THE LONG READ 4: THE BLACK HOUSE
Format Reminder:
1. Not spoiler-free.
2. I’m assuming you’re familiar with the King-lexicon.
3. Not a rated review. Or a review at all, really.
Hello. It’s been a little while.
Well.
It’s been a pretty god damn big while, I guess. I apologize for that. If you’ll excuse the general lack of explanation, let’s get on with business. Real, proper business.
Last time, I talked about THE TALISMAN, King’s first outing with fellow horror icon Peter Straub. It is a joint work more portal fantasy than horror, though it is certainly horrific at times. I used that book as an opportunity to discuss a couple different things. The first being that King’s writings aren’t always horror, and the second being that Straub contributed a great deal to the lore and mythos of the Dark Tower Universe. Well, as I mentioned in that trip along the beam, THE TALISMAN isn’t the only time King and Straub came together, and it isn’t the end of Jack Sawyer’s trials in the name of the White.
17 years after the publication of Jack Sawyer’s dramatic odyssey across the Territories, he is once again called up to task in another King-Straub venture, BLACK HOUSE. While their second outing as co-authors still follows the adventures of Jack Sawyer, now in his thirties, it is a very different type of story. Whereas THE TALISMAN represents a piece of King’s bibliography that veers more towards dark fantasy, BLACK HOUSE is no such story, resting firmly among the most harrowing, terrifying works of horror to come from either author. This time the story follows Jack’s hunt for a dangerous child murderer in the quiet Wisconsin town of French Landing, all the while repressed memories of his time beyond the veil, his time in the Territories, are leaking through.
So there we have it. The scene is set, the story moving. King and Straub, together again, more than a decade and a half later and a monster killing children in a peaceful little town where everybody knows everybody. So come with me, let’s take a look at what lies along this path of the beam, ya ken?
“What you love, you must love all the harder because someday it will be gone.”
I will admit, for a variety of reasons that are mine and mine alone, it has been a very long time since the last entry of this series. Though I won’t pretend that was a thematic choice, it is an excellent coincidence.
Instead of picking up where the last book’s story left off, King and Straub came back to Jack long after the memories of his adventures in the Territories had faded. In BLACK HOUSE Jack is a Los Angeles police detective attempting to ease into a quiet life of early-retirement. This phrase “early retirement” is a bit reductive, but it is the turn of phrase the novel itself often uses as Jack’s own way of simplifying the fact that, for all intents and purposes, he left the force, and law enforcement in general, because of a gruesome murder that begins to haunt his memories.
French Landing isn’t an alien space to Jack. A serial killer case brought him to the area prior to the events of the book, and it was that case which launched him towards national renown, cementing him as a new type of American legend. Whereas in THE TALISMAN he was a solitary and unknown traveler set about his task in secret, in BLACK HOUSE, we see Jack as a lawman. A fighter for justice, a warrior. Knight Errant and protector of the realm.
A Gunslinger, ya ken?
Returning as all good sequels do to the material that precedes it, so too must this essay follow in the steps of what came before. That turn from adventurer to Gunslinger is one we must spend time on. In the Straub Duology, we see a theme that is ever present in the Dark Tower Universe. The young and snappy adventurer turned forever towards the way of the gun. While King has talked little on it, and there isn’t anything in the Tower tertiary materials to really confirm this, Jack Sawyer is at the very least a thematic “twinner” of Jake Chambers, one of the central characters of the main Dark Tower Series.
This Dark Tower talk, though, does not begin and end with twinners and thematic connections. While THE TALISMAN is connected to the Tower in tertiary, mostly broad-spanning ways, BLACK HOUSE is a direct, vital piece of the broader story of the Tower and Roland’s fight. The story fits in neatly besides HEARTS IN ATLANTIS’s opening novella, LOW MEN IN YELLOW COATS as a further exploration of the Crimson King’s movings beyond Midworld, the Tower, and the warriors of the Ka-Tet.
BLACK HOUSE is the Tower series’ version of a “satanic serial killer” story, but with the ubiquitous Crimson King the controlling evil force in the stead of the other familiar Red Monster. Through this exploration of the Crimson King as the primary driving force, BLACK HOUSE gives us Constant Readers new monsters and heroes from the far side of the veil, none of which have ever returned, as King and Straub never went back to Jack’s story for a third entry, though apparently both talked often of it.
