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Feb 19, 2018deebitner rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
Years after the release of <i>The Talisman</i>, Straub and King got together again to write <i>Black House</i> its sequel. I loved this book until about halfway through, and then it disappointed me greatly. But my disappointment won’t be everyone’s, so read on. It’s years after <i>The Talisman</i>, and its protagonist has reached unprecedented heights as a police officer and then homicide detective. Now he wants to retire early and move to Wisconsin - but the place he likes so much has a serial killer with a literal taste for children haunting its streets and forests. The local police are begging him to help, and he finds himself drawn unwillingly into the investigation. Only in the world of fiction and fable would you find some of these characters actually used, although I would not be surprised to find brewer-biker-fighter-Blake fans among some of the geeks I know. (Real life often is stranger than fiction!) And here, once again, we have The Bad Place, a motif King and Straub both love. So far, so good. The disappointment, for me, was that this book Yet Again ties in with The Dark Tower series. King does that halfway through, and it took away from the rest of the book for me. Up until that point, I was enjoying it more than its prequel, but at that point to me it stopped being a sandbox they created together and started being Straub being allowed to play in King’s. Feh. And it was unnecessary - the book was going along just fine until then! If you like that series, I am confident you will love this. If you don’t care for it as much, you may or may not enjoy having it brought in. Four of five stars, but it could have been five of five.