t may be an accident that the first edition of Black House, by Stephen King and Peter Straub, and the first edition of Bleak House (1853), by Charles Dickens, have the same number of pages. It may be an accident, but it's no mistake. A great house, which stands in for the entire world, lies at the heart of each book; King and Straub refer to Bleak House constantly in their text; Black House is told in a big-voice present-tense panoptikon style unmistakably derived from
Dickens' narrative strategy in Bleak House, a strategy designed (in part) to make the reader see the threads and interstices that web individual events and places to the state of the whole world; a ferocious joviality lights both books; both seem to have a lot of story to get through, though Black House, had some editor been allowed a free hand to wash it down, might have been shrunk quite a bit (see below); and both books are absolutely crammed with storyteller.
(Right away we should deal with one non-issue: which of these two big long-breathed authors wrote what parts of Black House. Superficial brand markers aside—the Straubian jazz bits, which could have been inserted like raisins into a cake by King, and the Kingly loathsome-wrigglies-vomit-from-orifice macros, which are just as likely to have been keyed in by Straub—it is very difficult to tell who wrote what, and not very interesting to try to find out. The auctorial we of the book is the first person plural, not the imperial we with which I started this paragraph; and the conjoined voices of Stephen King and Peter Straub, speaking together as we, are seamless, barbershop. All the important parts of the book are told humming. It is a joy to listen.)
Black House is a sequel to the same authors' The Talisman (1984). It is a lesser story than its predecessor—a kind of anecdote told in a corner of the big war King has been nosing toward in his Dark Tower sequence—but an almost immeasurably better book. Instead of Dickens, The Talisman takes guidance from Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Twelve-year-old Jack Sawyer—whose mother, a former queen of the silver screen, is dying of cancer—must enter and travel westward through a parallel world called the Territories—which is ruled by a dying queen, Jack's mother's "Twinner"—in order to find the talisman which will heal both worlds by healing their queens. It is a great, episodic, epical, thumping story.
Childe Jack—who is a classic Jack in this world, and is rightly called Jason in the Territories—quests west and wins. That King and Straub never used 10 words where 50 would do, and kept telling each other's bits again twice or thrice, hardly mattered: though reading it was sometimes like climbing through a lot of boxcars to reach the engine, the story still pulled us like magnets. Black House is different.
The very model of storytelling art
We are in the first years of the 21st century, and we aren't in Kansas any more. The fantasy quest-propulsion of The Talisman gives way in Black House to horror, where Quest becomes Hook, and catches in your flesh from behind, and no matter how fast you run it's never a Quest you're on but an Attempted Escape. Jack Sawyer is now 20 or so years older. He has forgotten The Talisman completely, because it is dangerous to remember Eden, and has recently retired from his successful police career, and gone to ground, because the corpse of a black man in California has reminded him of the Territories. This reminder is a message, and Jack's attempts to ignore what turns out to be a cry for help from the Territories only make matters worse.
Black House is set where Jack has gone to ground: the small Wisconsin town of French Landing, on the banks of the upper Mississippi, beset by a lot of fog straight out of Bleak House. What happens here, in this world, may be dreadful enough, but it only shadows what is happening elsewhere. Here, in French Landing, a serial killer has been abducting children, eating their buttocks before killing them, writing sadistic letters to the children's mothers, spewing body parts hither and yon. The pleadings of the police chief, who is an old friend, and the increasing number of holes in his amnesia about the Territories, force Jack out of retirement; and the book seems tantalizingly about to become a detective thriller.
But the serial killer is soon identified—if only by the authors, who often address their readers directly, as Dickens used to, reminding them that they are reading a Story which is being told, revealing in advance what is about to happen there—and it is soon clear that the killer is a puppet of a much more terrible figure from beyond. That this figure is himself a satrap of a much, much more terrible figure who is immured in a Dark Tower and whose ultimate aim is to shatter the sweet
equipoise of all the worlds which will allow Him or It to translate all that is plenitude and green into ash and shit, need not detain us here: this is Stephen King country, where we may go later, in other Gunslinger books. Here, only the local conflict is of interest.
The Black House of the title is an edifice, bigger inside than out, full of mirrors and halls and stairs downward through portals into the other worlds. Deep inside Black House, deep in the rotting core of the bound worlds, the serial killer has stored a special victim, upon whose fate these worlds, one of which is ours, turn. Jack goes there to rescue him, but not alone, for he is no longer a Childe, though he retains the intense transparent glowing beauty of the Good Childe. His companions—the
police chief, and two members of a motorcycle gang who read Schopenhauer and have founded a really great microbrewery—go down all the way with him, into the Hades of the corrupted core. They help him rescue the person who must be rescued. They help destroy the satrap, a shapeshifting monster whose head dwarfs his body and who often has only one eye and who is described as resembling both Humpty Dumpty and William F. Buckley Jr.; his puppet, the serial killer, has already been killed, very effectively. The posse returns to Wisconsin.
All ends well. Even some heavily telegraphed twists to the very tail of the story only serve to prepare Jack for more adventures, in some other book, perhaps as skillful as this one, we can only hope. For we realize, perhaps rather slowly, that the big seven-league-boot voice of Black House has been pulling us along with nothing but storyteller stuff, that the essence of the novel lies in the prestidigitation and amplitude of its telling. The plot could be told on a dime. The story is in the telling. Every word grips. I could not say when I have enjoyed reading a novel more. From page one, Stephen King and Peter Straub have promised to give us a joy of storying. I take their word.
