Black House (84 page)

Epilogue

S
HE SITS BY
his bed on the first night of Full-Earth Moon, ten days after her conversation with Parkus in the secret passageway. Outside the pavilion, she can hear children singing “The Green Corn A-Dayo.” On her lap is a scrap of embroidery. It is summer, still summer, and the air is sweet with summer’s mystery.

And in this billowing room where his mother’s Twinner once lay, Jack Sawyer opens his eyes.

Sophie lays aside her embroidery, leans forward, and puts her lips soft against the shell of his ear.

“Welcome back,” she says. “My heart, my life, and my love: welcome back.”

April 14, 2001

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

S
TEPHEN
K
ING
is the author of more than thirty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, the novelist Tabitha King.

P
ETER
S
TRAUB
is the author of fourteen novels, which have been translated into more than twenty foreign languages. He lives in New York City with his wife, Susan, the director of Project Read To Me.

ALSO BY STEPHEN KING

N
OVELS

Carrie

’Salem’s Lot

The Shining

The Stand

The Dead Zone

Firestarter

Cujo

The Dark Tower:
The Gunslinger

Christine

Pet Sematary

Cycle of the Werewolf

The Talisman
(with Peter Straub)

It

The Eyes of the Dragon

Misery

The Tommyknockers

The Dark Tower II:
The Drawing of the Three

The Dark Tower III:
The Waste Lands

The Dark Half

Needful Things

Gerald’s Game

Dolores Claiborne

Insomnia

Rose Madder

Desperation

Wizard & Glass

Bag of Bones

The Girl Who LovedTom Gordon

Hearts in Atlantis

Dreamcatcher

The Green Mile

Storm of the Century

E-
BOOKS

Riding the Bullet

The Plant

A
S
R
ICHARD
B
ACHMAN

Rage

The Long Walk

Roadwork

The Running Man

Thinner

The Regulators

N
ONFICTION

Danse Macabre

On Writing

Secret Windows

C
OLLECTIONS

Nightshift

Different Seasons

Skeleton Crew

Four Past Midnight

Nightmares and Dreamscapes

Six Stories

S
CREENPLAYS

Creepshow

Cat’s Eye

Silver Bullet

Maximum Overdrive

Pet Sematary

Golden Years

Sleepwalkers

Storm of the Century

ALSO BY PETER STRAUB

N
OVELS

Mr. X

The Hellfire Club

The Throat

Mrs. God

Mystery

Koko

The Talisman
(with Stephen King)

Floating Dragon

Shadowland

Ghost Story

If You Could See Me Now

Julia

Under Venus

Marriages

P
OETRY

Open Air

Leeson Park & Belsize Square

C
OLLECTIONS

Magic Terror

Wild Animals

Houses Without Doors

Peter Straub’s Ghosts
(editor)

Letter from the Editor

In November 1999, our publisher, Ann Godoff, called me into her office and handed me a piece of paper. She said, “We’re bidding on this book. We’ll know tomorrow if we get it.” The book was a sequel to
The Talisman
, the 1984 bestseller by Stephen King and Peter Straub. “If we do,” Ann continued, “you’ll be the editor.” I had been at Random House four years by then, starting as an editorial assistant, and, needless to say, most of my negotiations didn’t involve the kind of numbers I was seeing on that piece of paper. I think I nodded mutely, went back to my office, and pondered my incredible luck. Random House got the book, of course, and I have been asked dozens of times since then, “What’s it like to work with these guys?” The answer is: a lot of fun.

For a while there, working on
Black House
, I had the best job in publishing. I was the editor of a very big book and my main responsibility was to leave the authors alone and let them do what they do best. I’ve read a little bit of the e-mail correspondence between the two as they were hammering out ideas for the book, and the creative juices were positively pouring—characters, secondary characters, family histories, creepy details, spooky coincidences, spine-tingling situations, you name it, enough for three sequels. At one point, when Peter Straub was planning a visit to Stephen King to nail down some details, King wrote, “I’m really looking forward to getting down to work with you next week, Peter. If ever there were two guys who need to stop generating notes and ideas, it’s us.”

