The Talisman

This is one of those rare moments when I bump a 4-star that I read many years ago up to 5-star. Usually a book isn't quite as magical on the second read, though with authors like King the rating normally stays the same as before.

But here, I realize that I underestimated just what The Talisman did for me. More than once I thought that it felt like Tolkien. I was often reminded of The Dark Tower (which I had not yet read during my first visit to the Territories). A Mark Twain boy's adventure even came to mind, blending with the Looking-Glass element of flipping back and forth between the pollution infested tired modern world and one of magical wonder.

Fans of Harry Potter should like this as well. Not because of any magical jumping candy show more frogs or a really awesome sounding name like "Hermione", but because this is where a young boy is set on the path to becoming a man. Not just aging and growing up, but learning about the important things in his life. Friends. Loyalty. Family. Honor. Integrity. And just flat out doing the right thing.

Jack Sawyer grows up a lot in this book, much like Huck Finn, Frodo Baggins, and Harry Potter before him. Yes, he goes on an adventure, like they did. But more importantly, he learns what it means to remain true to those that call you "friend". show less

Jack arrives at the Alhambra hotel in New Hampshire with the knowledge that his mother is sick and probably dying. In the slow season for the tourist town, no one is around and Jack spends his days wandering around empty beaches and an old abandoned amusement park. His only friend is Speedy Parker, an old jazz musician turned custodian, who sends him off on a journey between world in search of a magical talisman that can save his mother's life. The story is epic in scope, jumping between this world and an alternate parallel world, each presenting their own unique horrors, as Jack travels across the U.S.

Though firmly rooted in fantasy, with our young hero going on a quest for a magical object that can defeat evil in the name of a good show more queen, the novel also presents numerous horror tropes, including lots of blood splatter, popping eyeballs, grotesque creatures, and other moments of gore and the macabre, as well as the occasional gratuitous allusion to sex.

The first chunk of 100 pages or so were slow going for me at first. One, because there's the long build up before Jack finally takes action (he's a kid, so I can forgive him his indecision). And two, because the character Speedy Parker (a.k.a. the "Magical Negro") annoyed me from the get-go, because he's just such a caricature of a person without much (or any) depth beyond giving Jack a boost into his adventure and show up at opportune times to keep him going. King is kind of known for using the "Magical Negro" trope in several of his novels, so I'm not surprised to see it, but still.

Anyway, after those first hundred pages, I was into the story enough that it all began to flow and it carried me easily through the bulk of the story. I simultaneously loved and was annoyed by the character Wolf, as I was with the character Richard. The villains are all ugly and villainous, with not much dimension to them beyond their desire for power and their delight in cruelty. The good guys are very good and the bad guys are very, very bad and there is no in between.

Jack is the only one that was fully and complete character. You get to see him grow from a very young boy into an early adulthood by the end of the book. He has moment of darkness and cruelty in him, while all the while striving to be brave and noble and good. He's very, very different by the end of the book than he is at the beginning.

It's interesting that this was cowritten by King and Straub, because it was so cohesive that I couldn't tell who wrote what. However, the moments of sheer gore certainly had King's particular flair and in general this seemed a King sort of book, so much so that I didn't see much of Straub in it (maybe it's because I haven't read enough Straub, but based on what I have read he seems more multidimensional than this).

So, I guess my final analysis is that I really, really enjoyed this book with some rather strong reservations. show less

Summary: Jack Sawyer's mother, an aging B-movie actress, picked him up and moved him from California to a moldering hotel in an abandoned-for-the-winter East Coast tourist town. Jack knows there's something wrong, that she's very sick, even though she is doing her best to pretend that everything is fine, and to make things worse, Jack's late father's business partner, Morgan Sloat, is harrassing their family, trying to get Jack's mother to sign over their half of the company. Jack must do something, but he doesn't know what, until a custodian at a local carnival tells him about the Territories - a magical parallel world, a world that Jack's father knew how to visit, and which Jack himself can learn to enter. The Queen of the Territories show more is also dying, and Jack must go there and retrieve the Talisman, a magical object that will heal both his mother and the Queen. But the Talisman is in California - or the Territories equivalent of California. And how can a twelve-year-old boy make it across the country and back, while being chased by Morgan's evil forces, before time runs out... in both worlds?

Review: There are books that have a time limit for me, or an age limit. I've read plenty of books and thought "That was okay, but I bet I would have loved it if I'd read it when I was eight/twelve/fifteen." Mostly these are mid-grade books that don't quite make the leap to adult readership, but in the case of The Talisman, it's more a function of my reading tastes changing over time. Because if someone had handed it to me when I was thirteen or fourteen, when I was in the throes of my horror-reading phase, and was devouring Dean Koontz and Stephen King like they were going out of style, I suspect I would have, if not loved it, at least had an easier time with it than I did as an adult.

