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. 


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 En-gland 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 Fish-like 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. 

17. Which writers have influenced your work?
 
My collaborator would provide a very different list, but some of the writers who have 
influenced me are:Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Raymond Chandler, 
Iris Murdoch, Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, John Crowley, Donald Harington, Ross 
Macdonald, John Updike, John Ashbery. Stephen King influenced me, too, in a 
completely salutary way.


Jack's Back: Thoughts on the Sequel


How did Peter and I come to write not just one but two books about Jack Sawyer and his travels 
to another world called the Territories? And how did we manage these collaborations? 
    I suppose the initial collaboration happened because Peter and I enjoyed each other's work, 
and each other as well (we met for the first time in the Crouch End district of London, where 
Peter and Susie Straub were living in the late seventies). We had been ruled horror novelists and 
pretty much dismissed by the literary-establishment types, who were at that time deeply 
entranced with writers like John Gardner, E. L. Doctorow, and Philip Roth (always Philip Roth). 
Being ghettoized in such fashion didn't hurt Peter's feelings or mine, but we didn't necessarily 
buy that classification, either. We were just writing books, and doing the best we could to create 
people who behaved realistically under sometimes fantastic circumstances. I was impressed with 
Peter because he had such a beautiful grasp of how people behave. Also, the man had a sense of 
humor and could tell a story. My memory is that we started talking about collaboration at that 
first meeting in London. The talk got serious after Peter and Susie moved back to the States in 
the early eighties (to Connecticut, actually, just down the road apiece from Maine, where Tabby 
and I lived with our three kids). The result was The Talisman. 
    Although published in 1984, The Talisman was set in 1981. When Jack gets his first inkling of 
that other world called the Territories (on September 15th, the proposed publication date of 
Black House), he's twelve years old. His creators were in their thirties. And then . . . well . . . 
how shall I say this? "Funny how time slips away" is how one old song puts it, and that's as good 
an explanation of what happened as anything else. Jack's adventures had a satisfying run on the 
best-seller lists, first in hardcover and then in paperback; The Talisman then settled down to a 
quietly prosperous life on the active backlist. (Gratifying but not surprising good fantasy 
novels have long lives.) Peter went on to write a series of Vietnam novels; I went on to write 
what I came to think of as the Lady Trilogy (Dolores Claiborne, Gerald's Game, Rose Madder). 
And at some point, Peter and I started talking about where Jack Sawyer might be as the twenty-
first century approached. The boy would have become a man, we realized, and in order to be a 
successful man a sane man he would have needed to find a way to integrate his mad 
boyhood adventures into his adult life. And what about his friend Richard? What was Richard up 
to? (While preparing for Black House, which went under the title T2 for most of its gestation and 
creation, Peter at one point wrote four spectacular single-spaced pages about the absurd, 
successful, and unhappy life of Richard Sloat. Very little of it ever made its way into the finished 
novel, but it's there if and when needed.) What about Jack's mother? Alive or dead? What was 
going on in the Territories? But mostly it was Jack Sawyer who interested us. He was, in a sense, 
a childhood friend with whom we had lost touch. We wanted to find out what had happened to 
him. Which we could do . . . but for guys like us, finding things out means writing things down. 
Imagination can take guys like us anywhere, but you have to engage it first, and that means 
writing. We decided to engage. To the best of my recollection, this decision was made at lunch 
on a day in early April 1999. The plan was to start that very summer. As it turned out, I had a 
serious accident two months later, one I was lucky to survive (I was struck by a van as I took an 
afternoon walk), and we didn't get going until the winter of 2000. 
    What I remember with the most pleasure is how quickly Jack Sawyer became real to us again. 
In both of our first exploratory discussions (New York) and our later, more serious ones 
(Longboat Key, Florida), we spoke of Jack Sawyer as an actual living person. Peter would say, 
"Jack must have gone into law enforcement, don't you think?" I'd reply, "Well, he could have 