Once they decided what to do with—and to—Jack Sawyer, their protagonist, they started writing. Each would write a while and then e-mail his pages to the other, like a runner passing a baton on to his teammate. They had a general outline for
Black House
, as they had had for the original
Talisman,
but in the hands of these writers, anything can happen, outline or not. And, if I may mix my sports metaphors, it’s a bit like watching two fantastic tennis players in the most intense volley of their careers. One of them would describe the actual Black House, for example, and it would fall to the other to, say, describe Jack flipping over to the Territories—the book’s alternate universe—for the first time. One of them would give us our first stomach-churning look at the villainous Burny; the other would conjure the evil Crow Gorg luring the Fisherman’s next victim into a hedge, leaving nothing but a little shoe behind. Did they need an editor pushing them along, guiding them, offering encouragement? Nah, not these guys. The inherent thrill of taking that baton and running with it was all they needed. I think that thrill comes through on every page of the book.

By the time we signed
Black House,
I had already worked with Peter for a couple of years on a couple of books. We were veterans of several lunches, many late-night e-mails (it used to seem that Peter did nearly all of his work between 2 a.m. and dawn), in-house meetings with publicists and marketing people, dinners with book clubs, even, once, an ungodly early train ride to Baltimore for a book fair where we were guest speakers. As
Black House
morphed from idea to outline to book,I checked in with Peter now and again to see how it was going. Easy job. He’d say it was going fine and then we’d shoot the breeze and say sayonara for another month or so. At one point, though, I needed to ask Stephen King about something. I had never met him and had e-mailed him only once, briefly, to say how thrilled I was when we acquired the book. My quandary was this: Just what did I call him? Here’s how I finally handled it:

“Dear Steve (may I call you Steve? I usually just refer to you as ‘stephenking’ when left to my own devices as I can’t imagine anything as presumptuous as ‘So Steve said to me the other day’ coming out of my mouth, but it seems most people who know you call you Steve and you don’t strike me as the type who would want to be addressed as Mr. King but I trust you’ll correct me if I’m taking unwelcome liberties):” . . . . and then I asked him whatever it was I had to ask him. He replied along the lines of “For what Random House is doing for this book, you can call me Little Stevie if you want.” Like I said, these guys are fun.

They started sending me pages when they had written about three hundred. They FedExed me a batch over Thanksgiving. They FedExed me some more at home over Christmas. It drove me nuts to read
Black House
in installments, like reading
The Green Mile
all over again, because it had such a driving narrative—it’s a genuine page-turner—and because it was really, really scary. They had me hooked from that first paragraph, the eagle’s-eye (or, in this case, crow’s-eye) view of a bucolic Wisconsin town with its evil draft blowing through the open door of Black House. By the time we met reticent, reluctant, retired Jack Sawyer, and sweet little Tyler Marshall went whoosh through that hedge, I was dying to read more. And when Burny takes center stage? As I sat in my office that day, reading the manuscript, I must have looked over my shoulder four times, absolutely certain someone was sneaking up behind me. I was so spooked I had to go hang out with a few colleagues until the goose bumps went away.

They finished the manuscript in April, and it was, to my mind, a bravura performance. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that Travelin’ Jack has some travelin’ left to do. I am, as I was through the writing of
Black House
, on the edge of my seat awaiting that next FedEx package from Peter and . . . Steve.

Lee Boudreaux
July 4, 2001

A Chat with Peter Straub

1. What brought you back to the worlds of
The Talisman
and the character of Jack Sawyer?

Steve remembered a remark I had made to him years earlier, and found himself thinking about its potential as the way into a novel. The remark had to do with whether or not a house could, all by itself, be really wicked, or evil, or anything of the sort. If so, just how bad could it get? Eventually he got in touch with me and asked if I would like to investigate this question in a sequel to
The Talisman
. It sounded like a good idea to me.

2. What is the title of the new book,
Black House,
a reference to?

Two things: the Dickens novel
Bleak House,
which Jack Sawyer reads aloud to another character, and the actual structure called Black House, which is located off the road within a dark woods, and is a very tricky, very nasty place. As Shirley Jackson would say, Black House is not sane.