Because damn, this book was a tough slog for me this time through. It was slow reading, the pacing seemed really terribly off, it rarely drew me in enough to want to go back to it, I didn't get along with the prose style, I didn't really care about most of the characters, I was put off by both the horror/gore and some of the implicit social attitudes in the book, and I knew the quest was going to work out - since that's how these books go - so I wasn't particularly curious about the ending. In fact, I almost DNFed the book despite having committed several weeks to it, and already being 80% of the way through. Instead, I buckled down to some serious skimming to get through the last section (which, unsurprisingly, played out very much like I was expecting.)

I think the pacing was the biggest problem. The Talisman is structurally similar to The Odyssey, with the protagonist on a quest, but he keeps getting sidetracked/stuck along his journey. Conceptually, I have no problem with these kinds of road-trip novels, but in the case of The Talisman, the time spent in the various side adventures seemed uneven relative to their overall importance to the story, and just out of balance in general. Fully two-thirds of the book is spent getting Jack from the East Coast to Springfield, Illinois, and then he covers the distance between Illinois and California in only a few chapters, and without any major adventure.

I also didn't really care for Jack as a character. I got tired of hearing about how the Territories were changing him to this serene, wise, beautiful boy, especially when I found his companions, Wolf and Richard, much more likeable and interesting, respectively. The rest of the characters didn't fare much better than Jack; particularly distasteful was the character of Speedy Parker, who sets Jack on his way to the Territories with a bottle of magic juice, and could be the model for the "magical negro" character that King's so fond of, complete with dialect. (Also, the shorthand of "casual use of cocaine = villain" got me thinking - that's a trope I remember from my teens, when I read a lot of books like this, but not something that I've seen at all recently. Is that still a thing in more current fiction?) The book shows its age in other ways, too, not only in outdated cultural references but also in some of the attitudes about race, women, and homosexuals that are implicit in the writing. (To wit: "These [sexual advances from grown men] were annoyances a good-looking twelve-year-old boy in Los Angeles simply learned to put up with, the way a pretty woman learns to put up with being groped occasionally on the subway. You eventually find a way to cope without letting it spoil your day." What the hell do King and Straub know about how a woman should react to being groped by a stranger?)

Basically, the whole book felt self-indulgent, both in terms of the prose and the plot, without a correspondingly interesting story or compelling characters to merit it. The story definitely has potential: I like the ideas of the Territories, and Twinners, and how actions in one world affect the other; I loved Wolf as a character, and Richard's contrast to Jack; and some of the individual scenes were very tense and compelling... but the bloat of the book quickly swamped out the good parts. I probably would have put up with it (or even eaten it up) as a teen, but I've gotten less patient in my old age. 2.5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: It seems like there are plenty of people out there who liked this book a whole lot better than I did, so if you like supernatural horror and/or fantasy quest novels, particularly ones set in the real world, it might be worth a try. But for me, I think I've grown out of, or at least away from, this type of book, and King's style of prose. show less

This was huge to teenage me, but what strikes me now is hw very adult it is. Not For Kids. But for a younger reader, the experience of a young boy in a dangerous world of often horrible grownups is a vivid one, and the lack of comprehension of many of the details of various incidents adds an air of alienation and confuson that only reinforces identification with youg Jack Sawyer. As an adult reader the tendency is to wince a lot - his youth does not protect him from what John Clute called the punishing of the protagonist. Still, no denying the power of the Twain/Tolkein journey across dual landscapes infested with worldly and otherworldly horrors, often intermingled. King and Straub go all-in on the writing of this, their styles show more expansive even as they blend, but somehow the book remains fundamentally a Kingian exploration of Americana, the highways and byways, the hidden hellholes show less

Ich habe mich am Anfang mit diesem Buch brutal schwer getan und fand einfach absolut keinen Einstieg. Dann tat ich, was ich immer tue in so einem Fall: Ich holte mir das Hörbuch, gelesen von David Nathan, und das eröffnete mir die Figuren, die Geschichte und die Welt. Danach war das Lesen eine wahre Freude und ich muss sagen, dass ich einfach nur begeistert bin.

Der Talisman ist eine Fantasy-Abenteuergeschichte. Eine Coming-of-Age-Story. Ein Roman über Freundschaft, Liebe, Vertrauen und das Gute.

