I'm a big Stephen King fan. I'm an even bigger Peter Straub fan. I absolutely love The Talisman, I think it's gripping, heroic, absurd, brilliant, funny and touching. What a bummer, then, that Black House is irritating, contrived and kinda drags.

Maybe my expectations were too high... I was so excited about this book and I couldn't wait to read it. I don't know how other King fans will react, but I got the biggest shock when some way in I realised that this was not going to be an orginal sequel to The Talisman, but instead a sidestep into Kings Gunslinger series.

Maybe I missed something with the Talisman, maybe there are obvious links to the Gunslinger novels. Maybe I was being a bit blind to assume that it is a stand alone novel, a meeting of two fine horror writers who got together and came up with something unique.
That's what bugged me the most about Black House, that two such excellent writers couldn't come up with anything new and decent to follow The Talisman, so instead they botch up an existing place and characters and weave them all into a plot that belongs wholly to Stephen King.

Anyway... the story... For such a long book it certainly doesn't seem particularly well told and you get the impression that they were getting fed up with it too. The end climax is nothing of the sort. The four men who have braved the house (which seems to borrow quite a bit from "The Book of Leaves", or maybe that's just coincidence) turn up and defeat the baddie in about two pages. It takes them about three pages to get through the house. Maybe the book should have been called "What Happened on the Way to Black House", because they spend hardly any time in there and, once they get in, it doesn't seem to present them with much of a problem.

Jack Sawyer, so cool and noble in The Talisman, actually seems a bit thick in Black House. I suppose he had a lot to live up to,
but despite injecting him with Straub's love of jazz and King's love of cool, he is neither jazzy nor cool. He's just some bloke refusing to remember something, then grudgingly remembering something, and then taking a bloody long time to do anything about anything.

King and Straub seem also to have got into this annoying habit of telling you what's coming. There's nothing suspenseful about this, I never read the words "It was the last time he would see him alive" (or similar) and thought "Oh noooo! No, he's going to die, he's going to die! No way!" Sadly I didn't like any of the characters enough to care. "He's going to die? Really. Oh well."

The only person I liked was Henry, and he stood out as too cool to be true amongst these slightly desperate townfolk and incompetent policemen. Even the Hells Angels - so interesting at first introduction - turned out to be not as great as I'd hoped.

When you get right down to it it is neither as magical, as epic or as moving as The Talisman.

Big shame. BUT, I have read a preview of the first chapter of the next Gunslinger novel. Now that's looking good...