3. Did you have any trepidation about doing a follow-up?

Only the usual flutters of stage fright and performance anxiety attendant upon admitting another chef into the kitchen: Will he like using my pots and pans? Is the oven big enough for him? These chefs tend toward the temperamental, you know.

4. Why is Jack such a captivating protagonist?

Ah, surely Jack Sawyer’s charm is rooted in his sharing certain crucial attributes of his two daddies, such as great wealth; remarkable good looks; an easy, self-deprecating sense of humor; wonderful taste in books, music, and paintings; tremendous sensitivity; and finely honed social skills. Besides all that, Jack possesses an intriguing melancholy entirely alien to both of his strapping, well-muscled creators. And if you come right down to it, he’s probably smarter than we are, too.

5. Are you surprised at the cult classic status of
The Talisman
?

Well, you know how it is: you try to raise your babies as well as you can, give them nourishing meals and healthy values, do your best to make sure their heads are screwed on straight, and then you send them out into the world and wait to see what they make of themselves. As a child,
The Talisman
was a sturdy, athletic lad, yet given to spells of introspection, days-long periods when he scarcely moved from his little chair, so wrapped up in his private thoughts that his eyes would glaze over, with tendencies toward willfulness and mystification. He always ate well, and he always shared whatever he had with other, less fortunate children. That he should have wound up this way seems just about right, somehow, though you can never take these things for granted.

6. How did you two meet in the first place and decide to write a book together?

During the mid- to late seventies, there weren’t all that many horror writers around, and very few of those were under sixty. So King and I noticed each other’s work almost as soon as it appeared, and we saw that we had certain common ambitions and attitudes toward our bizarre field. After he had given me two terrific blurbs, I read his second book,
Salem’s
Lot,
which had just been published in London, where I was living at the time, and I was so excited, moved, and impressed that I wrote him a letter. He turned up in London a few months later, and we met at the bar of Brown’s Hotel. We enjoyed each other’s company. Later on, when the King family moved to England for a while, we got together a number of times. On one of those occasions, late at night when our wives had gone to bed and the coffee table was littered with empty beer bottles, Steve said, “Hey, why don’t we have some fun and write a book together?” Was I interested, was I receptive? Ahem.

7. Was working together different this time around?

Different from the first time, certainly. We are fifteen years older, and less inclined to Romantic turbulence. This book seemed almost to sail along on its own, propelled by internal breezes.

8. What are the particular challenges of collaborating on a novel? Why do you think you’ve been able to do it so successfully?

All novelists are moody, arrogant princelings who are most tremendously pleased with themselves when exercising their innate right to behave exactly as they wish and do whatever they feel like doing, no matter how adolescent. Sacking villages, relocating mountains, changing the courses of rivers, and slaughtering whole populations are meat and drink to these lads, so as you might expect, collaboration does not come easy to them. A great degree of mutual respect is essential, because that much respect more or less guarantees an equivalent amount of trust. Without trust, you’re lost, you’re condemned to bitterness from the start. It seems that Steve King and I respect each other enormously, and by now there can be no doubt that our mutual trust is well-nigh absolute. Me, I’d damn near step off a building if he told me he’d be there to catch me.

9. Explain your process. Did you write alternating chapters? Who started and who finished?

We wrote alternating blocks of at first fifty, later a hundred pages and sent them back and forth as e-mail attachments. Who started the book off? I’m not sure anymore . . . but him or me, that’s for sure. And the one that didn’t start it wrote the ending, unless the same poor schlub did both.

10. In
Black House
, a gruesome real-life serial killer named Albert Fish is mentioned. How did you come to know his handiwork and why did you decide to include him in this novel?

The lovely Albert Fish, a gaunt, gray, wall-eyed elderly psychopath whose favorite cuisine consisted of ragouts and bourguignons prepared with the remains of his numerous child victims, has long been a sentimental favorite among horror insiders. Karl Edward Wagner, an old friend of mine and a terrific writer, once used “Albert Fish” in the return address of a letter he sent to David J. Schow, another longtime friend and wonderful writer. David thought it was hilarious at the time, and I still think it’s hilarious. Just before King and I got started on
Black House,
I read a book about Fish called
Deranged,
by Harold Schechter, and therefore was completely prepared when Steve e-mailed me with the suggestion that we install a Fish-like creature at the center of our book.

