Black House - Stephen King, Peter Straub

Children are being abducted and murdered in a brutal fashion in French Landing. Dale, the town's helpless Police Chief fears for his town and his own son's safety. These murders are becoming more frequent and gruesome and the tauntings of the infamous killer nicknamed "The Fisherman" are driving the towns inhabitants insane. Dale turns to the prematurely retired LA Detective Jack Sawyer. He has come to this quiet little town as a means of escape. Touched by a magical "Talisman" as boy, he has a gift that he hides away from but when it turns out that this is more than just your average psycho surely he has to stop running? "Black ...  Read the complete review

Collaborations, like relationships, can be tricky things. Sometimes they work out and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes combinations that you don’t think could possibly work out come together with unexpectedly wonderful results and sometimes combinations which have worked well up to a certain point stop working and it all falls apart. It is this last category that Stephen King and Peter Straub seem to fall into. Both very successful authors in their own right, their 1984 collaboration “The Talisman” seemed to edge away from their horror writer roots into a soft fantasy world, which had dark undertones, without ever descending into the horror territory which ...  Read the complete review

Way back in 1984, the two giants of the fictional-horror genre that are Stephen King and Peter Straub teamed up to write a unique and spellbinding fantasy novel named The Talisman. The two men combined their immense imaginations to create a Tolkien-esque world-within-a-book; following a courageous twelve year-old boys trek across a magical realm that was awash with wondrous little touches and blessed with astonishing depth. I wasn’t even born when The Talisman was first published, though when in 2001 a sequel (of sorts) finally emerged, one can only imagine the anticipation felt by fans who had waited seventeen long years for a continuation of the original ...  Read the complete review

By the time I’d read a few Dooyoo reviews of this book, it was already too late: my pristine hardback copy (the black version – there was also a white binding available: can we say ‘marketing ploy’?!) was perched on my overloaded bookshelf, waiting in the never-ending queue of books to be read. On purchase it had a fair chance of skipping most of that queue – my love of the last collaboration between authors Stephen King and Peter Straub, The Talisman, saw to that. Then came the dire reviews, and it looked like Black House could be there a good while longer… Nonetheless, curiosity finally got the better of me: just ...  Read the complete review

I was initially really looking forward to the publication of Black House, which was supposed to be the sequel of The Talisman, the first collaboration of the two best-selling authors Stephen King and Peter Straub. However, having read some bad reviews of Black House, I decided to give it a miss. Unfortunately, I forgot to inform my friends and family of this, and was duly presented with the book for my birthday. Since I then had the book, I thought I may as well read it, but before starting it I dug out my copy of The Talisman to read again so that everything would be fresh in my mind. Ha, fat lot of good that did me. Perhaps King and Straub should have done likewise. ...  Read the complete review