Black House Read online

  17. Which writers have influenced your work?

  My collaborator would provide a very different list, but some of the writers who have influenced me are: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Raymond Chandler, Iris Murdoch, Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, John Crowley, Donald Harington, Ross Macdonald, John Updike, John Ashbery. Stephen King influenced me, too, in a completely salutary way.

  Jack’s Back: Thoughts on the Sequel

  How did Peter and I come to write not just one but two books about Jack Sawyer and his travels to another world called the Territories? And how did we manage these collaborations?

  I suppose the initial collaboration happened because Peter and I enjoyed each other’s work, and each other as well (we met for the first time in the Crouch End district of London, where Peter and Susie Straub were living in the late seventies). We had been ruled horror novelists and pretty much dismissed by the literary-establishment types, who were at that time deeply entranced with writers like John Gardner, E. L. Doctorow, and Philip Roth (always Philip Roth). Being ghettoized in such fashion didn’t hurt Peter’s feelings or mine, but we didn’t necessarily buy that classification, either. We were just writing books, and doing the best we could to create people who behaved realistically under sometimes fantastic circumstances. I was impressed with Peter because he had such a beautiful grasp of how people behave. Also, the man had a sense of humor and could tell a story. My memory is that we started talking about collaboration at that first meeting in London. The talk got serious after Peter and Susie moved back to the States in the early eighties (to Connecticut, actually, just down the road apiece from Maine, where Tabby and I lived with our three kids). The result was The Talisman.

  Although published in 1984, The Talisman was set in 1981. When Jack gets his first inkling of that other world called the Territories (on September 15th, the proposed publication date of Black House), he’s twelve years old. His creators were in their thirties. And then … well … how shall I say this? “Funny how time slips away” is how one old song puts it, and that’s as good an explanation of what happened as anything else. Jack’s adventures had a satisfying run on the bestseller lists, first in hardcover and then in paperback; The Talisman then settled down to a quietly prosperous life on the active backlist. (Gratifying but not surprising—good fantasy novels have long lives.) Peter went on to write a series of Vietnam novels; I went on to write what I came to think of as the Lady Trilogy (Dolores Claiborne, Gerald’s Game, Rose Madder). And at some point, Peter and I started talking about where Jack Sawyer might be as the twenty-first century approached. The boy would have become a man, we realized, and in order to be a successful man—a sane man—he would have needed to find a way to integrate his mad boyhood adventures into his adult life. And what about his friend Richard? What was Richard up to? (While preparing for Black House, which went under the title T2 for most of its gestation and creation, Peter at one point wrote four spectacular single-spaced pages about the absurd, successful, and unhappy life of Richard Sloat. Very little of it ever made its way into the finished novel, but it’s there if and when needed.) What about Jack’s mother? Alive or dead? What was going on in the Territories? But mostly it was Jack Sawyer who interested us. He was, in a sense, a childhood friend with whom we had lost touch. We wanted to find out what had happened to him. Which we could do … but for guys like us, finding things out means writing things down. Imagination can take guys like us anywhere, but you have to engage it first, and that means writing. We decided to engage. To the best of my recollection, this decision was made at lunch on a day in early April 1999. The plan was to start that very summer. As it turned out, I had a serious accident two months later, one I was lucky to survive (I was struck by a van as I took an afternoon walk), and we didn’t get going until the winter of 2000.

  What I remember with the most pleasure is how quickly Jack Sawyer became real to us again. In both of our first exploratory discussions (New York) and our later, more serious ones (Longboat Key, Florida), we spoke of Jack Sawyer as an actual living person. Peter would say, “Jack must have gone into law enforcement, don’t you think?” I’d reply, “Well, he could have become a lawyer.” Peter, shaking his head emphatically: “No, no, not our boy. Richard Sloat might have become a lawyer, but never Jack.”

  Little by little, we built up the underpinning of a story—a plausible history of Jack Sawyer, the Missing Years. While we were writing The Talisman, Peter had mentioned—half joking, half not—that if we ever wanted to revisit Jack Sawyer, we could write the ultimate haunted-house story. Books are slippery things, though; while the haunted-house thing was certainly part of the plan when we started work on Black House, it quickly became secondary to the monster who’d built the haunted house. But that’s okay. If a book comes alive, it tells you what it wants … and Black House was very lively, even when it was nothing but a letter and a number—T2.

