fireblend 's review for:

The Talisman by Peter Straub, Stephen King

3.0

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This is the Stephen King book that's taken me the longest to get through in my SK journey so far. That's not to say it's the worst I've read so far, far from it, it's just... long. It's unusual for a King book in some ways (putting aside the fact that it's also a Peter Straub book, and I honestly know very little of how much work either of them put into this); it focuses on relatively few characters with very few PoV changes, it's a brand of fantasy that somewhat cares about magical "mechanics" in a way that I don't associate with King's fantasy efforts so far, there's very little in it that dates it in terms of political or historical events being referenced, and the family drama that fuels it doesn't center so much on the like, vices of middle-low class, instead going for kind of classic archetypical courtly "betrayal" drama, even more so than something like Eyes of the Dragon, which had a bunch of alcoholism and domestic violence in it. That said, there's some classic King in there like the magical negro (he's back!), the rational character going through a denial phase, some of the episodes I can see reflected in stuff from The Stand, and... yeah, that's all I got. It's alright, it lacks some of the King spice but I didn't hate it.