It’s hard for me to say whether I liked Black House more or less than The Talisman because they really don’t feel like the same kind of book. The Talisman is Jack’s journey as a kid, and even though it gets dark, there’s still that adventure underneath it. Black House feels older, heavier, and a hell of a lot darker.
One of the things I liked most was seeing Jack as an adult. He’s lost or buried so much of what happened to him as a kid, but you can still see that childhood trauma all over the man he became. He may not consciously remember everything about the Territories, but the way he feels, the way he lives, and even the life he’s built for himself still seem shaped by what happened to him. I liked that King and Straub didn’t just bring back the same Jack Sawyer twenty-something years later and pretend none of that mattered.
The murder investigation gives the book a completely different feel too. Jack gets pulled back toward police work while these children are disappearing around French Landing, and the deeper he gets into it, the stranger everything becomes. Eventually those buried pieces of Jack’s past start pushing their way back in.
And then the Dark Tower connections start showing up.
That was probably the biggest oh shit moment for me.
I’ve read all of The Dark Tower, so once the Crimson King, Breakers, the Beams, and the Tower started becoming part of what was happening, I was completely in. Tyler isn’t just another kidnapped kid. He’s a powerful Breaker, and suddenly what started as a brutal murder investigation is connected to something much bigger.
That’s one of my favorite things about Stephen King in general. Read enough of his books and you start realizing how many of them touch each other. Sometimes it’s a name, a place, or some tiny reference you could miss completely. Other times, like here, he pretty much kicks the door open and tells you these worlds are connected.
Henry Leyden was another character I liked once I started remembering more of his part in the story. He’s Jack’s blind friend, this huge music guy with all these different radio personalities, and he adds something really different to Jack’s adult life. He helps make Jack feel like an actual person who has lived all those years between the two books instead of somebody King just pulled out of storage for a sequel.
Jack is still my favorite character, though. That probably isn’t surprising. I liked him as a kid and I liked seeing what that kid turned into, especially because he isn’t perfectly fine. He’s carrying things he doesn’t even fully understand anymore.
Nothing really annoyed me about Black House. If anything, I liked that it was willing to go darker than The Talisman. The darkness changes the entire feel of the story and, for me, takes it to another level.
I also don’t think you need to have read The Dark Tower to enjoy this book. You’ll definitely catch more if you have. There are connections that are going to mean a hell of a lot more when you already know who the Crimson King is, what the Breakers are doing, and why the Beams matter. But Jack’s story still works on its own.
If you liked The Talisman, I’d absolutely keep going. Just don’t expect another version of the first book. Black House takes Jack somewhere very different, and I think that’s one of the reasons it works.
— Cory Lane