Hello everyone and welcome to the Stephen King cast, one man's musings on the works of Stephen King.

Each week I will review one entry in the bibliography of Stephen King in the chronological order of publication.

This week I'm reviewing one of the books I couldn't wait to get back to rereading, one that I've read at least three times, and a novel that I believe is the last great

Dark Tower novel. It's King's second collaboration with fellow novelist Peter Straub,

the sequel to the much-loved novel The Talisman, in which we pick up with our once-child adventurer

Jack Sawyer, now a police officer brought back into the world of the supernatural to not just save

one life, but the entire multiverse by stopping the right-hand man of Stephen King's number

one bad guy, the Crimson King, a child-eating monster with a talking crow as a sidekick.

A tale of heroism, the return of magic, of monsters, children,

and other worlds than these, the greatly anticipated and very underrated Black House.

So this is a novel that is 100% not for the casual Stephen King fan.

This novel is for the Uber fan, who has to not only have

read The Talisman, but also the Dark Tower series. So not only does it alienate the average reader

who didn't read the original novel, to which this is a sequel, but also the reader who did pick

it up because it's the sequel to the Talisman, but never read those

weird Dark Tower books. And everything that occurs in this book occurs because of the machinations

of a villain from that other weird book, Insomnia. So yeah, I can understand that there are reasons

why people might not like it, but those reasons certainly don't apply to me. The reasons that are

off-putting to some

are the exact reasons why I love this book as much as I do. Yeah, it makes me giddy that

King and Straub finally released the sequel to the Talisman, but the fact that they both decided,

and I believe urged on by Straub, to incorporate it into the larger Dark Tower mythos

...