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Black House
by Authors:
Stephen King, Peter Straub
Paperback
In the seemingly paradisal Wisconsin town of French Landing, small distortions disturb the beauty: a talking crow, an old man obeying strange internal marching orders, a house that is both there and not quite there. And roaming the town is a terrible fiend nicknamed the Fisherman, who is abducting and murdering small children and eating their flesh. The sheriff desperately wants the help of a retired Los Angeles cop, who once collared another serial killer in a neighboring town.
Of course, this is no ordinary policeman, but Jack Sawyer, hero of Stephen King and Peter Straub's 1984 fantasy The Talisman. At the end of that book, the 13-year-old Jack had completed a grueling journey through an alternate realm called the Territories, found a mysterious talisman, killed a terrible enemy, and saved the life of his mother and her counterpart in the Territories. Now in his 30s, Jack remembers nothing of the Talisman, but he also hasn't entirely forgotten:
When these faces rise or those voices mutter, he has until now told himself the old lie, that once there was a frightened boy who caught his mother's neurotic terror like a cold and made up a story, a grand fantasy with good old Mom-saving Jack Sawyer at its center. None of it was real, and it was forgotten by the time he was sixteen. By then he was calm. Just as he's calm now, running across his north field like a lunatic, leaving that dark track and those clouds of startled moths behind him, but doing it calmly.
Jack is abruptly pulled into the case--and back into the Territories--by the Fisherman himself, who sends Jack a child's shoe, foot still attached. As Jack flips back and forth between French Landing and the Territories, aided by his 20-years-forgotten friend Speedy Parker and a host of other oddballs (including a blind disk jockey, the beautiful mother of one of the missing children, and a motorcycle gang calling itself the "Hegelian Scum"), he tracks both the Fisherman and a much bigger fish: the abbalah, the Crimson King who seeks to destroy the axle of worlds.
While The Talisman was a straightforward myth in 1980s packaging, Black House is richer and more complex, a fantasy wrapped in a horror story inside a mystery, sporting a clever tangle of references to Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, jazz, baseball, and King's own Dark Tower saga. Talisman fans will find the sure-footed Jack has worn well--as has the King/Straub writing style, which is much improved with the passage of two decades.
Average Customer Rating:
Not Horror, not great, not worth it...
If you picked up this book expecting a horror novel, well you ALMOST get one. Serial killer aside, this book is "just another tie-in" to the Dark Tower. Those of us waiting on pins and needles for the days of IT, Needful Things, and the early gripping shorts of Night Shift to return find our hopes bashed cruelly against the rocks once again. Welcome to the world of "rabbits the size of kangaroos!" whoopie! :-(
There are some gruesome elements, but they seem like afterthoughts rather than well built up scares. The sense of terror present in other works is reduced to a deep sense of nausea. Bring bag with you, you may _really_ vomit after reading this. Gore, aside, there are no psychological elements to "spook" the reader as in The Shining or IT. You will not come away being any more afraid of child eating murders than you are today.
The style of presentation is amateurish, not reflecting anything King has done before. The passive term "we", indicating the unseen narrator and the reader, appears far too much for my taste. It's overuse in this novel limits, rather than expands, the role of the reader. You are carefully dictated exactly what to see and what "you/we" think about it.
The characters in this story have very little compelling or "real" qualities. For instance, the bizarre and illogical relationship of Jack and Judy. After meeting Judy, his co-worker's wife who is in an insane asylum where she is recovering from the kidnapping of her child by a cannibal serial killer, he is somehow madly in love after five minutes. Without any buildup or common sense, the authors just expect us to accept that there was love at first sight for both of them -- "magically" of coarse. By his second encounter, he asking the head doctor to borrow his office for little "nookie" and a mind trip to "Faraway" with his drugged and unstable true love. Nothing in Jack's character to this point indicated he is anything but an alter boy, and possibly not even heterosexual... much less the type to be writhing on the floor of the loony-bin with married women who had their children kidnapped a few days earlier. The relationship simply doesn't make any logical sense, and nothing in the text helps make it any more sane to the reader. You can't help but feel like Judy is a victim of Jack, which I hope wasn't the actual intention of the authors.
The contrast of gore to the happy-go-lucky world of Faraway (The Territories) is interesting, but the attempt of pulling elements of The Talisman into this book didn't work too well. The main character could have been anyone, not necessarily Jack Sawyer pining over his dead movie-star mother and the traumas of being a twelve year old. In some ways Jack reminded me of Tom Hanks in the movie "Big", he is an adult physically but still a little boy in his mind. This was probably intentional, but if anyone is out there hunting a serial killer like the Fisherman, I certainly hope they are slightly more of an adult mentally.
Finally, the tie-in's to The Dark Tower are just too much. First, King should recognise that he has made a name for himself in horror and, just as there are problems for cross genera actors, some of his fan base simply isn't interested... not even a little. Unlike, putting in a reference to "Castle Rock", all the recent novels shove a whole mythos of gunslingers and kangaroo rabbits at you like smashing a square peg in a round hole. It doesn't matter if it works, at this point it is just a marketing ploy.
Chances are if you are a fan of the Dark Tower series the gore will turn you away, and if you are a fan of horror the kiddie-esque la la land of Faraway will do the same. This book is a no win situation. Do yourself a favor and dust off a classic King novel from your shelf and give it a read instead.
Black House
It's no secret that I'm a "Tower junkie," which is to say I really enjoyed the entirety of Stephen King's Dark Tower series. All of his books touch on the Tower in some small way, but three books in particular (Hearts in Atlantis, Insomnia, and Black House) can be considered the main tie-ins.
I listened to the entire Dark Tower series (save The Gunslinger) on audiobook, and I didn't see any reason to stop the trend with the non-series novels. Plus, Frank Muller (sadly deceased) was a fantastic narrator, and I relished the opportunity to hear more of his work.
Black House doesn't make too many pretensions at being anything other than a Stephen King novel. Demon-infested cannibalistic serial killer? Check. Oversized enchanted raven that drives people mad? Check. You get what I'm saying.
I'm not saying any of that is a bad thing if you're a fan of the genre. The problem is that I'm really not; I relished the amalgam of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and post-apocalyptic western found in the DT series, but straight horror just doesn't really do it for me. Also, I've never found King to be particularly readable, just hard to put down. As I understand it, that's a fairly common criticism.
Overdone
They try to be creative in their narrative but it doesn't work. It's like an actor doing asides, they're letting us in on a secret instead taking us through a story. Didn't work for me.
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DVD's
Not Horror, not great, not worth it... 
Black House 
