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Black House Paperback – September 30, 2003

by Stephen King (Author), Peter Straub (Author)

4.6 4,898 ratings

Book 2 of 2: Talisman

Editors' pick Best Science Fiction & Fantasy

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A retired Los Angeles homicide detective living in a rural Wisconsin town, Jack Sawyer is called in to assist the local police chief in solving a gruesome series of murders that causes Jack to experience inexplicable waking nightmares.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“EXTRAORDINARY . . . HARD TO PUT DOWN.”
—People (Page-Turner of the Week)

“AN INTELLIGENT . . . SUSPENSEFUL PAGE-TURNER . . . It’s a relief to find popular fiction that is as unpretentious yet rich in literary allusion and human detail as Black House.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“JACK’S SAGA OVERFLOWS WITH DARK WIT, SLY LITERARY REFERENCES, SUSPENSE, AND HEARTACHE. What elevates Black House beyond ordinary horror novels is the richness of its cast.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“HUGELY PLEASURABLE . . . Black House allows us to see two master craftsmen, each at the top of his game.”
—The Washington Post Book World

From the Back Cover

“EXTRAORDINARY . . . HARD TO PUT DOWN.”
—People (Page-Turner of the Week)

“AN INTELLIGENT . . . SUSPENSEFUL PAGE-TURNER . . . It’s a relief to find popular fiction that is as unpretentious yet rich in literary allusion and human detail as Black House.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“JACK’S SAGA OVERFLOWS WITH DARK WIT, SLY LITERARY REFERENCES, SUSPENSE, AND HEARTACHE. What elevates Black House beyond ordinary horror novels is the richness of its cast.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“HUGELY PLEASURABLE . . . Black House allows us to see two master craftsmen, each at the top of his game.”
—The Washington Post Book World

From the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Stephen King is the author of more than thirty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, the novelist Tabitha King.

Peter Straub is the author of fourteen novels, which have been translated into more than twenty foreign languages. He lives in New York City with his wife, Susan, director of the Project Read to Me.

From the Paperback edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Right here and now, as an old friend used to say, we are in the fluid present, where clear-sightedness never guarantees perfect vision. Here: about two hundred feet, the height of a gliding eagle, above Wisconsin's far western edge, where the vagaries of the Mississippi River declare a natural border. Now: an early Friday morning in mid-July a few years into both a new century and a new millennium, their wayward courses so hidden that a blind man has a better chance of seeing what lies ahead than you or I. Right here and now, the hour is just past six a.m., and the sun stands low in the cloudless eastern sky, a fat, confident yellow-white ball advancing as ever for the first time toward the future and leaving in its wake the steadily accumulating past, which darkens as it recedes, making blind men of us all.

Below, the early sun touches the river's wide, soft ripples with molten highlights. Sunlight glints from the tracks of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad running between the riverbank and the backs of the shabby two-story houses along County Road Oo, known as Nailhouse Row, the lowest point of the comfortable-looking little town extending uphill and eastward beneath us. At this moment in the Coulee Country, life seems to be holding its breath. The motionless air around us carries such remarkable purity and sweetness that you might imagine a man could smell a radish pulled out of the ground a mile away.

Moving toward the sun, we glide away from the river and over the shining tracks, the backyards and roofs of Nailhouse Row, then a line of Harley-Davidson motorcycles tilted on their kickstands. These unprepossessing little houses were built, early in the century recently vanished, for the metal pourers, mold makers, and crate men employed by the Pederson Nail factory. On the grounds that working stiffs would be unlikely to complain about the flaws in their subsidized accommodations, they were constructed as cheaply as possible. (Pederson Nail, which had suffered multiple hemorrhages during the fifties, finally bled to death in 1963.) The waiting Harleys suggest that the factory hands have been replaced by a motorcycle gang. The uniformly ferocious appearance of the Harleys' owners, wild-haired, bushy-bearded, swag-bellied men sporting earrings, black leather jackets, and less than the full complement of teeth, would seem to support this assumption. Like most assumptions, this one embodies an uneasy half-truth.

