You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.79 AVERAGE
3.79 AVERAGE
The Talisman wasn't my favorite SK, so I didn't have high hopes for this. But I loved it.
Going into this book, I was very apprehensive. I did not like The Talisman at all. What I heard about this book was that it was very similar, but that was just not true.
Black House had much faster pacing than The Talisman as well as a solid motivation for Jack Sawyer. He is a retired hotshot detective who gets roped into this case because of his prior experience.
I liked the characters in this book, where I couldn’t say the same about some in the previous book. Obviously there are evil or disdainful characters, but they were done well. Lord Malshun would have been hilarious if he wasn’t so evil, which landed very well with me. He was a perfect villain for this book.
The book was fascinating and gruesome and dark and I just really enjoyed it.
I will say that the book did feel a bit long at times. Especially the first person collective voice narrative moments. I didn’t mind the voicing, but those moments at times felt king or irrelevant. Other times, there were haunting or humorous little vignettes of things that happened around French Landing.
Overall, I loved the book.
Black House had much faster pacing than The Talisman as well as a solid motivation for Jack Sawyer. He is a retired hotshot detective who gets roped into this case because of his prior experience.
I liked the characters in this book, where I couldn’t say the same about some in the previous book. Obviously there are evil or disdainful characters, but they were done well. Lord Malshun would have been hilarious if he wasn’t so evil, which landed very well with me. He was a perfect villain for this book.
The book was fascinating and gruesome and dark and I just really enjoyed it.
I will say that the book did feel a bit long at times. Especially the first person collective voice narrative moments. I didn’t mind the voicing, but those moments at times felt king or irrelevant. Other times, there were haunting or humorous little vignettes of things that happened around French Landing.
Overall, I loved the book.
Maybe more of a 3.75, because it did drag in some spots and also took me a while to read. However, I’m very pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this book compared to the first one. This one was more horror/crime fiction, and that’s likely why. Plus the connections to the Tower were done really well.
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
dark
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Child abuse, Child death, Cursing, Death, Drug use, Gore, Gun violence, Physical abuse, Suicide, Torture, Blood, Kidnapping, Cannibalism, Murder
adventurous
dark
funny
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Such a great cooperative effort in creating this wonderful story. Both authors' styles shined and complimented eachother.
I picked up this book because I was in Bangor, Maine. The home of Stephen King. I heard about the many philanthropic things that he has done to help his hometown. I wanted to support. :) I hadn't read Stephen King since high school. the story was interesting, but it's not the style of writing that I like anymore. If you like horror, this is a great read. There are likeable characters, there are people you want saved, there are people you hate. The book was well written.
There’s a lot to say about Black House as a book, but I’d like to start by talking about how Black House functions as a sequel. Because this is a sequel to The Talisman, and yet if you asked me before starting this book how I would envision a Talisman sequel, it would be almost nothing like this. That’s not to say Black House works completely as a standalone book with no prerequisite necessary, but aesthetically, the two books in this series aren’t similar whatsoever. The Talisman is colorful and whimsical. It is an adventure book following around a twelve-year-old boy as he navigates his way through a fantastical alternate version of The United States called The Territories (with a traditional high-fantasy medieval type of atmosphere), befriending werewolves, fighting all sorts of eclectic monsters, traversing through wildly bizarre landscapes – a pretty typical fantasy “hero’s journey” type of thing. Black House is nothing like that. It’s a dark, gritty, realistic crime mystery novel, and its interconnectedness with the previous book is actually pretty subtle, or it at least is for the first 80% or so.
The plot centers, again, around Jack Sawyer, now an adult and a retired homicide detective living in western Wisconsin. The town of French Landing has been plagued with a series of child murders from an enigmatic figure known locally as “The Fisherman” (taken from real-life serial killer Albert Fish), and Jack Sawyer is eventually pressured into aiding the investigation. This kind of horror / true crime mystery is where the genre of this book lies for the majority of its duration, as the adult version of Jack doesn’t really remember the events from his childhood that make up The Talisman so a lot of the more fantastical elements don’t come into play for a while. It does eventually connect more explicitly towards the end as more supernatural elements start coming into play and when it turns out the serial killer they are looking for resides in a parallel world which is only accessible through the eponymous "Black House" which is a creepy, decrepit old black house that's off in the woods in the outskirts of town, but again, the otherworldly elements of this story are generally more toned-down in this book.
I'm gonna put a quick side tangent here and say that the way this "black house" is described is great. Just kind of like a nightmare acid trip where the house never stays the same shape or size, there are endless corridors inside with thousands of staircases and doors leading to nowhere, just the way being in its very presence can make you hallucinate and go mad. Really great stuff, and very evocative of House of Leaves or The Haunting of Hill House or something - better even than some of King's own scary house descriptions such as the Marsten House or the House on Niebolt Street.
