Black House

Rating:
Summary: Finally, after all these years
Review: I read the Talisman one summer many moons ago. I treasured the book and have put it at the top of my list. Enjoyed it so well, that as soon as I finished it, I read it again. Black House was not as well written or as captivating as The Talisman but was very glad to seen a sequel. Even though it was slow at times, I enjoyed reading it. The Characters, such as The Thunder Five and Henry, bring you even closer to the book. If you loved the Talisman, this is a must read but do not expect the same effect that you received from the first book.

Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Novel - Better Than Its Prequel
Review: Here's what you need to know:

Black House is the sequel to Stephen King and Peter Straub's 1984 novel The Talisman. The Talisman concerns the adventures of one Jack Sawyer, a boy who travels to a parallel universe called the Territories to retrieve a magical globe which will save his mother, her Territories "Twinner", and the Territories itself. Black House is set 20 years later, in the present. Jack is now a retired homicide detective on the trail of the Fisherman, a murderer who seems to be a copycat of serial killer Albert Fish.

Black House is, I think, the stronger novel of the two. First of all, it's a more original conception. While The Talisman was a relatively straight-forward epic fantasy novel, in Black House King and Straub mix and match many different genres: fantasy, horror, crime, and Western fiction. It comes off as a sort of cross between Elmore Leonard and H.P. Lovecraft, which sounds unwieldy but ends up working just fine.

Secondly, Black House is the stronger work stylistically. Whereas in The Talisman, Straub failed to reign in King's more operatic tendencies (not an easy task, I'm sure), in Black House this isn't a problem. The authors opt for a first-person plural point of view here, which, like the cross-genre pollination of the novel, could have been awkward but instead lends a nice cinematic feel to the proceedings.

In characterization, Black House is again superior to its prequel. This isn't to knock The Talisman - as in almost all of King's work, the characters are consistently interesting and well-developed (I've read very little of Straub's solo work, so I can't really comment on it). It's just that Black House has perhaps the most engaging characters in a King novel since The Stand. Particularly brilliant is Henry Leyden, the blind DJ who befriends Jack and helps persuade him to take on the Fisherman case - he alone makes the novel worth reading.

Perhaps what makes the novel most worthwhile is its resonance. Literary allusions abound here (the title is a play on Dickens' Bleak House, and there also references to the works of Poe, Malamud, and many others), the most significant of which are to King's Dark Tower series (especially to readers (like me!) who are eagerly awaiting the next book). The Dark Tower references may be occasionally annoying to those who are new to King's work, but I think there's enough explication here to make those allusions only a minor stumbling block.

In short, I recommend Black House to... well, just about everybody. Like horror? Fantasy? Crime fiction? Classic American or British Lit? You'll probably find something in here to interest you.

Trust me. This is a really good one.

Rating:
Summary: Terrible
Review: I read the Talisman a long time ago. Then I got this book, and decided that before I jumped into it, I should re-read the Talisman.

I cannot begin to describe the disappointment of attempting to read Black House only hours after finishing the Talisman. The way the story is told is just horrible. The whole "we" thing is completely unbearable. Simply put- the writing style was so bad I couldn't read the book. I had to put it down after only a few pages, for fear I would vomit.

I skipped several hundred pages just to see if that particular writing style persisted throughout the entire book, and it appears that it did. I was horrified.

So yeah, it's a horror book. Just not what I wanted. Unreadible. I'm sure, somewhere in between the terrible prose there is a story worth reading about, but I couldn't get there. I'm disappointed to say the least.

Rating:
Summary: Fabulously Weird
Review: Two of the finest "Masters of Macabre" team up in this delightfully frightening and weird tale of a house that isn't, but is, a town that might be, and a man named Jack Sawyer - who has been there before. Welcome back to the Territories, familiar readers will rejoice that our hero, Jack Sawyer has returned as a grown up coppiceman, already retired, whose services just happen to be the only ones that can stop a serial child killer (and eater!) from destroying every last child in this little town. There are sections in this book that if they don't scare you, they will most certainly gross you out, which is typical King - fantastic! Readers do not have to have read "The Talisman" to appreciate this bizarre stretch of imagination that Stephen King and Peter Straub have put together. Just make sure you have a long night ahead, you will not wish to put this down!