The current residents of Nailhouse Row, whom suspicious locals dubbed the Thunder Five soon after they took over the houses along the river, cannot so easily be categorized. They have skilled jobs in the Kingsland Brewing Company, located just out of town to the south and one block east of the Mississippi. If we look to our right, we can see "the world's largest six-pack," storage tanks painted over with gigantic Kingsland Old-Time Lager labels. The men who live on Nailhouse Row met one another on the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois, where all but one were undergraduates majoring in English or philosophy. (The exception was a resident in surgery at the UI-UC university hospital.) They get an ironic pleasure from being called the Thunder Five: the name strikes them as sweetly cartoonish. What they call themselves is "the Hegelian Scum." These gentlemen form an interesting crew, and we will make their acquaintance later on. For now, we have time only to note the hand-painted posters taped to the fronts of several houses, two lamp poles, and a couple of abandoned buildings. The posters say: fisherman, you better pray to your stinking god we don't catch you first! remember amy!

From Nailhouse Row, Chase Street runs steeply uphill between listing buildings with worn, unpainted facades the color of fog: the old Nelson Hotel, where a few impoverished residents lie sleeping, a blank-faced tavern, a tired shoe store displaying Red Wing workboots behind its filmy picture window, a few other dim buildings that bear no indication of their function and seem oddly dreamlike and vaporous. These structures have the air of failed resurrections, of having been rescued from the dark westward territory although they were still dead. In a way, that is precisely what happened to them. An ocher horizontal stripe, ten feet above the sidewalk on the facade of the Nelson Hotel and two feet from the rising ground on the opposed, ashen faces of the last two buildings, represents the high-water mark left behind by the flood of 1965, when the Mississippi rolled over its banks, drowned the railroad tracks and Nailhouse Row, and mounted nearly to the top of Chase Street.

Where Chase rises above the flood line and levels out, it widens and undergoes a transformation into the main street of French Landing, the town beneath us. The Agincourt Theater, the Taproom Bar & Grille, the First Farmer State Bank, the Samuel Stutz Photography Studio (which does a steady business in graduation photos, wedding pictures, and children's portraits) and shops, not the ghostly relics of shops, line its blunt sidewalks: Benton's Rexall drugstore, Reliable Hardware, Saturday Night Video, Regal Clothing, Schmitt's Allsorts Emporium, stores selling electronic equipment, magazines and greeting cards, toys, and athletic clothing featuring the logos of the Brewers, the Twins, the Packers, the Vikings, and the University of Wisconsin. After a few blocks, the name of the street changes to Lyall Road, and the buildings separate and shrink into one-story wooden structures fronted with signs advertising insurance offices and travel agencies; after that, the street becomes a highway that glides eastward past a 7-Eleven, the Reinhold T. Grauerhammer VFW Hall, a big farm-implement dealership known locally as Goltz's, and into a landscape of flat, unbroken fields. If we rise another hundred feet into the immaculate air and scan what lies beneath and ahead, we see kettle moraines, coulees, blunted hills furry with pines, loam-rich valleys invisible from ground level until you have come upon them, meandering rivers, miles-long patchwork fields, and little towns--one of them, Centralia, no more than a scattering of buildings around the intersection of two narrow highways, 35 and 93.

Directly below us, French Landing looks as though it had been evacuated in the middle of the night. No one moves along the sidewalks or bends to insert a key into one of the locks of the shop fronts along Chase Street. The angled spaces before the shops are empty of the cars and pickup trucks that will begin to appear, first by ones and twos, then in a mannerly little stream, an hour or two later. No lights burn behind the windows in the commercial buildings or the unpretentious houses lining the surrounding streets. A block north of Chase on Sumner Street, four matching red-brick buildings of two stories each house, in west-east order, the French Landing Public Library; the offices of Patrick J. Skarda, M.D., the local general practitioner, and Bell & Holland, a two-man law firm now run by Garland Bell and Julius Holland, the sons of its founders; the Heartfield & Son Funeral Home, now owned by a vast, funereal empire centered in St. Louis; and the French Landing Post Office.

