This is the final Stephen King book for me. I don’t mean I am done reading him, but I have now read all his books. And I think I am pretty close to reading everything he’s ever published. Though I might have some odds and ends from especially epublishing days.
Unfortunately, I think this book is kind of awful. It’s the sequel to The Talisman, a book I thought well of but don’t recall a lot of reading it, and this book was almost very good. It brings us up to date on Jack Sawyer, now in his 30s and a stellar police detective. He doesn’t quite realize that his skill at solving mysteries is tied to his otherwordly powers, but he knows something is up. We are dealing with a serial killer who has currently snatched up a young boy, and has many victims in his past. I thought this was where the book was going to leave it, having the powers gleaned from the previous book allow Jack to solve this mystery, but the Stephen King (and who knows about Peter Straub) couldn’t leave it there, and kept on adding in more and more of the cosmology of this world (and the Dark Tower world) into this book in frustrating ways.
The worst offense of this book though is the god awful narration that uses a cynical quirkiness and camera-lens fakery like we’re not only watching a movie, but hearing the director tell us the moves as he’s making it. I can’t even begin to tell you how distracting the narration was in this book.
(Photo: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10607.Black_House)