Sicherlich könnte man hier in Jack Sawyer das klassische Klischee des auserwählten Jungen sehen, der die Welt retten muss. In seinem Freund Richard die Rolle des Samweis Gamdschie. Aber irgendwie auch wieder nicht. Jack begibt sich auf eine show more Reise von der Ostküste zur Westküste der USA. Dabei wandert er manchmal in unserer Welt und manchmal in den Territorien. Unterwegs trifft er auf gütige Menschen aber auch auf absolute Monster, deren Bösartigkeit und Perversität einfach unglaublich sind.

Bis er zu seinem Freund Richard gelangt, trifft er unterwegs in den Territorien Wolf, der ihn dann ein ganzes Stück begleiten wird und ein sehr guter Freund wird.

Der Horror kam hier nicht vorrangig aus der Welt der Territorien. Er kam hier aus Menschen unserer Welt, die so böse sind, dass man ihnen ein grausames Ende wünscht. So arbeitet Jack nicht nur für einen Hungerlohn auf Farmen oder in einer Kneipe, wo er nichts wert ist, sondern landet auch irgendwann im Sunlight Heim für schwererziehbare Kinder. Landen ist das falsche Wort: er wird kurzerhand dorthin verkauft. Sklaverei der modernen Zeit.

Seine Abenteuer sind größtenteils sehr erschreckend und gingen mir extrem unter die Haut. Es gab nicht nur eine Situation, in der ich vor Spannung den Atem anhielt. Hier ist Stephen Kings Weitschweifigkeit das eine oder andere Mal eine Verschnaufpause für mich gewesen.

Fazit:
Auch wenn der Einstieg schwer fiel, hat mich das Buch restlos begeistert. Von einigen Logikfehlern abgesehen, ist es eine absolut fesselnde Geschichte, die mich schwer in ihren Bann gezogen hat. Hier freue ich mich sehr auf die Fortsetzung Das schwarze Haus, die die beiden Autoren geschrieben haben. show less

I picked this up because I'm re-reading the Dark Tower series and picking up some of the adjacent books I hadn't read before. This is more of an "other worlds than these" rather than a direct tie-in to DT, but goddamn this was good. I hadn't read Straub before, but it seems like this partnership allowed King's wonderful handling of boys coming of age, forming friendships, and going on great quests to shine without getting bogged down in the overnarration and too much Kingian weirdness. I consistently felt the danger lurking around the corner, wholeheartedly rooted for the characters, and really enjoyed the philosophy behind an alternate heroic self. This was a surprisingly great read, and a great note to start wrapping up my reading show more year on. show less

Amazon book description: "Why had twelve-year-old Jack Sawyer’s mother frantically moved the two of them from Rodeo Drive to a New York City apartment to the Alhambra, a fading ocean resort and shuttered amusement park in New Hampshire? Who or what is she running from? She is dying . . . and even young Jack knows she can’t outrun death. But only he can save her—for he has been chosen to search for a prize across an epic landscape of dangers and lies, a realm of innocents and monsters, where everything Jack loves is on the line."

To answer the opening question, they're running from Jack's "Uncle" Morgan, Lily Cavanagh's deceased husband's business partner. As many times as I've read this, I've never quite figured out why a show more nearly-abandoned New Hampshire resort is Lily's choice of hideout, but no matter. It serves as the jumping-off point for Jack's quest for the Talisman, a mysterious object that can only be found in The Territories.

And what are The Territories, you ask? A world that parallels ours, not only in its similar, if compressed, geography, but in its people. With few exceptions, each of us here has a "Twinner" over there. Jack's mother's Twinner is the Queen, Morgan's Twinner is Osmond, a nobleman; and other people Jack encounters along his path exist in each world. Jack is one of the exceptions: his Twinner, the Queen's son, died as an infant. At any rate, at the resort, young Jack is befriended by Speedy, a handyman who also happens to know about The Territories, and the need for Jack to go there.

It all seems a little far-fetched, and the set-up is slow, but go with it. Once Jack accepts Speedy's story (and accepts his own faint memories of a place he called the Dreamland) ("...when Jackie was six...yes, Jackie was six..."), he's off and running, often literally, to save his own life and that of his mother. And it's truly an epic journey, from coast to coast, through pastoral valleys and grimy villages, with each moment, whether here in our world or there in the Territories, filled with danger and magic and wonder and terror.

I've read this book probably a dozen times over the last 30 years, and it never fails to astonish me. King has a gift for creating remarkable young characters -- he gets inside the mind of an adolescent boy like no one else I've ever read; and his and Straub's differing prose styles blend so well, I can't really tell who wrote what. I will agree with a couple of other reviewers that a fearless and ruthless editor could have done The Talisman some good by excising a little repetitive exposition, but you know what? I don't care. It's a damn good story regardless. show less