They are skilful, deliciously silly showmen who teeter close to vaudeville and whose talents highlight both horror's inherent childishness and its boundless thrills.Brief Summary of Book: Black House (The Talisman, #2) by Stephen King King and Straub are content to leave it where it has always been - behind a velvet curtain 'simultaneously sinister and banal', and to speak of it in a strange narrative voice that is gossipy, intimate and gleeful.
Danielewski dragged horror into the twenty-first century where he gave it a hose down. King's and Straub's house has crazy stairs, vultures with babies' faces and is gratifyingly cheesy, a place that 'would be an anomaly anywhere except in a "haunted mansion" in an amusement park'.Īnd perhaps this is the clearest definition of the difference between the old horror of King and Straub and the new: an heroic journey versus the modern paraphernalia that freeze-frames the nightmare. The house is 'almost infinite', a description which contains the echo of The House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski, whose house is an endlessly expanding black space that swallows warmth, light and life. The black house itself - no longer black, but 'faded to the leaden grey-black of thunderheads and dismal seas and the hulls of wrecked ships' - is the place for which the novel's heroes must search and then enter if they are to rescue the fourth child, abducted but still alive. There is a serial killer on the loose, one who writes to the mothers ('the ex-mothers'), and who is a paedophile, a cannibal and, as this is recognisably King's world, who possesses something far worse than these merely earthbound qualities.
There are already three dead - strangled, dissected and partially eaten. In the town of French Landing, the children are being 'harvested like wheat'. At the Nelson Hotel, 'you can die on a fixed income and the last sound you hear could well be the creaking of bedsprings over your head as some other helpless old loser jacks off'. There are also pages as evocative of a certain, terrible and lonely life as viewed in an Edward Hopper painting. Together, they have produced a novel that is, on occasion, the literary equivalent of two divas singing their hearts out, stretching every last note in an attempt to continue to be heard and not to be outdone.
Peter Straub, with whom King has written Black House, a sequel to the multi-million selling The Talisman published 17 years ago, is a different sort of writer more wordy, more descriptive, more literary even. King's language is that of the chatty, confiding, small-town American given to statements as colloquial as they are chilling: 'His sanity may not be gone forever,' he writes of a man pushed to his mental limit, 'but it's certainly taken the wife and kids and gone to Disney World.'
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