Rating: 
Summary: Very, Very Heavy Tale
Review: First some small criticisms: The "viewpoint" felt a bit confused, and a little too much in the foreground of the tale at times (this is said as one who feels viewpoint should be as unnoticeable as possible). Related, the fading in and out from omniscient to direct felt a bit awkward here and there. And the late part of the book felt slightly rushed and compressed, as thought a publication deadline had begun to dominate the authors and story to some degree, as opposed to the first 3/4 or so, which had beautiful literary tempo. No doubt related to this, there were several typos that should've been caught toward the end.Beyond these little quips, the book is as good as anything I've ever read, and more compelling a tale (read as: "impossible to put down") than anything I ever recall reading. Rating the book 5 stars doesn't do "Black House" justice, it's clearly off the normal rating chart. It's two excellent authors combining and interlacing their skills to produce much more than the sum of their parts. If you are not too sqeamish and want to read a real masterpiece of a novel, this is a major classic. Warning: may cause temporary sleep difficulty!
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: This novel was very disappointing. There was no substance, after the key figures made it in to the Black House. There were so many references to The Dark Tower series, I wonder if readers unfamiliar with that work were able to follow the assumptions.
Rating: 
Summary: BAG OF BONES
Review: FOR STARTERS I'M NOT A WRITER. BUT I'VE BECOME USED TO A CERTAIN LEVEL OF SUSPENSE,HORROR AND HUMOR FROM MR. KING. BAG OF BONES WAS NOT UP TO HIS USUAL STANDARDS. AND PLEASE NO MORE DARK TOWER. I REALLY DON'T CARE ANY MORE IF ROLAND FINDS THE MAN IN BLACK OR THE TOWER, ACTUALLY I WAS HOPING BLAINE THE TRAIN WOULD RUN THEM ALL OVER, WITH THE EXCEPTION OF OY, MAYBE. MR. KING SHOULD STICK WITH FAR OUT STUFF LIKE INSOMNIA WHICH I THROUGHLY ENJOYED.
Rating: 
Summary: Straub's a Dark Tower convert? Oh boy.....
Review: I was torn in several directions by this book. First, it's prequel ("The Talisman") was distinctly written in Stephen King's style - if Peter Straub did indeed collaborate with King on that book you'd never know it. With "Black House", it's noticeably more of a combined effort. The writing is more Straub's style than King's, but the mythology is definitely King. There are references to "Hearts in Atlantis" as well as "The Dark Tower", King's self-styled magnum opus and the most incomprehensible work of fantasy fiction since the Gormenghast trilogy. There are also attempts throughout the story to make it read like some kind of dark fairy tale, or a more morbid version of "The Hobbit". Those factors make this an incredibly depressing novel, even though the ending is a positive one. But despite the definite dark tone of this book I still held on to the end. The writing is top-drawer, more surprising when you realize that Straub's been turning out clunker after clunker over the last few years. I'm recommending this book, but with the caveat that you be aware that it's hardly a fun read, as most of King's novels are. I wish he'd either explain or junk the whole idea of the Dark Tower. At the rate he's going with it we'll all be long gone before he finally explains what it's all about.
Rating:
Summary: Unable to put it down!!!
Review: I just finished reading this book and I would like to say, I LOVED IT!!!! Once I started reading it, I was unable to put it down. To me it coved every aspect possible...I laughed, I cried, I cringed, and I cheered!! Once I got past the first few informational chapters I was hooked. I loved the portrayal of all the characters in the story, Henry being the most interesting, although, I thought Beezer was equally interesting and I was rather glad to see a positive spin put on a bunch of hog riding, beer drinking guys. Nuff said....grab a copy of the book and sit down and start reading.....ps, turn the answering machine on and feed the cat before you start...cause you sure wont want to do it onced you get into the book!
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing...
Review: Back when Stephen King was still writing terror novels, he was one of my favorite authors. To scare someone with nothing more than the written word is a huge talent and he possessed it in spades. "IT" is still one of my all-time favorites as is "The Stand". I enjoyed "The Talisman" but have never been a fan of fantasy tales and Stephen King's true genius (I believe) lies in writing horror. Taking ordinary people and placing them in extraordinary circumstances was one of his main strengths. The characters of his novels would come to life and I could picture them in my head as clearly as if they were standing in front of me. I cared about them and I cared what happened to them. In his later books, even though I didn't particularly like the tale itself (in "The Tommyknockers" for instance), he still had the ability to flesh out his characters and infuse them with life. Unfortunately, I didn't feel that way about "Black House". The characters were too one-dimensional with the exception of Jack, the bikers and Uncle Henry and I would have enjoyed much more of the latter two. The characters never really completely got through to me. There were sections of the book where I felt the authors were justthisclose to pulling me in, but I just couldn't lose myself in it which is something I have missed in Stephen King's stories for a long time. The other issue I had was with the third person, present tense narrative. It was extremely distracting. So the combination of flat characters, a story I couldn't dive into and an odd writing style pretty much spoiled it for me.
Rating:
Summary: Great followup to The Talisman, worthy Dark Tower entry
Review: As some are complaining about here, this is a Dark Tower novel. I think it is becoming clear that most, if not all, of King's novels concern the dark tower in one way or the other. Maybe not the early ones except by association of characters, but the later ones certainly are. Insomnia, Hearts in Atlantis, and now Black House are all adding to the mythology surrounding Roland's quest for the Dark Tower. In that respect this book is a slam dunk. It brings back characters and refernces events in Dark Tower as well as The Talisman. However the prose is a bit difficult at times with its detached quality and it works to take you out of the story by talking directly to you. It can be distracting but the story and payoff are worth it in the end. Bring on Dark Tower V!