Rating:
Summary: Engaging follow-up to The Talisman.
Review: As always, King and Straub have told a captivating tale that will keep you turning the pages. A nuance to DH that was missing from the first book is the connection to King's Dark Tower series; as a fan of this series, I enjoyed the references to it, but others might not appreciate this aspect of DH. I also found it a little hard to relate the Jack Sawyer of DH to the Jack Sawyer of The Talisman--maybe a prelude would have been helpful. Finally, in contrast with the Talisman, very little of DH takes place within the Territories. Overall, however, I found this to be an enjoyable, engaging read.

Rating:
Summary: My Journey Back to the Territories
Review: When people ask me (at least once or twice a year) what my favorite book of all time is, I always will say "The Talisman". Perhaps this is because I read it at age 13, same age as the hero Jack Sawyer, and always fascinated me with the thought of a parallel universe, with a twinner of my own. Perhaps it's the only book I've ever re-read, but I think it stands out because it's the only book that actually made me cry, sob really, as those who experienced the death of Wolf may sympathize. So when I read that Black House would be its sequel, I approached it with both excitement and trepidation. Can they do the original justice with a older Jack Sawyer??
I thought before I'd begin Black House, I'd re-read the Talisman for a third time. It's been about 10 years since I had re-read it, and due to the Wild 90s I've lived through, most of the brain cells containing the memories of the book had died a valiant death somewhere in Tucson/Las Vegas/Los Angeles.
I read on the jacket that Jack had forgotten most of his territory adventure, so if Jack was going in blind (sorry, Henry) then so would I. It will come back to me, I thought.
So I began my journey again with Jack and I the same age now as we were then, and looked forward to my journey back to the Territories.
I like that Jack has become an LAPD detective (one of my "if I had two lives to lead" wish of a job), and that he has found success but is not yet fulfilled (my twinner?).
Without delving into the plot, as has already been done in several reviews, I'll just say that I enjoyed the story. I do wish Steve and Pete would've spent more time in the Territories, and revisiting the magic the place had offered, but we really only captured glimpses of it. I had just started reading the Dark Tower series about a year ago, and I'm glad I did, as there were far more references to that series than there were the orginial Talisman. Not to say that's a bad thing. I'm becoming more and more intrigued with the Dark Tower, the Crimson King, and Ka.
The Black House was a great tale told, and the characters were all good, but not great. (Why'd they take it so easy on that scumbag Wendell Green at the end? Another message from Henry Leyden re: the Sexson Slugger would've have been nice. Mr Munshun could have put up a better fight). I enjoyed the ending (both of them) and the foreshadowing of things to come. I look forward to that tale as well. Perhaps both Jack and I will be in our forties when that comes around.

Rating:
Summary: Talisman part 2 or Dark Tower 5?
Review: Billed as the continuation of the Talisman (sort of) this book is a must for the Dark Tower fans out there. While Jack Sawyer is the main character, the book is filled with references to Roland and his little band of apprentices, as well as the tower, ka and "other worlds than these". The book opens a little slowly, and the narrator/voice over guide that the two authors use is a little annoying, but the last two thirds of the novel more than make up for the searly shortcomings!

Rating:
Summary: The book jacket is the color of poop for a reason
Review: This book is quite a bit harder to get through than I had hoped. I heard it was the sequel to the Talisman, which I haven't read, and maybe that's why some of it didn't make sense to me. I thought the narrator flying around at the beginning was tolerable, but the book did drag on. Jack Sawyer is a hot shot investigator who must have gone to this place called the Territories when he was a kid and did something or other. I didn't care for the references to Poe or Dickens or the bat in The Natural too much. Perhaps, like Jack Sawyer, I've grown up and it's hard for me to believe that a bat can shoot ray beams out even in fiction. I did think the idea of the Fisherman was interesting, but he ended up being an old man possessed, and that kind of ruined my interest in it...

Rating:
Summary: BORING
Review: First and foremost, this book takes way to long to get into. We did not need the 80 page introduction to the area 'we' are going to see in the rest of the book, especially when it is told by the absolute most confusing, boring and annoying writer in the world (Peter Straub). Even when Stephen King begins writing, the book does not pick up. The idea is strong, but drags so much at parts (for instance, before they are set to go into the Black House). Furthermore, the ending is confusing and not the ending you'd expect. Usually, that's a good thing, but in this case it's a bad thing. Like The Talisman (only slightly better) this book has too much Peter Straub in it, and he is a terrible writer. Straub and King are not made to write with each other.