Separated from these by a wide driveway into a good-sized parking lot at the rear, the building at the end of the block, where Sumner intersects with Third Street, is also of red brick and two stories high but longer than its immediate neighbors. Unpainted iron bars block the rear second-floor windows, and two of the four vehicles in the parking lot are patrol cars with light bars across their tops and the letters flpd on their sides. The presence of police cars and barred windows seems incongruous in this rural fastness--what sort of crime can happen here? Nothing serious, surely; surely nothing worse than a little shoplifting, drunken driving, and an occasional bar fight.

As if in testimony to the peacefulness and regularity of small-town life, a red van with the words la riviere herald on its side panels drifts slowly down Third Street, pausing at nearly all of the mailbox stands for its driver to insert copies of the day's newspaper, wrapped in a blue plastic bag, into gray metal cylinders bearing the same words. When the van turns onto Sumner, where the buildings have mail slots instead of boxes, the route man simply throws the wrapped papers at the front doors. Blue parcels thwack against the doors of the police station, the funeral home, and the office buildings. The post office does not get a paper.

What do you know, lights are burning behind the front downstairs windows of the police station. The door opens. A tall, dark-haired young man in a pale blue short-sleeved uniform shirt, a Sam Browne belt, and navy trousers steps outside. The wide belt and the gold badge on Bobby Dulac's chest gleam in the fresh sunlight, and everything he is wearing, including the 9mm pistol strapped to his hip, seems as newly made as Bobby Dulac himself. He watches the red van turn left onto Second Street, and frowns at the rolled newspaper. He nudges it with the tip of a black, highly polished shoe, bending over just far enough to suggest that he is trying to read the headlines through the plastic. Evidently this technique does not work all that well. Still frowning, Bobby tilts all the way over and picks up the newspaper with unexpected delicacy, the way a mother cat picks up a kitten in need of relocation. Holding it a little distance away from his body, he gives a quick glance up and down Sumner Street, about-faces smartly, and steps back into the station. We, who in our curiosity have been steadily descending toward the interesting spectacle presented by Officer Dulac, go inside behind him.

A gray corridor leads past a blank door and a bulletin board with very little on it to two sets of metal stairs, one going down to a small locker room, shower stalls, and a firing range, the other upward to an interrogation room and two facing rows of cells, none presently occupied. Somewhere near, a radio talk show is playing at a level that seems...

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ballantine Books (September 30, 2003)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 688 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 034547063X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0345470638
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.3 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.25 x 8.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,774,994 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #137,618 in Fantasy (Books)

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4.6 4,898 ratings

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Stephen King

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Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His first crime thriller featuring Bill Hodges, MR MERCEDES, won the Edgar Award for best novel and was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award. Both MR MERCEDES and END OF WATCH received the Goodreads Choice Award for the Best Mystery and Thriller of 2014 and 2016 respectively.

King co-wrote the bestselling novel Sleeping Beauties with his son Owen King, and many of King's books have been turned into celebrated films and television series including The Shawshank Redemption, Gerald's Game and It.

King was the recipient of America's prestigious 2014 National Medal of Arts and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American Letters. In 2007 he also won the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He lives with his wife Tabitha King in Maine.

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ann0314

Couldn't Put it Down...

Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2013

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For many, they read the Talisman years ago when they were younger and feel in love, having been a similar or close to age of "Jack" at the time. Me I just finished reading it for the first time a month ago on a recommendation and then moved to Black House being told it was a sequel (so seemed to make sense to read them in order together) Looking at the reviews here I was really hesitant at first to read it. It seemed a fair few were not fond of this book. Well, having bit the bullet and read it, I can honestly say I don't understand why so many negative reviews. I loved it even more then The Talisman honestly. Thinking on it, I've decided what made some so unhappy comes down to a few things (For those like me who may be hesitant based on other reviews):

1) They didn't like the odd narrative: The "We now move over the house looking at it curiously. We know we shouldn't look but we must to truly appreciate what is about to happen" type narrative. At first, I will admit I had some trouble with that as well. It was somewhat distracting and instead of pulling me in it kinda threw me out of the story. For me what helped was thinking about some movies (and some movie adaptations of Stephen Kings Novels) and tried picturing myself doing what he was saying. Looking in on what was going on from above. I pictured it kinda like the long sweeping camera strokes that directors sometimes use when they do films with similar Narratives throughout (The series Kingdom Hospital written by King had this narrative voice throughout so I found myself picturing the sweeping camera movements from that honestly) I found looking at it like that made it far easier to get into and less distracting and by the end I did feel as if I was peering in right there as everything happened. It took a bit of getting used to though so for those struggling with that or about to read this...hang in there as your mind will adjust to it at around 50 pages in or so. For some it may be hard to overcome...for me it was a slight obstacle that amounted to a tiny pebble in my journey through Black House's Pages and in the end for me it actually added to making me feel a part of the story rather then taking it away as some other reviewers had mentioned.

2) Subject Matter: This is not the fantastical world of the Territories nor is it a story of a child on a fantastical journey. This is the story of a boy who has become a man and like so many other adults has all but forgotten that world of magic until he is cruelly reintroduced to it. This is a story of our world and the horrors that lie here waiting. It is also a sort of Detective or Mystery Novel as well. The story had a very "Rose Red" feel to it and if you are a fan of that made for TV series you should in general like this. Raw and gritty, one foot in a magical yet dark existence and one foot on solid real ground. That said, some things are tough to read (especially if you're a parent, which I am) as much of the story has to do with a serial killer and children. The Territories are there though sprinkled throughout the book with many throw backs to The Talisman. Those that said the Territories were almost thrown in as an after thought, I disagree with. The Territories are very much a part of this book, though most of it does not take place there. The magic, monsters, evil, beauty, and horror of the Territories are all there just they have bubbled somewhat spilling into our existence rather then Jack needing to go to the Territories to find them.

For me, I found the story engaging and downright hard to put down. Some parts made me wince or gasp, but well it's Stephen King so I expect that. This book is far harsher then the Talisman and if you are more a fan of the Talisman but not so much of King's other work then this book (while a follow up) may not be for you. I loved the Talisman but this book is far darker then that and also less fantasy and more reality horror/fantasy with a base more in reality like The Stand and not necessarily Horror as in EEEK Monster also like The Stand. I think if you go in with those expectations, you should find the book an intriguing read.

Who should like it:
Those who enjoyed Kingdom Hospital, Storm of the Century, The Stand, or Rose Red (the made for TV Series')
Those who liked books like Salem's Lot, The Shining, and similar fantasy/horror/mixed with reality stories
Those who like Serial Killer, murder mystery, detective stories
Dark Tower Fans (Though I have not read them yet, there are definite tie ins to that series here-enough that I decided now I need to read those LOL)

Those who may not like it:
Those expecting something more akin to the Talisman (The Talisman and the magic is there but that is not this story so to speak)
Those sensitive to reading about harm coming to children (this aspect was tough for me and I found myself wanting to hug my kids a bunch LOL)

