Book: The Talisman
Authors: Stephen King and Peter Straub
Published: 1984 (Ballentine)
Pages: 735
Authors: Stephen King and Peter Straub
Published: 1984 (Ballentine)
Pages: 735
Reading this book made me wonder what parts King wrote and
what parts Straub wrote. It’s a very King-esque travel narrative with a lot of
his tropes, but they’re noticeably reigned in. I wonder if King wrote, and then
Straub edited. It’s more even than King’s own prose about slowly going crazy
over the course of a road trip when the only thing that keeps a shred of sanity
is the moral convictions of your ideals, but it’s also not as interesting.
Lowest lows and highest highs just sort of level off into a slog you can feel
with the poor kid.
The boy who goes on a cross-country, cross-dimensional trip
to find a cure for his dying mother and the other dimension’s queen is pretty
bland. The only things that make him interesting are what’s given to him in the
end, physically and psychically along the way. His friend’s got a whole
fiercely self-protected logical fallacy to grapple along with the fact that his
dad’s the main bad guy, so that makes the friend’s heroics more complex than
just the good-vs-evil the protagonist has to clearly guide his way.
And they can jump from this world to a magical parallel one
but the magic rules aren’t consistent enough to get a good hold on why and how
this started. There’s a lot of talk about their two dads discovering and trying
to start a business in the realm (corruption ahoy!) but it quickly gives way to
a sort of Geneva Convention weapons debate that doesn’t get resolved before the
good one is killed, turning all that debate into a moot point that could’ve
better been spent exploring or convincing me of its half-ass, selectively
working magic.
Anyway, I’m not really a fan of fantasy. This is like the
lightest fantasy you could read in adult fiction, probably, including the Dark
Tower series, and my attention kept wandering. It just didn’t feel as immediate
as a lot of King’s writing, so it was sort of boring. I guess I’ll donate it.
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