an instrument for the evil forces against Sawyer in our world, or at least implicate him for the Fisherman's crimes, Green is just the sort of convenient character kept around so we can feel comfy about dissing him) Green is only one of the more obvious characters in this story that reveal how the authors have very definate ideas about who we're supposed to like, and not much interest in developing their characters (if you don't believe, skim to a page in which the town's nameless rabble converge on the scene of the Fisherman's latest victim, claiming their right to have a "keepsake" of the killer's reign of terror. The authors do toss in some sympathetic characters, but doesn't do much to develop them either. Though this is at least partly a Stephen King novel, much of the language seems less like his trademark terrifyingly funny prose than the treacly lines of Robert James Waller (Sawyer, like the hero of "Bridges of Madison County" is himself a character with a disdain for our world, and his creators can do no more to craft their romanticized other-world than show us how lame our own is). Even the narrator - an unseen personage who tells us where to look - is a none-too clever cheat: The authors create a separate character with its own point-of-view because they can't otherwise do the same for any of the book's other characters. The biggest cheat is how the book skims over the story we want to read - Jack discovering what the evil is, and journeying to its world to battle it. Instead, Jack learns of the Evil from Parkus, a friend of Jack's from their days in the Talisman, and now an fellow law enforcer (or "coppicemen") in the Territories. The "Black House" is unsurprisingly more of a challenge than anything you've seen on HGTV, but Jack and his band navigate it with surprising ease. Because it's obvious that the authors couldn't work up much of a story with our leads, most of the book seems designed as a huge stalling tactic, designed to keep our heroes from attempting to enter the Black House that sits at the crossroads of many worlds - and ending the story. The book ends on a complete cop-out - what the author's probably envisioned as a twist, but the rest of us would have seen from the first page (but doubted if only because it would have been incredibly trite). Instead of "Black House", pick up "The Shining" or "Tommyknockers".
Rating: 
Summary: The beginning is slow, but the rest is awesome
Review: Blackhouse is a very good book. Better than the talisman. The beggining is rather slow, i almost gave up on it, but by the time i got into the middle, i was hooked. After a few days of slogging through it it finally began to scare me. About two thirds of the way through I wanted to put it down because i thought it would give me a heart attack but it was just too damn gripping. I strongly suggest buying it and reading all the way through. The beggining is weak, but the rest will scare the pants off you.
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Summary: A riveting mystery gone on a trip to the Twilight Zone
Review: Having only read a handful of King's stories and none of Straub's (I'm a koontz fan myself) I was a bit skeptical as to how much I'd get into this book. The first 90 pages supported my suspiscions in that it was slow going with a bit of unnecessary wordiness BUT then the story blossomed and the dark and sinister plot grabbed me by surprise. I was a little bewildered by the way in which the narration unfolded at first, with the spirit-like beings taking me on a journey here and there, but at the end of the story it all made sense. I liked how King and Straub start the reader out with a seemingly normal flock of characters with a tragic set of circumstances; a very believable storyline. Then they open the door deep into the book to a world thats turned topsie-turvie in such a successful transition you don't miss a beat. Another concept I rather enjoyed, is that the authors choose to be non-conformists with the character development stereo-type. The typical thing to do is to highly develop unexpendable characters and to mininally develop characters whose purpose's are to be extingished later in the story. They even comment at the end about it! How clever. In reading the reviews inside the cover, I realize I'm not the only one waiting for a sequel to the trials and tribulations of Jack Sawyer.
Rating:
Summary: Liked it, but not as good as "The Talisman"
Review: positives: good in-depth characters, good plot, vintage King
negatives: disappointing climax (no crescendo) I have read "The Talisman" four times (it is, overall, my favorite book - A+). "Black House" (around a B+) is definitely not the caliber of Talisman, but overall I enjoyed it. If you are not a "Constant Reader" (if you have to ask, you're not) should pick something else to start with (Talisman or the "Dark Tower" series), because the references to those books will make your "Black House" reading more enjoyable. A lot of King's novels have subtle references to past characters, places or events -- I enjoy spotting the "Easter eggs". Did anyone else notice the one line reference to Mr. Brautigan from "Hearts in Atlantis"? It did take time to "get into" the story, but I remember thinking the same thing about "Talisman" the first time I read it -- was bored until Jack took off on the adventure and then I was hooked. The biggest disappointment was the "climax" of good vs. evil which covered fewer pages than some of the book's character backgrounds. The ending could have been more powerful, but I liked the bit concerning the "scribbling writers" on page 639 of the paperback.
Rating:
Summary: BORING, plain and simple
Review: It's a good decision: Stephen King's plan to retire, that is. How could the author of "The Stand" let his name appear on this pile of.......?
Rating:
Summary: Black House rocks....
Review: This is an awesome, awesome book. Definitely a keeper....
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