43 people found this helpful

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Alan Robson

Bleak and Black

Reviewed in the United States on November 18, 2001

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Stephen King and Peter Straub are back with The Black House which is the sequel to their earlier The Talisman. You don't have to have read the earlier novel to enjoy this one. Indeed in some ways it is perhaps better if you haven't read the earlier book for it was a routine fantasy quest and its very ordinariness may predispose you to think badly of The Black House, and that would be a shame for this new novel is a tour de force.
The title is a pun, bringing to mind Charles Dickens' novel Bleak House. This is quite intentional. Stylistically the book owes a lot to the Dickens novel and even the convoluted plot has resonances with Dickens. The authors don't seek to disguise this relationship; the book is full of overt references to Bleak House and at one point one of the characters even spends some time reading that novel out loud to one of the other characters (who is blind). I love these little touches - it's only a game, but the game adds a depth and a freshness that I really enjoy.
The story itself is set some twenty years after the events of The Talisman. Jack Sawyer is a retired Los Angeles detective living in the small town of Tamarack, Wisconsin. He has largely forgotten the adventures of his childhood.
Tamarack is plagued by an odd series of gruesome murders of little children. They seem to parallel a similar series of killings that were committed several decades ago by a man called Albert Fish. Because of the resemblances, the new murderer is dubbed the Fisherman. The local chief of police begs Jack for help in solving the killings, but Jack is reluctant to be drawn in to the gruesome business. However the pressure becomes too much for him, particularly because he is getting flashbacks to his childhood adventures in the Territories. There may a relationship between the Fisherman killings and the Territories and Jack is the only link between them, the only man who perhaps can solve the problems that run in parallel on both sides of the veil that divides the two worlds.
Much of the success of the novel can be traced to the superb characterisation. Jack in particular jumps alive from the page. At times the people almost degenerate into "caricaturisation", if I may coin a word; but though the book hovers on the brink, it never (quite) succumbs. I particularly liked the gang of motor cycle thugs who are all college graduates and who are the brains behind the success of the beer brewed in the local brewery. In between picking fights and doing drugs they are likely to be found talking about existentialism in the bar. At one point one of them discovers that the man he is about to hit in the face is a preacher, so he stops the fight in order to discuss a knotty problem of early Christian philosophy that has been worrying him for quite some time...
Stephen King has a unifying plot thread that runs like a sub-text through many of his books. The image of the Dark Tower and the doings of Roland the Gunslinger are ideas that he picks at again and again; sometimes overtly as in the Dark Tower novels, sometimes less so as here in The Black House. The climax of this novel depends in part on the mythology of the Tower and certainly adds another thread of mystery to the theme (and illuminates others).

7 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Not sure

Reviewed in the United States on April 19, 2003

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Well, this novel is certainly a Dark Tower novel. Although this book is written by both Stephen King and Peter Straub, it feels as if King is starting to wrap up his Dark Tower series ( maybe his career too ).
This book is not a bad book, however, I didn't care for the narration of the story. It became irritating constantly hearing how we would take a ride from a bird or bug or whatever and spy on the action.
The beginning of the book was difficult to get into. I felt certain that Peter Straub was the culprit. Then, I found out that the entire book was written the same way.
Overall I'm very pleased with the book. I don't feel that it is the best King work. The book gave us much more information on what is happening with the Dark Tower. It seemed to tie several of King's books to his Dark Tower.
I do feel that King is wrapping up his career. I'm starting to feel that when the Dark Tower ends, so will his career.
By the way, it was neat to find out what Ted Brautigan was up to.
Buy the book. It's worth it.

4 people found this helpful

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Kindle Customer

A must read

Reviewed in the United States on April 18, 2024

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It's a great read! Love all of Mr. Kings books. I look forward to my next adventure with him📚 💜

Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2024

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Loved it! Completely recommend this book.

Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2024

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Good read

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Top reviews from other countries

Sue Head

Brilliant

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 13, 2024

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Great story as always

Murrie

Long Road Ahead

Reviewed in Canada on November 17, 2020

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I found this book cumbersome in its length. The language is as usual, excellent handling and with many truths, but the tale goes on and on even though it turns corners, it drags in conversations that don't tell a lot. I kind of lost the thread a few times over it. The ending felt muddied somehow unlike most of King's books that have satisfying conclusions. I shall however, remain a faithful King reader.

Mike Le Gray

A great sequel to The Talisman

Reviewed in Germany on October 17, 2019

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For those who loved The Talisman, you won't be disappointed. Jack's back, although now he's an adult and drawn into the hunt for an horrific serial killer.