‘Everything goes away, Jack Sawyer, like the moon…’
Stephen King’s collaborative novels are one of the last areas of his bibliography that I’d never explored… until now. King has co-written novels with his son, Owen, and fellow writer Richard Chizmar, but his most celebrated collaborations have been with Peter Straub, author of Ghost Story. The two produced The Talisman and a sequel, Black House, and King is currently working on the third in the trilogy following Straub’s death in 2022. The Talisman shares some rogue DNA with my beloved Dark Tower series, but it never threatens to match the highest highs of that franchise. That being said, I still found plenty to enjoy here…
On the surface, The Talisman is a simple quest story in the vein of The Lord of the Rings (a book that looms large here and is even referenced directly in the text a few times), but there are many moving parts that add an unnecessary level of complication to the proceedings. Jack Sawyer, an unfortunately quite dull 12-year-old, goes on a quest to find a special object (the titular talisman) to save his mother, a fading actress, from terminal cancer. Along the way, Jack discovers that there are indeed other worlds than these as he routinely slips into another place and time, which is where the links to The Dark Tower come in (which I won’t spoil here). Where things become murky is that in this other world, everyone has a ‘twinner’ – a mirror image of themselves. This makes the concept of someone slipping into that world weirdly convoluted and unsatisfactory. This, along with the drab protagonist and repetitive narrative (Jack’s two travelling companions, Wolf and Richard, are both annoyingly inept), ensures that this is very much a middle-of-the-road affair. As with all of his work, however, there are some excellent moments here – a visit to an insidious school for delinquent boys, a trip through a radioactive wasteland – but for every compelling section, there is another chapter that feels like wheel spinning.
The Talisman is captivating enough to make me excited to read the sequel (watch this space), but it’s very much second best in terms of King’s fantasy novels.