Let's hope they don't try it again.

Rating:
Summary: A Mixed Bag of Tricks
Review: Black House is, to paraphrase a line from an early Peter Straub novel, a great ghost story in which the ghost is underutilized. It's an impressive piece of writing, however, and one which I enjoyed a great deal. It works a little better as a stand-alone novel than as a sequel, oddly enough, and deals well and (for the most part) fairly with its characters and the reader.

The novel is the authors' sequel to The Talisman, and that is using the term "sequel" very freely indeed. Only two of the first novel's characters appear in Black House, Jack Sawyer being of course the primary one. And instead of ranging across the country and a couple of universes, Black House pretty much stays in one place...which may be the book's biggest flaw, but I'll get to that later. The story finds Jack Sawyer, young hero of The Talisman, now a young retired cop living in a Wisconsin town. A series of grotesque murders have taken place, committed by the book's nominal villain, the Fisherman. Judy Marshall, the mother of one victim, is going mad, and is doing some...ah, rather unusual things...with her tongue. And the whole thing is somehow connected to Jack Sawyer's Territories (which he barely remembers)...and to other, darker worlds, as well.

MINOR SPOILER: I would like to point out here that Black House belongs as much in King's Dark Tower cycle of novels, as it does in the Territories King and Straub created. Many King fans have wondered if the two worlds might indeed be one and the same. They aren't -- but neither are they very far apart, it seems. The authors do a very good job of connecting the two universes, and in the process they tell a good, though not a great story. They pull a lot of different tricks out of their collective bag, and while a good deal of it works, not all of it does. A few examples:

Perhaps searching for a way to apprroach their work from a new angle, Straub and King chose to write in the present tense, which I found enjoyable. King has written a few short stories in that style, but never an entire novel, and the results are...interesting. The collaborative work with Straub has a nice "flavor" to it, perhaps even better than their work in Talisman -- but there is also a lot of what's called "author intrusion": lines that are too-sly asides, cutesy-clever remarks, and cajolings of the "come, Constant Reader, and we shall go" variety. This I did not enjoy a bit, because its overall effect was to put the story at one remove from Constant Reader (in this case, me). As a result I found the story lacking in any real heat. Events seemed muted, even when they were meant to be GOOD AND LOUD -- and the "Constant Reader" stuff, which wears very thin after the first fifty pages, was a big reason why.

Another flaw is the pacing -- when I said Black House stays in one place, I meant it! SPOILER ALERT: For all the talk of this being a Talisman sequel, there is very little of the Territories in it, and Travelling Jack Sawyer does most of his travelling on the back roads of Wisconsin. That's not to say that the setting isn't interesting, because it is -- but it's also one of the stock weird-little-small-town portraits both authors could paint in their sleep. In fact, it's my opinion that both the setting and a great deal of the characters are more Straub's than King's -- most if not all of them could have stepped straight out of Mystery, or the Wisconsin-set scenes in Koko. which makes things interesting, as the "events" in Black House (when things do happen) are pure King. The biggest problem is that the setting is a very sleepy one, which makes for a somewhat sleepy novel. And while there's a lot of talk about borderlands and slippage, the authors show us very little convincing evidence of either until very late in the game. As a friend of mine has said, there just wasn't enough of the Territories (the ghost I referred to above) in this one.

There are other, less severe problems -- minor characters who appear, seem about to contribute something major to the narrative, then disappear forever, other major characters who are given ignominious and gratuitous exits (even for a novel by King and/or Straub!), too-obvious name symbolism, a Boo Radley slimy-newsman type who quite frankly borders on caricature, the least believable biker gang since The Wild One...but these are, in the end, minor things. As a whole Black House has more on the ball than off, with moments of humor and horror, drama and wonder, what I thought was a very appropriate ending, with more than one mythical resonance, and that's pretty good -- even if the authors never do explain what the deal is with Judy Marshall's tongue. Oh, well -- maybe they'll do that in the NEXT sequel. Remain In Light -- Phrodoe.