Evil follows Jack to small-town Wisconsin

BLACK HOUSE. Stephen King and Peter Straub. Random. 623 pages. $29.
BY RENE RODRIGUEZ

Once upon a time -- 20 years ago, to be exact -- a boy named Jack Sawyer traveled to a parallel universe known as the Territories, a place of great, wondrous magic. It was there that Jack befriended a benevolent werewolf, battled an evil shaman and managed to save his mother's life. When he returned, Jack was forever changed, his eyes opened to a world few people knew existed.

Those adventures were recounted in The Talisman, the 1981 bestseller by Stephen King and Peter Straub. In their infinitely grimmer, darker sequel Black House, Jack is now an adult, his adventures repressed and forgotten. After quitting the LAPD, where his detective work dredged up too many unpleasant memories, Jack moved to a small town in Wisconsin, where he leads a peaceful, if lonely, life, interrupted by the occasional hallucination, a persistent remnant of his fantastical childhood.

Then the murders begin. A serial killer, dubbed ``The Fisherman'' by the terrified locals, is preying on children. Two are already dead, a third is missing, and more are soon to follow. What's worse, the Fisherman doesn't merely kill his victims; he eats them, too -- parts of them, anyway -- and on occasion even sends the stray limb through the mail to taunt the authorities, daring them to catch him.

The local police chief, a good-hearted but basically hapless man, hasn't a clue how to do that. He turns to Jack, whose visit to the Territories left him with a near-psychic intuition ideal for detective work. But despite the severity of the situation, Jack is reluctant to get involved.

``He had come to Norway Valley in flight from a world that had abruptly turned unreliable and rubbery, as if liquefying under thermal pressure. During his last month in Los Angeles, the thermal pressure had become intolerable. Grotesque possibilities leered from darkened windows and the gaps between buildings, threatening to take form. . . . He had escaped to this obscure pocket of the countryside, this shelter, this haven at the edge of a yellow meadow, removed from the world of threat and madness. However, the layers of removal had failed to do their job. He would have to conclude that what he had fled had spent the last three years sniffing his trail and had finally succeeded in tracking him down.''

Eventually, though, Jack gives in and agrees to help, and his decision will bring him back to that surreal land where jackrabbits the size of kangaroos hop freely, good magic exists side-by-side with bad and the fate of all existence -- in this world and beyond -- is in peril.

Black House leaves behind the Mark Twain-ish gentleness of the first book in favor of the nightmarish surrealism of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. The serial-killer plotline initially gives the book the feel of a Thomas Harris procedural, complete with grisly realism. But that turns out to be just a hook for the story's final destination, which reveals Black House to be a work of dark fantasy, one closer in subject to King's ongoing Dark Tower saga (whose complex mythos figures prominently here) than to Hannibal Lecter.

King, in fact, is the commanding voice in Black House. The book's vivid, carefully detailed depiction of small-town life, its folksy, common-man characters confronted by supernatural evil and even the plot's structure, which follows a group of characters as they band together for a life-and-death showdown against larger-than-life monsters, are all familiar tropes of King's novels. Straub's influence is felt mostly in the writing, which takes the kind of elegant, stylistic chances for which the author is known, including the book's collective first-person narrative voice, which is a bit off-putting at first but quickly becomes hugely satisfying, delivering an omniscient, almost cinematic view of the action.

Black House reminds you that although King and Straub are best known for their abilities to tap into our collective nightmares, their true strength, and the quality that makes this novel so engrossing, lies in depicting ordinary situations with uncommon perception and understanding. The disintegration of a father's sanity upon learning his son has gone missing, the lynch-mob mentality that spreads among the townspeople or the wormy doggedness of a shady reporter yearning to make headlines are three driving subplots, and all are more compelling than the book's flights of horrific fancy.

It's probably no accident that for all of Black House's otherworldly terrors, the greatest evil lurking in its pages turns out to be flesh-and-blood. King and Straub know that when it comes to genuinely frightening a reader, no woolly monster can ever compete with plain old human beings.

© 2001 The Miami Herald and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.