Black House

Letter from the Editor

In November 1999, our publisher, Ann Godoff, called me into her office and handed me a piece of paper. She said, “We’re bidding on this book. We’ll know tomorrow if we get it.” The book was a sequel to The Talisman, the 1984 bestseller by Stephen King and Peter Straub. “If we do,” Ann continued, “you’ll be the editor.” I had been at Random House four years by then, starting as an editorial assistant, and, needless to say, most of my negotiations didn’t involve the kind of numbers I was seeing on that piece of paper. I think I nodded mutely, went back to my office, and pondered my incredible luck. Random House got the book, of course, and I have been asked dozens of times since then, “What’s it like to work with these guys?” The answer is: a lot of fun.

For a while there, working on Black House, I had the best job in publishing. I was the editor of a very big book and my main responsibility was to leave the authors alone and let them do what they do best. I’ve read a little bit of the e-mail correspondence between the two as they were hammering out ideas for the book, and the creative juices were positively pouring—characters, secondary characters, family histories, creepy details, spooky coincidences, spine-tingling situations, you name it, enough for three sequels. At one point, when Peter Straub was planning a visit to Stephen King to nail down some details, King wrote, “I’m really looking forward to getting down to work with you next week, Peter. If ever there were two guys who need to stop generating notes and ideas, it’s us.”

Once they decided what to do with—and to—Jack Sawyer, their protagonist, they started writing. Each would write a while and then e-mail his pages to the other, like a runner passing a baton on to his teammate. They had a general outline for Black House, as they had had for the original Talisman, but in the hands of these writers, anything can happen, outline or not. And, if I may mix my sports metaphors, it’s a bit like watching two fantastic tennis players in the most intense volley of their careers. One of them would describe the actual Black House, for example, and it would fall to the other to, say, describe Jack flipping over to the Territories—the book’s alternate universe—for the first time. One of them would give us our first stomach-churning look at the villainous Burny; the other would conjure the evil Crow Gorg luring the Fisherman’s next victim into a hedge, leaving nothing but a little shoe behind. Did they need an editor pushing them along, guiding them, offering encouragement? Nah, not these guys. The inherent thrill of taking that baton and running with it was all they needed. I think that thrill comes through on every page of the book.

By the time we signed Black House, I had already worked with Peter for a couple of years on a couple of books. We were veterans of several lunches, many late-night e-mails (it used to seem that Peter did nearly all of his work between 2 a.m. and dawn), in-house meetings with publicists and marketing people, dinners with book clubs, even, once, an ungodly early train ride to Baltimore for a book fair where we were guest speakers. As Black House morphed from idea to outline to book,I checked in with Peter now and again to see how it was going. Easy job. He’d say it was going fine and then we’d shoot the breeze and say sayonara for another month or so. At one point, though, I needed to ask Stephen King about something. I had never met him and had e-mailed him only once, briefly, to say how thrilled I was when we acquired the book. My quandary was this: Just what did I call him? Here’s how I finally handled it:

“Dear Steve (may I call you Steve? I usually just refer to you as ‘stephenking’ when left to my own devices as I can’t imagine anything as presumptuous as ‘So Steve said to me the other day’ coming out of my mouth, but it seems most people who know you call you Steve and you don’t strike me as the type who would want to be addressed as Mr. King but I trust you’ll correct me if I’m taking unwelcome liberties):” . . . . and then I asked him whatever it was I had to ask him. He replied along the lines of “For what Random House is doing for this book, you can call me Little Stevie if you want.” Like I said, these guys are fun.

They started sending me pages when they had written about three hundred. They FedExed me a batch over Thanksgiving. They FedExed me some more at home over Christmas. It drove me nuts to read Black House in installments, like reading The Green Mile all over again, because it had such a driving narrative—it’s a genuine page-turner—and because it was really, really scary. They had me hooked from that first paragraph, the eagle’s-eye (or, in this case, crow’s-eye) view of a bucolic Wisconsin town with its evil draft blowing through the open door of Black House. By the time we met reticent, reluctant, retired Jack Sawyer, and sweet little Tyler Marshall went whoosh through that hedge, I was dying to read more. And when Burny takes center stage? As I sat in my office that day, reading the manuscript, I must have looked over my shoulder four times, absolutely certain someone was sneaking up behind me. I was so spooked I had to go hang out with a few colleagues until the goose bumps went away.

They finished the manuscript in April, and it was, to my mind, a bravura performance. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that Travelin’ Jack has some travelin’ left to do. I am, as I was through the writing of Black House, on the edge of my seat awaiting that next FedEx package from Peter and . . . Steve.

Lee Boudreaux

July 4, 2001