The Talisman

Stephen King has made his name and his fortune as a horror writer. Ask people who Stephen King is and they will tell you he is a writer, ask him what genre, and most if not all will tell you "horror." This title is well earned, especially with his earlier works like Carrie and The Shining. Not as many people are familiar with his Fantasy work. This is of course rapidly changing with the pending release of the Movie "The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger" based on his "Dark Tower" series. But even fewer people know that Mr. King has partnered up with Peter Straub for another epic fantasy series and this book, is the first in this series.

World Building. This book is a lesson in how to build a world. The concept of "twinning" is not really that new. But Mr. King and Mr. Straub were able to create two fully formed worlds, this enabled a storyline that felt rich, in spite of the fact that the character development was just so-so in the secondary characters. To this day I still have no idea as to the motivation if any of Morgan Sloat. The main protagonistic characters of Jack and to a lesser extent Richard were fairly well fleshed out, the rest, meh.

I am looking forward to reading the next book in the series Black House. This book is set 20 years after the events in The Talisman. It will be interesting to see what has happened with an adult Jack Sawyer.