Black House - Large Print Edition

Amazon.com Review In the seemingly paradisal Wisconsin town of French Landing, small distortions disturb the beauty: a talking crow, an old man obeying strange internal marching orders, a house that is both there and not quite there. And roaming the town is a terrible fiend nicknamed the Fisherman, who is abducting and murdering small children and eating their flesh. The sheriff desperately wants the help of a retired Los Angeles cop, who once collared another serial killer in a neighboring town. Of course, this is no ordinary policeman, but Jack Sawyer, hero of Stephen King and Peter Straub's 1984 fantasy The Talisman . At the end of that book, the 13-year-old Jack had completed a grueling journey through an alternate realm called the Territories, found a mysterious talisman, killed a terrible enemy, and saved the life of his mother and her counterpart in the Territories. Now in his 30s, Jack remembers nothing of the Talisman, but he also hasn't entirely forgotten: When these faces rise or those voices mutter, he has until now told himself the old lie, that once there was a frightened boy who caught his mother's neurotic terror like a cold and made up a story, a grand fantasy with good old Mom-saving Jack Sawyer at its center. None of it was real, and it was forgotten by the time he was sixteen. By then he was calm. Just as he's calm now, running across his north field like a lunatic, leaving that dark track and those clouds of startled moths behind him, but doing it calmly . Jack is abruptly pulled into the case--and back into the Territories--by the Fisherman himself, who sends Jack a child's shoe, foot still attached. As Jack flips back and forth between French Landing and the Territories, aided by his 20-years-forgotten friend Speedy Parker and a host of other oddballs (including a blind disk jockey, the beautiful mother of one of the missing children, and a motorcycle gang calling itself the ''Hegelian Scum''), he tracks both the Fisherman and a much bigger fish: the abbalah , the Crimson King who seeks to destroy the axle of worlds. While The Talisman was a straightforward myth in 1980s packaging, Black House is richer and more complex, a fantasy wrapped in a horror story inside a mystery, sporting a clever tangle of references to Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, jazz, baseball, and King's own Dark Tower saga. Talisman fans will find the sure-footed Jack has worn well--as has the King/Straub writing style, which is much improved with the passage of two decades. --Barrie Trinkle From Wikipedia Black House is a novel by horror writers Stephen King and Peter Straub. Published in 2001, this is the sequel to The Talisman. As Peter Straub stated in December 2009, he and King should begin work on a third novel in the series sometime in late 2010. Read more - Shopping-Enabled Wikipedia on Amazon In the article: Plot summary | Terms Twenty years ago, a boy named Jack Sawyer travelled to a parallel universe called The Territories to save his mother and her Territories "twinner" from a premature and agonizing death that would have brought cataclysm to the other world. Now Jack is a retired Los Angeles homicide detective living in the nearly nonexistent hamlet of Tamarack, Wisconsin. He has no recollection of his adventures in the Territories and was compelled to leave the police force when an odd, happenstance event threatened to awaken those memories. When a series of gruesome murders occur in western Wisconsin that are reminiscent of those committed several decades earlier by a real-life madman named Albert Fish, the killer is dubbed "The Fisherman" and Jack's buddy, the local chief of police, begs Jack to help his inexperienced force find him. But is this merely the work of a disturbed individual, or has a mysterious and malignant force been unleashed in this quiet town? What causes Jack's inexplicable waking dreams, if that is what they are, of robins' eggs and red feathers? It's almost as if someone is trying to tell him something. As that message becomes increasingly impossible to ignore, Jack is drawn back to the Territories and to his own hidden past, where he may find the soul-strength to enter a terrifying house at the end of a deserted track of forest, there to encounter the obscene and ferocious evils sheltered within it

When a series of gruesome murders occur that are reminiscent of those committed several decades earlier by a madman dubbed The Fisherman, the local police chief begs Jack Sawyer, a retired homicide detective, to help his inexperienced force find him. But is this merely the work of a disturbed individual or has a mysterious and malignant force been unleashed? Twenty years ago, Jack traveled to a parallel universe called the Territories. He has no recollections of his adventures there, yet what causes Jack's inexplicable waking dreams? It's almost as if someone is trying to tell him something. As the messages become increasingly impossible to ignore, Jack is drawn back to the Territories and to his own hidden past.

Washington Post Book World

Two master craftsmen, each at the top of his game. Hugely pleasurable.

Preceded by: [The Talisman][1] Black House is a horror novel by American writers Stephen King and Peter Straub. Published in 2001, it is the sequel to [The Talisman][1]. This is one of King's numerous novels that tie in with the Dark Tower series. Black House was nominated to the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel. The novel is set in Straub's homeland of Wisconsin, rather than in King's frequently used backdrop of Maine. The town of "French Landing" is a fictionalized version of the town of Trempealeau, Wisconsin. Also, "Centralia" is named after the nearby small town of Centerville, Wisconsin, located at the intersection of Hwy 93 and Hwy 35. [1]: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15119769W/The_Talisman Abandoned by his friends as they cycle through the Wisconsin town of French Landing, ten-year-old Ty Marshall spots a crow hopping towards him down the sidewalk. Then it calls his name. Fascinated, Ty gets off his bike for a closer look - and is dragged into the shadows. Is Ty destined to become the fourth victim of the Fisherman, the serial killer who's stalking this sleepy town? If so, only ex-detective Jack Sawyer may be able to save him. Jack left his old life behind precisely to avoid such madness, but lately he's been visited by strange nightmares and visions. Could the doomed past he thought he'd escaped forever be reaching out for him... from the Black House? Jack Sawyer, a retired homicide detective living in rural Wisconsin, doesn't remember his boyhood journey into the parallel universe called the Territories. Jack is recruited to help find a brutal serial killer who is stalking the region, but is there an even more malignant force at work? 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. When a series of gruesome murders take place in western Wisconsin, retired homicide detective Jack Sawyer is hired to find "the Fisherman," a killer whose methods resemble those of Albert Fish who committed murders thirty years earlier Right here and now, as an old friend used to say, we are in the fluid present, where clear-sightedness never guarantees perfect vision.