Weird Tales #327. Thomas Ligotti
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with parting words from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: “It being strictly a history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man.” Although King would revisit the Territories as early as The Eyes of the Dragon, no sequel was ever planned.
Fast-forward nearly two decades, and many words and worlds later, when the question implicit in that epigraph came knocking on the doors of Stephen King and Peter Straub: Whatever happened to Jack Sawyer? What about that unwritten history of the man?
The answer is Black House.
With The Talisman now an early entry in their bibliographies, the divergent novelistic pursuits of Stephen King and Peter Straub — like the fallacy of thinking of them as genre writers — is apparent. As stylists, their voices share next to nothing save a sublime individuality. Yet they remain ideal collaborators, bound not only by friendship but also by an essential enthusiasm, a shared aesthetic that finds the fiction of the dark fantastic an ideal forum for sustained inquiry into pain and wonder, love and loss, life and its potential for meaning. Indeed, the melancholy search for immanence that powered The Talisman resonates more deeply in the works of each man — and ultimately in Black House. And why not? With the passing years, each has witnessed a downward spiral of cultural and metaphysical disenfranchisement — of children growing up in a world where desires and delights are rarely discovered, but imposed by corporate hierarchies; where J.R.R. Tolkien sells fast food for Burger King.
Although wisely eschewing the tagline ‘Talisman 2,’ Black House is presented as a sequel — not in structure or plot, but in its particulars. It is that history of the man, a Jack Sawyer who, like most grown-ups, has pretty much forgotten the history of the boy. Now past thirty, his exploits in the Territories — those days of Travellin’ Jack and his friends Speedy Parker, Wolf, and Richard Sloat — have faded into something less than memories, dim echoes of dreams or childish fantasies. But Jack’s persistent individuality, his gift for ferreting out evil, remains. That desire to detect is the instinct of a theologist — or, of course, a novelist: “I always wanted to find what was missing. My whole life was about the search for a secret explanation.” His adulthood has been spent as a cop, working his way up the ranks of LAPD Homicide, then fraying out with the knowledge that the real mystery remains unsolved — and finally retiring to a rural Wisconsin Wonderland known as Coulee Country.
While The Talisman ranged from coast to coast and into the beyond, Black House is more insular and intimate. Like its protagonist, it is set for the most part (perhaps the better word is trapped) in novelistic reality — not until its two-hundredth page does Jack visit the realm of the Faraway. Coulee Country itself is a fine amalgam of King’s Maine, Straub’s Wisconsin, and Twain’s Missouri. There, the town of French Landing offers the latest incarnation of the setting that King and Straub perfected in ’Salem’s Lot and Ghost Story (and that has governed an entire generation of horror fiction): a “guileless, good-hearted corner of the world” that recalls the past as a finer, better place, yet cloaks vile secrets that worm into the present and threaten the future.
As its name suggests, Black House twists away from Twain and Tolkien toward Charles Dickens, Mervyn Peake, and the grim, grey places where children are more often victims than heroes. Wonderland is haunted by slippage, the real melting into the fantastic in ways more violent and foreboding than those of The Talisman. Although the entropic pall of evil will again demand a quest of the knight-errant Jack — one whose grail is a human life, whose rescue would avert a cosmic disaster — the stakes are increasingly complex and ultimately more fatal.
Jack is drawn, at first reluctantly, into a baffling case of serial murder: the grisly doings of a predator known as The Fisherman, who abducts, butchers, and partially devours children. This vile successor of Albert Fish and Fritz Haarmann hides beneath aged, corrupted flesh, but he serves two masters: his own mundane madness and a force from the beyond that is quintessentially lower.
“Jack Sawyer is acquainted with the infinite, and that makes him a problem.” Alive, awake for the first time in years — “the rest of his adult life now feels so gray” — Jack rediscovers the Territories, and through them, his place among worlds. Central to his revelations is the knowledge that the Territories are more than an unspoiled twin of our planet, but one of many worlds, “worlds beyond telling” that are linked by a nexus well-known to the readers of Stephen King: the Dark Tower, at whose apex is a cell that imprisons the Crimson King.
In The Talisman, Jack Sawyer ventured back to a time when things were not only simpler, but also more possible: “when you’re twelve, the mind and body are more elastic.” Yet the adult Jack has learned a vital lesson — that the past is the source of ghosts and pain: “Yes, it’s always the past. That’s where the hurt is, all you can’t get over.” His singularity has evolved into a profound duality; now he is “a person younger than twelve and older than thirty, stunned by both grief and love” — the best kind of man, one for whom neither age nor flesh is a trap.
The past and its secrets are locked in the Black House, an aged three-story wood-frame nightmare that “looks unbalanced: an off-kilter mind conceived it, then relentlessly brought it into off-center being.” Its builder has turned the house into its own shadow, its paint fading with time into “the leaden gray-black of thunderheads and dismal seas and the hull of wrecked ships. Black would be preferable to this utter lifelessness.”
But life of a kind still haunts the Black House. Like the Marsten House of Salem’s Lot or the eponymous estate of Shadowland, it is a house on the borderland. Inside waits an unguided tour of insanity, with “no plan for the future or memory of the past” — here “only the fuming present exists.” The decor is Twentieth Century vile — Martha Stewart meets Hieronymous Bosch — with rooms offering vistas otherwise seen only on bad acid.
The only meaningful direction is down, past a wall of human faces — “cut off, cured, and then stretched on squares of wood” — and finally into the abyss: the charred and smoking lands of an eternal endtime. There, the Crimson King holds court, hungering for more blood and sorrow, and for the breaking of the links that hold the realms of reality, imagination, and sanity in place.
Like its predecessor, Black House capably melds the prose styles of its masters into a common voice. There are passages where the reader may be tempted to guess the identity of the writer, but they’re infrequent. Even more impressive is the remarkable stylistic risk — this is a novel written in the present tense, collective: “Right here and now, as an old friend used to say, we are in the fluid present, where clear-sightedness never guarantees perfect vision.” The style makes for the least intrusive use of present tense in recent memory; and although the authorial “we” underscores the spirit of collaboration, it further serves the communal nature of the reading experience.
There’s also an appealing elegance to the style, and to the way in which King and Straub construct a narrative glidepath, swooping in and out of lives and universes with remarkable ease. It’s made even more effective by the presence of several profoundly drawn characters, particularly the blind disc-jockey and record-hound Henry Leyden. Indeed, one of the novel’s fine digressions — Jack’s musings on his feelings for Henry — is exquisite and moving; and probably says more about the friendship of Stephen King and Peter Straub than could be written by any journalist or biographer.
There are, perhaps inevitably, a few minor bumps on the road to glory. The discovery and first assault on the Black House by a band of motorcycle cronies known as the Thunder Five comes from deep in left field, but it does produce some of the novel’s creepier moments and down-and-dirty set-pieces. More curious is the patching of this text into King’s evolving lore of the Dark Tower and the Crimson King, which may delight some readers but confuse others — and which seems to lessen the novel’s individuality and its own mythic ambition.
“Sometimes little boys get lost” — and sometimes big boys get lost as well; but not Stephen King and Peter Straub. Black House, true to the promise of its predecessor, is a novel that resists the expected, that charts a course through regions vaguely familiar yet untested in their earlier fiction, that takes real risks and meets its own challenges
Although insistently unlike The Talisman, the novel