become a lawyer." Peter, shaking his head emphatically: "No, no, not our boy. Richard Sloat 
might have become a lawyer, but never Jack."
    Little by little, we built up the underpinning of a story a plausible history of Jack Sawyer, 
the Missing Years. While we were writing The Talisman, Peter had mentioned half joking, 
half not that if we ever wanted to revisit Jack Sawyer, we could write the ultimate haunted-
house story. Books are slippery things, though; while the haunted-house thing was certainly part 
of the plan when we started work on Black House, it quickly became secondary to the monster 
who'd built the haunted house. But that's okay. If a book comes alive, it tells you what it wants . . 
. and Black House was very lively, even when it was nothing but a letter and a number T2. 
    What else do I remember about the creation? I remember Peter remarking that an old monster 
would be hard to catch. "Everyone overlooks old monsters," he said. From there we started 
talking about old folks' homes, retirement communities, Alzheimer's. I might have been the one 
who said Alzheimer's would be the perfect cover for an old monster. That's the way we did it, I 
think. It's like playing tennis with no ball, no net, no rackets, no court, and then gradually 
thinking those things into existence. We'd set The Talisman in New England, at least to start 
with; Stephen King territory. Peter wanted to revisit the Wisconsin settings of his early books in 
T2, and that was fine with me. The final focusing touch? My wife and I have a summer house on 
a lake in western Maine (it is the house, in fact, where Peter and I finished writing The Talisman 
in the summer of 1982). My study there is in a second-floor room that overlooks the living room. 
One night I was in my study, goofing around with something (I think it was spot rewrites for 
Dream-catcher), while Tabby watched TV down below. It was the History Channel, and they 
were talking about a serial killer named Albert Fish. "Who in their right mind would have 
suspected such a distinguished old man?" the narrator asked, and then my wife changed the 
channel. I ran to the rail overlooking the living room and shouted, "Change that back!" My wife's 
a wonderful woman who understands my frenzies. She switched back to the Fish documentary 
without a single question. (But with at least one comment: "Steve, this is really gross." "I know," 
I said happily.) Later that night, I wrote Peter Straub an e-mail suggesting Fish as the template 
for our villain, a villain who eventually became known as the Fisherman. There was more to it 
than this the creation of Black House happened in a series of layers but I think you get the 
idea. The actual creation of the story was a nearly perfect collaboration. It would move forward . 
. . pause . . . move forward again . . . pause again. And we always had Jack Sawyer at the center. 
He was the axis from which the entire story spun itself out. Even before we wrote anything 
down, there was that powerful, unifying curiosity: how does the child become a man, especially 
when the child has been through a series of fantastic adventures in another world? How does 
such a person attain maturity and an adult's rationality? How would he maintain those things if 
he discovered that the world of the Territories was not just a dream? And what if he found it 
necessary to return there? Those were the questions that energized us and guided our 
imaginations as we went from talk to outline and finally to book. Answering them was not 
always easy, but the act of collaboration has some unique comforts. One of them is that if you 
find yourself absolutely and completely stymied, you can turn things over to your running 
buddy! 
    The actual writing of Black House was accomplished in much the same fashion as The 
Talisman: by turns. Peter would write for a while, then send the book to me. I'd write for a while 
and then send it back to him. We had rather more consultations this time (both by phone and by 
e-mail), because Black House is very different in structure from The Talisman. T1 was a quest 
novel, mostly populated by young people. T2/Black House has a wider range of characters, and 
holds a pleasingly complex mystery at its core, as well as some interesting connections to the 
Dark Tower novels (and that, Constant Reader, was actually Peter's idea). Complex plot or not, 
the writing went quite smoothly. 
    In the end, we tried to write the kind of page-turning suspense novel that readers will like. And 
in order to do that, we had to please ourselves. It should be enough to say that in this case, we 
did. It was a complete pleasure to revisit Jack Sawyer and to revisit the Territories. 

Steve King
July 3, 2001