Black House: Stephen King and Peter Straub
Back in 1984, Stephen King teamed up with Peter Straub to write "The Talisman", a wonderful fantasy story about a young man with an unusual nature, who travels between universes on a quest to save his mother. It's a great story filled with good and it's triumph over a great evil. But then it ends -- and the world goes on. So what happend to the boy? Well, there is a brief glimpse of him later in Stephen King's book "The Tommyknockers", where we learn that his life has taken a (slight) turn for the worse -- but nothing more, until Black House.
The story begins with us (the readers) being given a tour of the town. I assume this section of the book was written by Straub, because -- while I like some of his books, they are extremely difficult things for me to read. Not because they're written using difficult words -- but because they border on the mind-numbingly boring. You force yourself to read through it because the end result is satisfying -- Kind of like hacking your way up the forest on a steep hill because the view from the top is amazing. Anyway, in what will be a major timesaver for the person who makes this into a movie (you'll see what I mean if you read the book) we are introduced to the town, the people, the victims, and the bad guy -- it just takes a while before we get introduced to the story. The story revolves around an evil from an alternate universe that comes to our universe to seek people with special abilites, and to fulfil some sick and twisted fantasies -- and it's up to our (now grown up) hero to save the day. Jack Sawyer is a retired police detective living in a small Wisconsin town that's having a nasty string of child murders. He doesn't want to get involved, but since it involves an evil that travels through the territories, he has no choice in the end. His little town is one of those places where the lines betwqeen alternate universes start blurring together, making it easy for strange evils to invade -- particularly in a certain black house.
It's a long book, and I'm not even going to try to get into all the plot in this review. Suffice it to say, the story of Jack is completed (for the most part) in a happily ever after (for the most part). The book is enjoyable, once you get past the terminally slow beginning, though I have to say that it feels more like a Peter Straub book than a Stephen King book -- and it doesn't really feel like The Talisman either. To be honest, there were several times when it felt too much like the book was an attempt to perk up sagging book sales for the authors (King's Dark Tower series character is mentioned in the book as well). It's good, just not great...