The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub

 

Took a couple of nights to read this, for the first time in decades; the book is new to me but is physically about the same age as the mass-market paperback I read to tatters in high school and a bit later, and I am please that it shows at least some of its age. I figured out before I started this reread that part of my latching onto it when I did was about the twelve-year-old main character saving his mom (when thirteen-year-old me wasn't able to--what with reality being kinda a bitch like that) and that was certainly a part of it, but this is a really solid novel. The  Early-Eighties America in it is shockingly grim, almost as scary as any of the monsters and badguys in it; the badguys and monsters in it are all deeply twisted and evil and scary in their ways, but this is really more a fantasy novel than a horror one, whatever it says on the cover, wherever you find it on the shelves. The characters in it all feel observed, the places all feel as though the authors have been to them, no one does anything outside of their own character (and the gradual unveiling of Morgan Sloat/Morgan of Orris is really well-handled, in some ways he never really knows himself). Both Straub and King were funnier writers than anyone really wanted to give them credit for, at least in the 1980s, and there are moments of scintillating wit in here, as well as all kinds of other tonal variation. I'm not sure the novel really cried out for a sequel, never mind a second one, but the choice to end with a quotation of the last words of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn does leave open the possibility. I hope Richard comes off better in Other Worlds Than These than he did in Black House.