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Jack Sawyer is back, older and, perhaps sadly, much wiser. His special skills have
made him one of the most noted crime stoppers in the nation. Ironically, that is why he
left his job as a detective par excellence in Los Angeles and retired to French Landing,
Wisconsin, an Americana-ish small town of no special repute, save for the recent
disappearance and gruesome demise of some of its children.
Like the western law man of old, who has long since put away his guns, vowing never to
fight again, Sawyer is drawn back to fight the unspeakable evil that is terrorizing his
new home.
King and Straub, both masters of the genre in their individual rights, lull their readers
with long descriptions of the people and events that have recently (or will soon) take
place. Their method for this disclosure is the use of a narrative figure, whose identity
is left to the reader's imagination.
The Fisherman is the mastermind here, bringing to mind a pedophiliac Hannibal Lechter.
Unsatisfied with merely doing in his victims, he taunts their families as well as the
authorities. It's not a plea as is often heard --- "stop me before I kill again"
--- but rather a gloating, a conceit that he will never be caught. But in fact, he is not
working on his own.
Similar in nature to King's THE STAND, BLACK HOUSE pits a group of well-meaning townsfolk,
all of whom have been affected by the Fisherman in some way, against this evil incarnate.
Jack is aided in his quest by Henry Leyden, a blind disc jockey with multiple professional
personae; his nephew, Dale Gilbertson, chief of French Landing's keystone kop police
force; Judy Marshall, mother of Tyler, a child who possesses the same "gift" as
Jack; and the "Thunder Five," a group of intellectual bikers. Of course, there
is the usual assortment of "window dressing" and "red-shirts" (named
after those unfortunate supernumeraries on Star Trek; if they wore the blood-colored
tunics, it was a good bet they'd be dead before the first commercial), who provide
inadvertent aid to the villain and comic relief for the audience.
The problem with sequels is that they take for granted that readers of the current volume
have read the precursors, in this case THE TALISMAN. This can cause a bit of confusion,
especially as the current characters drift back and forth between worlds, and references
to the previous one lack clear explanation. Jack himself has been to the alternate
universe known as "the territories" and knows better than anyone the dangers
that lurk there and what needs to be done to bring Ty back and destroy the portal to the
evil world once and for all. But as we've come to see, nothing is ever final when it comes
to books like this.
Also, like novels of this type, there is the requisite amount of gore for gore's sake. The
chills are often predictable, and the authors seem to rely on gory descriptions to make up
for the occasional lack of mystery.
Collaboration is a tricky thing. Several years ago, Jim Bouton, author of the watershed
BALL FOUR, teamed up with Elliot Asinof, whose EIGHT MEN OUT served as the definitive work
on the 1919 world series gambling scandal, to produce STRIKE ZONE. The differentiation in
voices were obvious. Written in first person, the story went back and forth between a star
pitcher and an umpire considering the inconsiderable: cheating on his calls to cover a
gambling debt of a friend. BLACK HOUSE is much less discernible in divining each author's
contribution. Perhaps hard-core fans of each writer will be able to pick out their unique
characteristics. One thing is for sure --- given the reputations of each, the book is
certain to be a bestseller.
--- Reviewed by Ron Kaplan (ronk23@aol.com)
© Copyright 1996-2009, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
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