All of this, though, brings me back to that conversation I had in the previous entry of this series, the discussion on just how much of the actual mechanisms of The Tower Universe Peter Straub contributed. It is doubtful, at least until King passes and armchair analysts flock towards wherever his personal papers get donated to try and dig through the minutiae of his processes, that Constant Readers will ever really know. That’s okay. Perhaps one of the strongest driving themes in the Tower is that we can’t, and shouldn’t, know everything. Remember what I told you way back there in the first entry of this series. The true first cardinal rule of reading Stephen King.
“What’s on the other end of that portal is none of your goddamn business.”
Across King’s works, most of which connect to the tower directly, all of which connect thematically, BLACK HOUSE stands out as one of the most violent and one of the most introspective. I think it’s safe to say, taking a look at Straub’s other works, a lot of that introspective turn was his, though King did return to a similar sort of story in 2018’s THE OUTSIDER (which we’ll get to eventually). I won’t go into that one too much here besides to say: if anything in that novel falls flat it is that the deep-rooted introspection does not reach the highs present in BLACK HOUSE.
So, there we have the two pieces of what, to me, makes BLACK HOUSE such a worthy and powerful successor to the first step in Jack’s journey. The thematic continuation of Jack’s journey from young adventurer to Gunslinger and the metatextual continuation of Straub’s contributions to the mythology of the Dark Tower universe. By the time of BLACK HOUSE’s publication in 2001, only the first four Tower books had been released (along with the novella LITTLE SISTERS OF ELURIA, released in 98 as part of the landmark and hugely important fantasy collection LEGENDS, which we will get to in due time, say thankya). King was struck by a van in 1999, which nearly killed him and put a pause on much of the Dark Tower’s progress as a series. When he did turn back to the Tower, it was with Straub that he did so. BLACK HOUSE came into being a full two years before WOLVES OF THE CALLA.
There are a few reasons that this timing is really important. First, King has said a couple times that working on BLACK HOUSE with Straub is part of what forced him to stop procrastinating and get on with finishing Roland’s journey to the Tower. The second, though, is back in those parallels between Jake and Jack’s journeys.
Among Tower fans, Jake’s story is perhaps one of the most important and powerful pieces of the series. Abandoned by Roland, brought into a new existence through the machinations of forces beyond what anyone understands, Jake Chambers’s journey from young boy in a strange world to Gunslinger and heir apparent to Roland of Gilead is considered by many (if not most) fans to be the strongest aspect of the main story and the most fully realized of all of the main thematic threads.
Here though, we have a thematic parallel to Jake in Jack Sawyer, who is a young boy in a strange world, who fights for what he believes in and eventually becomes a Gunslinger in his own right (and I do not say this as interpretation or inference. The Gunslingers of Gilead are named outright, and technically, though how and exactly is complicated beyond the scope of a single essay, BLACK HOUSE is a direct sort-of sequel/continuation/connection to LITTLE SISTERS OF ELURIA). While many characters across King’s mythos can be seen as early inspirations and parallels to Jake Chambers, Jack is perhaps the strongest with a journey that feels the most directly related to Jake’s.
So, that brings me to something of a conceptual successor to my big point in the essay on THE TALISMAN. How much of Jake’s journey came from Straub?
Yes, dear reader, I know that Jake came first in THE GUNSLINGER way back in 1982, but by 1997 in WIZARD AND GLASS Jake’s story is far from over, his journey far from realized. King has talked in detail in the past on how the accident in ‘99 caused him to struggle with finding his footing as far as finishing the Tower was concerned, and that can only logically include the paths all of the main characters take in those final three entries.
Then, in the process of writing Jack’s new turn in life, how much of Jake’s journey clarified itself to King? And how much did Straub contribute to that final clarity on where Jake Chambers ends up at the end of the quest for the Tower?
I don’t posit these questions to cast doubt on the legitimacy of King’s story or Jake’s journey or claim that Straub was the architect of the Tower. Instead, what I am hoping to shine a light on here is just that Peter Straub, a horror writer taken from us too early and dearly missed by readers and writers alike, contributed so much not only to mythology of the Tower universe, but to the story of Jake Chambers, one of the series’ most beloved characters.
A lot of us, meaning readers in general and not just the demented and craven beings known as Constant Readers, tend to see the writing of fiction as a solitary and introspective art form, which it absolutely can be, but it is never JUST that. Writing is a collaborative effort, a thing of community. Of first readers and rewrites and sudden sparks of inspiration spurred on by our closest writing confidants.
It seems that, even if only in passing, Straub served as that spark of inspiration for King, and for that, I am forever grateful.
Thanks for reading.
-Billy Don.
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