And roaming the town is a terrible fiend nicknamed the Fisherman, who is abducting and murdering small children and eating their flesh. The sheriff desperately wants the help of a retired Los Angeles cop, who once collared another serial killer in a neighboring town. Of course, this is no ordinary policeman, but Jack Sawyer, hero of Stephen King and Peter Straub's 1984 fantasy The Talisman. At the end of that book, the 13-year-old Jack had completed a grueling journey through an alternate realm called the Territories, found a mysterious talisman, killed a terrible enemy, and saved the life of his mother and her counterpart in the Territories. Now in his 30s, Jack remembers nothing of the Talisman, but he also hasn't entirely forgotten: When these faces rise or those voices mutter, he has until now told himself the old lie, that once there was a frightened boy who caught his mother's neurotic terror like a cold and made up a story, a grand fantasy with good old Mom-saving Jack Sawyer at its center. None of it was real, and it was forgotten by the time he was sixteen. By then he was calm. Just as he's calm now, running across his north field like a lunatic, leaving that dark track and those clouds of startled moths behind him, but doing it calmly. Jack is abruptly pulled into the case--and back into the Territories--by the Fisherman himself, who sends Jack a child's shoe, foot still attached. As Jack flips back and forth between French Landing and the Territories, aided by his 20-years-forgotten friend Speedy Parker and a host of other oddballs (including a blind disk jockey, the beautiful mother of one of the missing children, and a motorcycle gang calling itself the "Hegelian Scum"), he tracks both the Fisherman and a much bigger fish: the abbalah, the Crimson King who seeks to destroy the axle of worlds. While The Talisman was a straightforward myth in 1980s packaging, Black House is richer and more complex, a fantasy wrapped in a horror story inside a mystery, sporting a clever tangle of references to Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, jazz, baseball, and King's own Dark Tower saga. Talisman fans will find the sure-footed Jack has worn well--as has the King/Straub writing style, which is much improved with the passage of two decades. --Barrie Trinkle From Publishers Weekly Today's literature is plagued by sequelitis; plagued because many of the offspring are abominations. But here's a marvelous exception. Seventeen years after King and Straub's first collaboration, The Talisman, comes an immensely satisfying follow-up, a brilliant and challenging dark fantasy that fans of both authors are going to love. Page by page, the novel reads as equal parts King and Straub, with the Maine master's exuberance and penchant for excess restrained by Straub's generally more elegant (though no more potent) approach

. But the book, far more than its predecessor, is set explicitly in the King universe, with particular ties to the Dark Tower series. Its primary hero is The Talisman's Jack Sawyer, now retired from the LAPD and living with no memory of his otherwordly Talisman exploits, alone in French Landing, Wisconsin a town surveyed by the authors in an unusual third-person plural narration that buoys the book throughout. Terror stalks French Landing in the form of the Fisherman, who's been snatching, killing and eating the town's children. We know that the Fisherman is a resident of the town's elderly care facility, but Jack doesn't; when yet another child, Ty Marshall, is taken, Jack enters the hunt for the killer and the boy. He's joined by an array of locals, notably a gang of philosopher bikers and blind Henry Leyden, a 50-something cool cat whom every reader will adore. Jack is going to need all their help, and more.

 Random House 0375504397 / 9780375504396
Hardcover As New Condition New York 

Price: 27.23 USD

Lisey Debusher Landon lost her husband Scott two years ago, after a twenty five year marriage of the most profound and sometimes frightening intimacy. Lisey knew there was a place Scott went -- a place that both terrified and healed him, could eat him alive or give him the ideas he needed in order to live. Now it's Lisey's turn to face Scott's demons, Lisey's turn to go to Boo'ya Moon. What begins as a widow's effort to sort through the papers of her celebrated husband becomes a nearly fatal journey into the darkness he inhabited.

Perhaps King's most personal and powerful novel ever, Lisey's Story is about the wellspings of creativity, the temptations of madness,the secret language of love .

Kirkus Reviews: The widow of a bestselling novelist reveals that the wellspring for his ideas is a very dark place, indeed. First and last, this is a powerful love story-and love causes people to do strange and remarkable things. It has been two years since legendary novelist Scott Landon died. His widow, Lisey, has finally summoned the strength to begin clearing and cataloguing his workspace. It is a significant metaphor that Scott and Lisey never had children. Instead, their coupling allowed him to produce numerous novels that thrilled readers. His bestselling works are filled with raw emotion. Academic vultures circle the widow, desperate for access to Scott's massive archive of unpublished works, notes and secrets. And some of those secrets are worth killing for. Only Lisey knows the source of Scott's magic, the place where imagination runs wild, the place called Boo'Ya Moon. Scott and Lisey shared a life full of passion, but his death has left a void in her life. She is adrift, confused and stalked by supernatural forces. Incunks prowl, while Lisey chases bools and ducks blood-bools. Sometimes it is unclear where her reality stops & her imagination takes over.

Battling against Scott's legacy, Lisey also comes face to face with her own demons at the edge of Boo'Ya Moon. King is surprisingly introspective and mature here. He showcases the agony and the ecstasy of the writing process. Where Misery (1987) looked at the relationship between writer and fan, this time it is that of the writer and his one true love. There seems to be much of King in the character of Scott (although Scott is both a Pulitzer- and National Book Award-winner). Pain and suffering are Scott'sliterary trademarks. The Buddha taught that the end of suffering is supreme happiness. When King finally reveals Lisey's fate, we all reach the same destination in Boo'Ya Moon. One of King's finest works.

 Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group 0-7432-8941-2 / 9780743289412
Hardcover Brand New Condition New York 

Price: 23.13 USD