  What else do I remember about the creation? I remember Peter remarking that an old monster would be hard to catch. “Everyone overlooks old monsters,” he said. From there we started talking about old folks’ homes, retirement communities, Alzheimer’s. I might have been the one who said Alzheimer’s would be the perfect cover for an old monster. That’s the way we did it, I think. It’s like playing tennis with no ball, no net, no rackets, no court, and then gradually thinking those things into existence. We’d set The Talisman in New England, at least to start with; Stephen King territory. Peter wanted to revisit the Wisconsin settings of his early books in T2, and that was fine with me. The final focusing touch? My wife and I have a summer house on a lake in western Maine (it is the house, in fact, where Peter and I finished writing The Talisman in the summer of 1982). My study there is in a second-floor room that overlooks the living room. One night I was in my study, goofing around with something (I think it was spot rewrites for Dreamcatcher), while Tabby watched TV down below. It was the History Channel, and they were talking about a serial killer named Albert Fish. “Who in their right mind would have suspected such a distinguished old man?” the narrator asked, and then my wife changed the channel. I ran to the rail overlooking the living room and shouted, “Change that back!” My wife’s a wonderful woman who understands my frenzies. She switched back to the Fish documentary without a single question. (But with at least one comment: “Steve, this is really gross.” “I know,” I said happily.) Later that night, I wrote Peter Straub an e-mail suggesting Fish as the template for our villain, a villain who eventually became known as the Fisherman. There was more to it than this—the creation of Black House happened in a series of layers—but I think you get the idea. The actual creation of the story was a nearly perfect collaboration. It would move forward … pause … move forward again … pause again. And we always had Jack Sawyer at the center. He was the axis from which the entire story spun itself out. Even before we wrote anything down, there was that powerful, unifying curiosity: how does the child become a man, especially when the child has been through a series of fantastic adventures in another world? How does such a person attain maturity and an adult’s rationality? How would he maintain those things if he discovered that the world of the Territories was not just a dream? And what if he found it necessary to return there? Those were the questions that energized us and guided our imaginations as we went from talk to outline and finally to book. Answering them was not always easy, but the act of collaboration has some unique comforts. One of them is that if you find yourself absolutely and completely stymied, you can turn things over to your running buddy!

  The actual writing of Black House was accomplished in much the same fashion as The Talisman: by turns. Peter would write for a while, then send the book to me. I’d write for a while and then send it back to him. We had rather more consultations this time (both by phone and by e-mail), because Black House is very different in structure from The Talisman. T1 was a quest novel, mostly populated by young people. T2/Black House has a wider range of characters, and holds a pleasingly complex my
stery at its core, as well as some interesting connections to the Dark Tower novels (and that, Constant Reader, was actually Peter’s idea). Complex plot or not, the writing went quite smoothly.

  In the end, we tried to write the kind of page-turning suspense novel that readers will like. And in order to do that, we had to please ourselves. It should be enough to say that in this case, we did. It was a complete pleasure to revisit Jack Sawyer and to revisit the Territories.

  Steve King

  July 3, 2001

  Copyright © 2001 by Stephen King and Peter Straub

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  A limited edition of this book has been published by Donald M. Grant, Publisher, Inc., Hampton Falls, New Hampshire.

  Permission Acknowledgments

  I CAN’T GET STARTED, by Ira Gershwin and Vernon Duke © 1935 (Renewed) Ira Gershwin Music and Chappell & Co. All Rights o/b/o Ira Gershwin Music administered by WB Music Corp. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.WARNER BROS. PUBLICATIONS U.S. INC., Miami, FL 33014

  QUEEN OF THE WORLD, by Gary Louris, Tim O’Reagan, Bob Ezrin © 2000 Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. (BMI), Absinthe Music (BMI) & Under-Cut-Music Publ. Co. (PRS). All Rights o/b/o Absinthe Music administered by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission. WARNER BROS. PUBLICATIONS U.S. INC., Miami, FL 33014

  WHEN THE RED, RED ROBIN COMES BOB, BOB BOBBIN’ ALONG Written by Harry Woods © 1926, renewed All rights controlled by Callicoon Music. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  King, Stephen.

  Black house: a novel / Stephen King and Peter Straub.

  p. cm.

  1. Ex–police officers—Fiction. 2. Serial murders—Fiction. 3. Wisconsin—Fiction. I. Straub, Peter. II. Title.

  PS3561.I483 B57 2001

  813’.54—dc21 2001031657

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-054-0

  v3.0