by Jay Wilburn
The plan is to reread all of Stephen King’s works in the order that they were published. Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance had the vision. I’m doing it because I am a writer and I want to improve my fiction. And I love Stephen King’s stories. I think there is something to be learned through this process.
You can also go back to the beginning and read Before Carrie or any of my other posts up through this one and beyond by checking out this link to the Master List of all my #StephenKingRevisited posts.
Right here and now …
Black House has an interesting narrative style from coauthors Stephen King and Peter Straub in this 21st century sequel to 1984’s The Talisman. Like a guided tour setting the scene. Literally pointing out sights and then moving us along. Remember Amy, we are told. We’ll come back here, the narrators tell us. Let’s park up here on the windowsill between the this and the that to watch this scene play out. We go through many pages like this introducing characters and backgrounds. Too much time is spent on a D.J. set up and other scenes as well.
This second person plural present tense style took some getting used to and it still jarred me out of the story from time to time even in the later sections of the story when I was mostly used to it.
The Crimson King, Ram Abbalah to some, and The Dark Tower mythology loom large in this novel. When King and Straub invented The Territories for The Talisman a couple decades earlier, The Dark Tower series was still one book. King had not linked this shared world of The Talisman into his Tower multiverse. Here, in Black House, Jack Sawyer’s continued adventure becomes a Dark Tower deep cut. It joins Insomnia and Hearts in Atlantis as essential reading for Dark Tower lore and for understanding the “breakers.” We get big information dumps about Roland, his new gunslingers, and the nature of his mission and enemies. It turns out all telekinetics seem to come from Earth. There are mentions of the monorails, a third mono in End World, and the “head breaker” and his many escapes from Hearts in Atlantis.
“And the Fisherman lives there like a cancer cell lives in a healthy organism.”
This is a 2001 release. The band Korn is mentioned. The Scream movies are referenced along with Wes Craven and an inference to I Know What You Did Last Summer. Mark McGuire’s homeruns and Harry Potter’s magic are referenced. Rush Limbaugh broadcasts into the talk stations. Kids are playing with Magic cards. A character flips open a Nokia. And the Blair Witch Project is referenced. It’s all so beautifully the early 2000s.
A black house fading to grey fools us into thinking maybe this place is less than it actually turns out to be. There is slippage between worlds … between territories, and bad things happen when there is slippage. Approaching the Black House comes at a cost.
Jack Sawyer grew up to be a really intuitive cop. He retains the power of that which he touched but has lost his memory of earlier events until he needs to be reawakened. Jack is plagued by waking dreams, robin eggs, and feathers appearing where they do not belong. The town is plagued by a child killer and worse.
The Talisman is also called the Globe of Forever, we learn.
Cops see everyone as guilty, Jack laments.
“Dread set to music” is a good phrase.
“Dripping poison into the porches of her ears” is a great turn of phrase.
“While good takes a long time to develop, evil has a way of popping up full-blown and ready-made.” Powerful line.
“Shines murder bright” is great description of light reflected off a gun.
“The smell of blood was like laughter.” This is supposedly a quote from somewhere else, but I can’t find it. Interesting line either way.
“He could not remember the face of his father, not clearly” is a line thrown in off-handedly, but to great effect.
The story will hinge on three characters with Travelin’ Jack, a distraught mother, and an intermittently senile patient. A biker gang with hearts and minds of gold along with a blind man who sees more than anyone will be vital too. The mother/wife character is praised in the narrative until she and a counterpart rise to Mary Jane levels. Jack may be the same way with his “touched” life.
And the fog rolls in during a crucial scene … “If he’s out there, he can do whatever he wishes.”
The Little Sisters are vampires living in a hospital tent and their patients never get better.
Mr. M’s accent is very hard to read spelled out phonetically. It was to the point that I wanted to skip his lines and hope nothing important was being said. This was another broken rule from King’s own instructions in On Writing about over-using accents and dialects to the point of distraction from the story.
In dialogue, King writes “pictures” as “pitchers.” “Fuckarow” is a new word that has popped up in King’s last few books leading into Black House. The Wall Flowers play a lot in Stephen King novels. Elsewhere, in a discussion of 11/22/63, King says his son Joe Hill suggested the word “obdurate” to describe the resistance of time to change. King has been using that word in all its various forms throughout his writing career including in this novel.
The indulgent, self-referencing narrative style lays in heavy again near the end of the novel, in the midst of the final battleground. The co-authors directly self-reference at the end. It’s well-written prose, but the sort of stuff lesser men might have been talked into cutting from the final work and probably to better result.
Black House was more narratively cohesive than The Talisman, but it still drifted a bit, skipped the payoffs to a couple narrative set-ups, lingered in places, and then rushed forward in others. The ending is solid in this one. The authors offer, “You can stop reading here, but if you keep going, you’re not going to like what happens next.” It was in many ways one of King’s better endings. The story and characters hold together well. I would not put it in the top of King’s books, but I would exclude it from any list of his books I liked the least.
My next post in this series will be Before Everything’s Eventual which will be linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.
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