A review by thebestmark
The Talisman by Peter Straub, Stephen King

dark mysterious tense slow-paced

A queasy mixture of extreme grindhouse-cinema violence and the boyish high fantasy of The Neverending Story, The Talisman is essentially a mechanism of torture for its 12 year-old protagonist, Jack Sawyer. Throughout The Talisman, Jack is enslaved, menaced by a sex pest, bears witness to cannibalism and is haunted by the guilt of accidentally murdering half a dozen adult men, along with countless other psychological punishments. The constant repetition of Jack's incredible misery takes on an almost fetishistic quality thanks to the novel's narrator, who possesses a sardonic, mocking detachment from Jack's infinite misery. Because Jack's trauma is both escalatory and cyclical, rising and falling as regularly oceanic tides, The Talisman almost achieves a kind of Hellraiser-esque reverse-zen philosophy, in which only the worst possible outcome can be achieved, and in which the reader learns to anticipate whatever's worse than the worst thing imaginable. Because of this, the hands of the authors weigh heavily over The Talisman, as if both King and Straub are playing a game of chicken to see who's definition of 'too far' is the broadest. It feels less like a comprehensive, full-bodied novel than it does a writing class exercise about committing to the bit that's gone on way too long.