Black House, Stephen King and Peter Straub's eagerly awaited sequel to their 1984 best-seller The Talisman (an initial print run of two million copies in the US alone), finds both horror meisters at their scary and gruesome best. Equal parts gothic tale, fantasy adventure and mystery story, King and Straub construct a complex narrative which not only combines successfully their very individual styles but also offers some of the strongest writing from both writers in years.
The last two decades have seen King and Straub achieve extraordinary success within the mystery and horror genre, both challenging its limitations and re-defining its conventions - Straub's Blue Rose trilogy (Mystery, Koko and The Throat) is as knowingly reflexive as any experimental novel by John Barth, while King's The Green Mile wryly recalls the serialised narratives of Dickens.
If their first collaboration, The Talisman, dressed Greek myth in 1980s glamour and goth rags, then their second draws on a myriad of cultural tropes and historical references, from jazz, baseball and contemporary films to the fiction of Dickens and Poe, exuberantly blurring the line between popular and serious fiction.
Set in the small Wisconsin town of French Landing, Black House charts former police lieutenant and child hero of The Talisman Jack Sawyer's attempts to capture The Fisherman, a paedophile serial killer, who is brutally "reaping" its children, dismembering and eating them.
Sawyer, a reluctant hero haunted by memories of a dangerous parallel world, The Territories, and aided by a blind DJ, a band of Derrida-reading Hell's Angels brewers, and the latest victim's mother, travels through the Black House, a liminal site of "slippage" between worlds, in order to find The Fisherman, defeat his master, The Crimson King, and confront his own dark past.
King and Straub strike a deft balance between Black House's various formal elements, with King writing the bulk of the novel's small town and Territories narratives (including the eagle's eye/floating camera device which frames most of the book) and Straub writing the central characters and relationships between Sawyer and his motley crew. King's wry demotic style and word play (plenty of folksy phrases such as "Case closed, game over, zip up your fly") merges easily with Straub's elegant and detailed prose while their forensic description of violence and their assured narrative control effortlessly hook and reel the reader in.
Jocelyn Clarke is commissioning manager of the National Theatre, Ireland (Abbey Theatre)