Hello everyone and welcome to the Peter Straub cast, One Man's Musings on the Works of Peter Straub.

Each week I will review one entry in the bibliography of Peter Straub in the chronological order of publication,

which brings us to this week's episode, a review of 1984's fantasy collaboration with author Stephen King,

a world hopping journey of discovery, loss, magic, love, and strength.

Today, we examine the story of Jack Sawyer, the young boy, who set off on a quest to find

the talisman.

The talisman stands out from King's other works.

I know that he isn't the only author, but I'll get to that in a minute.

As we all know by this point, he has been labeled a horror writer, even though he's already

dabbled in works that have demonstrated just as much talent for creating stories set within

the genres of post-apocalyptic, dramatic, thrillers, and science fiction.

With the talisman, King, with Straub as his co-pilot,

steers a ship directly into the realm of fantasy. It's an important novel in King's career,

because as we'll see later in the podcast, it's full of Stephen Kingisms. Kingisms, for first-time

listeners, are the traits and tropes and patterns you'll find from one king book to the next.

With this novel, he's pulling from what he's built before, and he's gearing up for the climax to the first phase of his career, which will culminate with the publication of it.

Here, we'll see the staples of magic, the boyhood hero, the otherworldly threat, the vileness that only adulthood can bring, and so forth.

I don't want to get too far into that, as I'll address these tropes in the Stephen Kingism section,

but as I've said in previous episodes, King's early work seemed to be a rough draft for the novel It,

and this novel shares many of the same DNA strands as the later

book. Furthermore, for Dark Tower fans, this novel is significant when placing King's

magnus opus into context. Now don't worry, because I'm definitely going to get to that later as

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