Black House, Stephen King & Peter Straub

[nixie]

Reading Black House, I am surprised with the amount of cross references there is too the Dark Tower. I know a lot of King's book do but this one is a collaboration with another author.

I did struggle with the third person narrative at first, unusual as normally third person doesn't bother me.

Now it is starting to pick up with the disappearance of a fourth child and ex LA detective Jack Sawyer agrees to help.
I feel I should know Jack Sawyer, his back story even his childhood. I have come to the conclusion this isn't the first book he has appeared in, can someone help with what other book he has been in?
For some reason Hearts in Atlantis keeps coming to mind but I don't think it's right.

 

[nixie]

I've found it Talisman, their previous collaboration. In my defence it is over 30 years since I read it and I wouldn't have been conscious of the Dark Tower connection. Now I'll need to search my books to see if I still have a copy.

 

[HareBrain]

I read Black House a year or two back, and like you, read Talisman many years before that. I'm not sure there is very much linkage between the two, to be honest. It helps a bit to know Jack's history (very vaguely, in my case) but not sure it's necessary.

Despite my whinging about King's It recently, I mostly enjoyed Back House, and thought it was a more mature work than Talisman. The opening is for me a very good example of an omniscient narrator done very well, dipping in and out of different characters and with his own distinct voice.

 

[nixie]

It was Jack Sawyer who rang a bell, knew I'd come across him before.

 

[Phyrebrat]

I read The Talisman maybe three or four years ago after I finished the Dark Tower books as I had heard the strong link between them both. I did wonder how that were possible bearing in mind Straub would have had to 'agree' it, too.

I think perhaps it was a very nascent version of his vision of the alternate universes so the references are oblique or perhaps don't quite mesh with all the ones in books like The Stand, From a Buick 8 and Salem's Lot etc.

I'm now wondering whether to give The Black House a try at some (distant) point in the future, but really I'm more hopeful he'll produce something along the lines of his old style like he did with Duma Key.

pH