Anyway back to the topic at hand - another thing I really appreciate is how real this book feels. It reads like a normal town, normal police chief, normal citizens, etc. So when supernatural things do happen, they pack more of a punch having lived in a seemingly normal world for so long. It feels like a more adult rendition of the things happening in The Talisman, and that makes complete sense given our now adult-aged protagonist. There are other things about Black House I really enjoy as well. For one, it has a much more ensemble cast of characters in comparison with the previous book. The townbuilding of French Landing almost reminds me of 'Salem's Lot in many ways. Getting to see so many different inhabitants of this town, getting a peek into their lives, being able to see events unfolding from all these different perspectives - it just paints a really colorful picture of the setting (and not to dox myself, but I actually lived in this same geographic area for many years (the "driftless" region of southwestern Wisconsin / southeastern Minnesota) and the way it's described actually does it a lot of justice, it's a very beautiful area).
As usual with Stephen King there are many wonderful side characters such as the motorcycle gang "Thunder Five" consisting of five huge burly men with leather jackets and long beards who also happen to be extremely thoughtful and smart and into art and philosophy and whatnot, there's Henry Leyden, the blind yet extremely perceptive radio DJ with many personalities, and there's the stock King b-villain in Wendell Green, the most irritating journalist of all time. In fact, Jack himself is probably the least engaging character here. Not bad by any means, but definitely just a straight-man goldenboy who doesn't have a ton of depth besides having some vague supernatural abilities left over from the talisman itself.
Overall though, this is a really solid and engaging book! You can once again feel Straub's presence on this thing - flowering up the prose in a way that King can't really do by himself, and also once again there are a litany of Dark Tower references (basically the whole reason I'm reading this book in the first place). It's weird and dark and creepy as a standalone book, and serviceable albeit strange as a sequel. A worthy edition to the extended Stephen King multiverse, and perhaps there will be a third book to look forward to someday!
The plot centers, again, around Jack Sawyer, now an adult and a retired homicide detective living in western Wisconsin. The town of French Landing has been plagued with a series of child murders from an enigmatic figure known locally as “The Fisherman” (taken from real-life serial killer Albert Fish), and Jack Sawyer is eventually pressured into aiding the investigation. This kind of horror / true crime mystery is where the genre of this book lies for the majority of its duration, as the adult version of Jack doesn’t really remember the events from his childhood that make up The Talisman so a lot of the more fantastical elements don’t come into play for a while. It does eventually connect more explicitly towards the end as more supernatural elements start coming into play and when it turns out the serial killer they are looking for resides in a parallel world which is only accessible through the eponymous "Black House" which is a creepy, decrepit old black house that's off in the woods in the outskirts of town, but again, the otherworldly elements of this story are generally more toned-down in this book.
I'm gonna put a quick side tangent here and say that the way this "black house" is described is great. Just kind of like a nightmare acid trip where the house never stays the same shape or size, there are endless corridors inside with thousands of staircases and doors leading to nowhere, just the way being in its very presence can make you hallucinate and go mad. Really great stuff, and very evocative of House of Leaves or The Haunting of Hill House or something - better even than some of King's own scary house descriptions such as the Marsten House or the House on Niebolt Street.
Anyway back to the topic at hand - another thing I really appreciate is how real this book feels. It reads like a normal town, normal police chief, normal citizens, etc. So when supernatural things do happen, they pack more of a punch having lived in a seemingly normal world for so long. It feels like a more adult rendition of the things happening in The Talisman, and that makes complete sense given our now adult-aged protagonist. There are other things about Black House I really enjoy as well. For one, it has a much more ensemble cast of characters in comparison with the previous book. The townbuilding of French Landing almost reminds me of 'Salem's Lot in many ways. Getting to see so many different inhabitants of this town, getting a peek into their lives, being able to see events unfolding from all these different perspectives - it just paints a really colorful picture of the setting (and not to dox myself, but I actually lived in this same geographic area for many years (the "driftless" region of southwestern Wisconsin / southeastern Minnesota) and the way it's described actually does it a lot of justice, it's a very beautiful area).
As usual with Stephen King there are many wonderful side characters such as the motorcycle gang "Thunder Five" consisting of five huge burly men with leather jackets and long beards who also happen to be extremely thoughtful and smart and into art and philosophy and whatnot, there's Henry Leyden, the blind yet extremely perceptive radio DJ with many personalities, and there's the stock King b-villain in Wendell Green, the most irritating journalist of all time. In fact, Jack himself is probably the least engaging character here. Not bad by any means, but definitely just a straight-man goldenboy who doesn't have a ton of depth besides having some vague supernatural abilities left over from the talisman itself.
Overall though, this is a really solid and engaging book! You can once again feel Straub's presence on this thing - flowering up the prose in a way that King can't really do by himself, and also once again there are a litany of Dark Tower references (basically the whole reason I'm reading this book in the first place). It's weird and dark and creepy as a standalone book, and serviceable albeit strange as a sequel. A worthy edition to the extended Stephen King multiverse, and perhaps there will be a third book to look forward to someday!