11. But the novel’s real villain is one Charles Burnside, an Alzheimer’s patient who is the unsuspecting host of a very malevolent force from another world. Where did he come from?

Ol’ Burny? One of the beautiful things about this great country of ours is that everyone who is however briefly a child here sooner or later, and most often before the age of eight, comes into contact with a sour, pissed-off, malicious, malodorous, horribly dressed old dingbat who hates his or her guts, and does so on principle. Get off my lawn! Don’t yell! Where did you get that apple? I’m going to tell your mother, you little brat! Burny is an affectionate composite of these lovable neighborhood characters.

12. The actual black house in
Black House
is, in an alternate world, a dark tower. Should this ring a bell with readers of King’s Dark Tower novels? How does
Black House
fit in with that series?

Black House
is, I guess, a sort of adjunct to the Dark Tower books and the world they evoke.
The Talisman
was too, but nobody knew it then, not even the authors, since—at least as far as I know—the first of the Dark Tower novels had not yet been written.

13. Are you finished with Jack Sawyer or are there more adventures to come?

Given the tendency of fantasy novels to parcel themselves out in units of three, it would be entirely reasonable to propose a third part to the Talisman series. After all, the first book is set more or less equally in this world and the Territories; the present book takes place mainly in this world; and the third could be set mostly in the Territories. There’s a nice balance in that structure. And, as we learn at the end of
Black House,
Jack Sawyer is going to be spending a great deal of time away from home.

14. Both of you have great websites. Do you feel you’ve gotten closer to your fans through your use of the Internet?

I can speak only for myself, but I hope so. Steve’s website, set up an maintained by Simon & Schuster, is beautiful and glossy and wonderfully informative—his fans must learn a lot from it. Mine, on the other hand, was set up and designed by my brother John, and it includes a lot of stuff I wrote more as entertainment, as comedy, than as straightforward information. In fact, if you wander into my website and take everything at face value, you will emerge in a state of profound befuddlement.

15. Do you ever troll around on the Web to see what fans are saying about your work? Any surprises?

I know that Steve does not do this, but I do, shamelessly. Yes, there have been surprises. Um. Let us not go into a great deal of depth on this issue. However, some of my work, I might say, has not quite met with universal approval. This occasional disapproval—and even, I feel I must add, dislike—seems utterly rational to my old friend of the swing-set and sandbox era, Professor Putney Tyson Ridge, but it has at times required the services of psychiatrists working in platoons, around the clock, not to mention the expertise of several highly skilled mixologists, to restore my equanimity after encountering a particularly harsh dismissal. Yes, all right, it is true that after
The Talisman
had been completed, Stephen King asked me to go through it once more and put in the boring parts, but that was supposed to remain a secret. (He felt I had a particular gift, perhaps even a kind of genius, for the boring bits.)

16. When you go to bed at night, can you put your stories and your characters away or are they always with you while you’re writing a book?

I’m sure you know how it goes—children and cats behave the same way. You try to send the little darlings off to slumber in their own beds, you tuck them in, the buggers, you mutter soporific nothings until your own eyes are drooping, and then tiptoe off to your own bed and try to get some much-needed rest. And four nights out of seven, what happens? They come windmilling into your room, screaming at the tops of their lungs; they leap up onto your chest and dig their nails into your skin. They’re hungry, they’re thirsty, they had a bad dream or a scary thought, they are afraid they you have forgotten about them, that you don’t love them anymore, that you will give them the wrong destiny. On top of all that, they’re angry. You never understood how brilliant, how funny they are, you never really comprehended their pain, you got them all wrong, you knothead! The funny thing is, when you line them up the next morning and give them their orders, more than half of them drift off, paying no attention.

17. Which writers have influenced your work?

My collaborator would provide a very different list, but some of the writers who have influenced me are: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Raymond Chandler, Iris Murdoch, Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, John Crowley, Donald Harington, Ross Macdonald, John Updike, John Ashbery. Stephen King influenced me, too, in a completely salutary way.