Black House

by Stephen King

  SHE 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

  STEPHEN KING 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.

  PETER STRAUB 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

  NOVELS

  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

  AS RICHARD BACHMAN

  Rage

  The Long Walk

  Roadwork

  The Running Man

  Thinner

  The Regulators

  NONFICTION

  Danse Macabre

  On Writing

  Secret Windows

  COLLECTIONS

  Nightshift

  Different Seasons

  Skeleton Crew

  Four Past Midnight

  Nightmares and Dreamscapes

  Six Stories

  SCREENPLAYS

  Creepshow

  Cat’s Eye

  Silver Bullet

  Maximum Overdrive

  Pet Sematary

  Golden Years

  Sleepwalkers

  Storm of the Century

  ALSO BY PETER STRAUB

  NOVELS

  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

  POETRY

  Open Air

  Leeson Park & Belsize Square

  COLLECTIONS

  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 Fishlike 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.