Black House is a 2001 sequel to King and Straub's 1984 novel The Talisman. It has enough fun Dark Tower connections for me and my fellow Tower-junkies, but it's also an interesting read in its own right.
There's too much going on in Black House to discuss in this humble review, so let me focus on two main things: the narrative style and the connections between other works and worlds, with a bit about the plot sandwiched between.
It took a little getting used to, but the narration style was one of my favorite things about this book. It's told in the present tense in what probably has a fancier name, but let's call it quasi-omniscient first person plural. Basically the narrators (two "scribbling fellows") and the readers are some sort of wispy invisible, flying observers to the story. It's cooler than that probably sounds. Or at least it's a really unique way to tell a story, and I doubt many authors could keep that going so effectively for 650 pages as King and Straub did. It does at times give the book a too-leisurely pace, but it pays off in how it builds the atmosphere of the town and other locations.
I'm not a huge fan of detective stories or police procedurals, but this one is weird enough that I can let it slide. I won't spoil it, but Jack Sawyer has used the skills he learned in The Talisman to become a great detective in Los Angeles. Then he retires early (at 32!) to rural Wisconsin. And wouldn't you know, some kids go missing and they get him out of retirement to help.
Eventually he starts to remember his time in the Territories from the first book once things start getting weird, or at any rate weirder than the already kind of strange bits like the lovable motorcycle gang with at least one medical doctor in the bunch and Jack's best friend, an intellectual blind man who voices several distinct characters on the local radio station (think Glen from The Stand, but with the voice talent of Richie from IT).
You probably could pick this up without having read The Talisman, but I wouldn't recommend it. You'd miss out on some connections to that book, and also Jack's remembering of the Territories prompts some of the same questions about personal identity between childhood and adulthood that King asked in IT. Do we as adults ever really remember who we were as children?
Likewise, you could read Black House without being familiar with King's Dark Tower series, but you'd be missing a lot of the fun. As a huge Dark Tower fan, these connections were some of my favorite parts, and to be honest, a big part of why I wanted to read this in the first place.
The connections are there (the Crimson King, breakers, etc. are all explicitly mentioned), but much like I wanted more time in the Territories in The Talisman, I wanted more time in Dark Tower weirdness here. While the connections are real and deep, I found this a far cry from being "practically a Dark Tower book" as I once heard someone refer to it.
What you do get, though, is a bit more food for thought about the Dark Tower multiverse. How do the Territories fit in to the Dark Tower multiverse? Is there a level of the Tower where Jack plays a greater role in things? Is he somehow related to the ka-tet, maybe even Jake's twinner as some have suggested? Is Jack's Earth Keystone Earth, or some other Earth? How is the phenomenon of slippage in Black House related to thinnies, beam quakes, and the like from the Dark Tower? Is it possible that ka has some role for Jack to play in the events of the Dark Tower series we don't know about?
Are we, dear reader, in a real multiverse right now? The mind boggles! Perhaps the most pressing question of all: Will King and Straub ever give us a third book that explores some of these and other questions?
See also my review in the Territory of Goodreads.
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