Rating:
Summary: Okay, but nothing special
Review: The first book, The Talisman, was a joy to read. You couldn't wait to turn the page to see what happened next, but you also didn't want to finish it because then it would be over. Everyone feels that way about books they love. I knew the sequel wouldn't be anywhere nearly as good, and it wasn't. There was no joy in reading it, but only curiosity to see what they were going to do with (and to) the characters. I had never cried before just from reading a book, but I did when Wolf died in the first book. This one doesn't elicit anywhere near the same kind of emotion.
Still, it was somewhat entertaining, and it was interesting how it was linked to other Stephen King books. If it wouldn't have been for that link, someone would have had to convince me that Black House was written by the same people, because the writing style is so dissimilar. Not a bad read, but not a great one, either.
Rating:
Summary: You must read The Talisman and DT before this
Review: The first ten pages of this book are pure literary writing, beautiful prose. The story itself is fairly simple and if you're familiar (as you should be)with Jack Sawyer's adventures into the Territorries from "The Talisman," then you might be delighted to find out the deep connnections with the Dark Tower series (all of King's books have to do with the Dark Tower in some way). I would advise anyone to begin with the Talisman, move into the Dark Towers, read this book, then Hearts in Atlantis, and then Insomnia, It, The Stand, etc. etc. ad nausea.
Rating:
Summary: After the shovel, the more delicate tools-- please!
Review: It takes King and Straub over five hundred pages to get us to what should be the end of a novel whose central plot culminates in the Fisherman's death and the mystery's resolution. The terrain isn't all that easy to traverse. The first two hundred pages are ponderously expository, inviting as much skimming as reading. The novel as a whole is dogged by an intrusive narrator who frequently interrupts the story to provide transitions ('let's make like an amoeba and split'), to tell us what we're thinking ('Our hearts groan for a hero'), or to tease us with hints of things to come. The most egregious example of this occurs near the novel's end: 'you're not going to like what happens next,' the narrator tells us. 'Certainly the idea that he [spoiler withheld] might be dying in a few minutes has not occurred to him.' Curiously, while Black House is ostensibly Jack Sawyer's novel, Jack'a watery shadow of the boy he was in The Talisman--is not compelling enough to be the hero of his own tale. Furthermore, of the dozens and dozens of characters in Black House, perhaps ten of them further the narrative. The rest of them bring Coulee Country to life, to be sure, but they are narratological dead ends that have no bearing on the story's outcome. Wendell Green, for example, the rabid reporter desperate to make a killing on the killings, threatens to impede the investigation and tarnish Jack's reputation, but after a couple of punches in the stomach and a whack on the head, he slinks away. At least Sophie, a woman in a parallel universe with whom Jack falls truly, madly, deeply, and spontaneously in love, is still with us at the end of the novel, playing a minor role in the resolution of Jack's personal life-and-death drama.
What occupies most of the last 125 pages of Black House is the denouement of the parallel supernatural plot hinted at from the novel's beginning but only partially fleshed out in its final third. The evil the Fisherman has done was encouraged by a ghoul named Lord Malshun, head henchman to the ultimate evildoer, the Crimson King (whom we never actually get to meet in Black House). Lord Malshun directs the collection and enslavement of telekinetics who are then put to work to psychically 'break' the 'axle' around which the universe's many parallel worlds turn independently. Bit by bit, they gnaw away at the 'beams' that support the universes, the goal being to collapse time and space into utter chaos over which the Crimson King intends to rule. (If you've read Hearts in Atlantis, this is the work that Brautigan, here the 'chief breaker,' is forced to perform.) Lord Malshun is thus the prime mover behind the evil in French Landing, working with the Fisherman to find Ty Marshall, the breaker of all breakers (and allowing him to eat those children who have no breaking abilities). Malshun, however, with his one red eye and spoon like face, is a cartoon ghoul easily brought down by rays from a baseball bat Jack calls 'Wonderboy' after The Natural's bat. As the 'axle' on which the murder mystery plot turns, the supernatural underpinning is too flimsy to bear the weight of a story like the Fisherman's. Too bad King and Straub didn't notice that real evil, as it is embodied by the Fisherman, is all the evil Black House needs. I suspect that Black House's weakness can be explained by the supernatural plot's potential to generate yet another sequel, one that would take us to the Crimson King's court and focus on the supernatural machinery we barely glimpse in this continuation of The Talisman. Black House is not intended to be a whole in its own right, we might argue, generously seeing its narratological imbalance as a temporary thing to be righted in Talisman III. Yet this possibility is about as satisfying to us as Sppedy Parker's explanation of the work of the Crimson King was to Jack. Noting Jack's confusion, Speedy, a repeat character from The Talisman, insists, 'There's no need for you to understand it all in order to do your job.' Now there's an excuse for poor storytelling if I ever heard one. Despite the novel's warts, die-hard Stephen King fans like me will want to read Black House just to make the acquaintance of the Fisherman and of Henry Leyden, the real hero of the novel, a blind-from-birth radio personality whose keen powers of observation make him an extraordinary human being and a pretty darn good detective. And afterwards they may want to join me in volunteering to proof the first draft of the sequel. As readers, we will do our jobs, after all, and they will be easier if King and Straub do theirs first.
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