Black House

A Chat with Peter Straub

1. What brought you back to the worlds of The Talisman and the character of Jack Sawyer?

Steve remembered a remark I had made to him years earlier, and found himself thinking about its potential as the way into a novel. The remark had to do with whether or not a house could, all by itself, be really wicked, or evil, or anything of the sort. If so, just how bad could it get? Eventually he got in touch with me and asked if I would like to investigate this question in a sequel to The Talisman. It sounded like a good idea to me.

2. What is the title of the new book, Black House, a reference to?

Two things: the Dickens novel Bleak House, which Jack Sawyer reads aloud to another character, and the actual structure called Black House, which is located off the road within a dark woods, and is a very tricky, very nasty place. As Shirley Jackson would say, Black House is not sane.

3. Did you have any trepidation about doing a follow-up?

Only the usual flutters of stage fright and performance anxiety attendant upon admitting another chef into the kitchen: Will he like using my pots and pans? Is the oven big enough for him? These chefs tend toward the temperamental, you know.

4. Why is Jack such a captivating protagonist?

Ah, surely Jack Sawyer’s charm is rooted in his sharing certain crucial attributes of his two daddies, such as great wealth; remarkable good looks; an easy, self-deprecating sense of humor; wonderful taste in books, music, and paintings; tremendous sensitivity; and finely honed social skills. Besides all that, Jack possesses an intriguing melancholy entirely alien to both of his strapping, well-muscled creators. And if you come right down to it, he’s probably smarter than we are, too.

5. Are you surprised at the cult classic status of The Talisman?

Well, you know how it is: you try to raise your babies as well as you can, give them nourishing meals and healthy values, do your best to make sure their heads are screwed on straight, and then you send them out into the world and wait to see what they make of themselves. As a child, The Talisman was a sturdy, athletic lad, yet given to spells of introspection, days-long periods when he scarcely moved from his little chair, so wrapped up in his private thoughts that his eyes would glaze over, with tendencies toward willfulness and mystification. He always ate well, and he always shared whatever he had with other, less fortunate children. That he should have wound up this way seems just about right, somehow, though you can never take these things for granted.

6. How did you two meet in the first place and decide to write a book together?

During the mid- to late seventies, there weren’t all that many horror writers around, and very few of those were under sixty. So King and I noticed each other’s work almost as soon as it appeared, and we saw that we had certain common ambitions and attitudes toward our bizarre field. After he had given me two terrific blurbs, I read his second book, Salem’s Lot, which had just been published in London, where I was living at the time, and I was so excited, moved, and impressed that I wrote him a letter. He turned up in London a few months later, and we met at the bar of Brown’s Hotel. We enjoyed each other’s company. Later on, when the King family moved to England for a while, we got together a number of times. On one of those occasions, late at night when our wives had gone to bed and the coffee table was littered with empty beer bottles, Steve said, “Hey, why don’t we have some fun and write a book together?” Was I interested, was I receptive? Ahem.

7. Was working together different this time around?

Different from the first time, certainly. We are fifteen years older, and less inclined to Romantic turbulence. This book seemed almost to sail along on its own, propelled by internal breezes.

8. What are the particular challenges of collaborating on a novel? Why do you think you’ve been able to do it so successfully?

All novelists are moody, arrogant princelings who are most tremendously pleased with themselves when exercising their innate right to behave exactly as they wish and do whatever they feel like doing, no matter how adolescent. Sacking villages, relocating mountains, changing the courses of rivers, and slaughtering whole populations are meat and drink to these lads, so as you might expect, collaboration does not come easy to them. A great degree of mutual respect is essential, because that much respect more or less guarantees an equivalent amount of trust. Without trust, you’re lost, you’re condemned to bitterness from the start. It seems that Steve King and I respect each other enormously, and by now there can be no doubt that our mutual trust is well-nigh absolute. Me, I’d damn near step off a building if he told me he’d be there to catch me.

9. Explain your process. Did you write alternating chapters? Who started and who finished?

We wrote alternating blocks of at first fifty, later a hundred pages and sent them back and forth as e-mail attachments. Who started the book off? I’m not sure anymore . . . but him or me, that’s for sure. And the one that didn’t start it wrote the ending, unless the same poor schlub did both.

10. In Black House, a gruesome real-life serial killer named Albert Fish is mentioned. How did you come to know his handiwork and why did you decide to include him in this novel?

The lovely Albert Fish, a gaunt, gray, wall-eyed elderly psychopath whose favorite cuisine consisted of ragouts and bourguignons prepared with the remains of his numerous child victims, has long been a sentimental favorite among horror insiders. Karl Edward Wagner, an old friend of mine and a terrific writer, once used “Albert Fish” in the return address of a letter he sent to David J. Schow, another longtime friend and wonderful writer. David thought it was hilarious at the time, and I still think it’s hilarious. Just before King and I got started on Black House, I read a book about Fish called Deranged, by Harold Schechter, and therefore was completely prepared when Steve e-mailed me with the suggestion that we install a Fish-like creature at the center of our book.

11. But the novel’s real villain is one Charles Burnside, an Alzheimer’s patient who is the unsuspecting host of a very malevolent force from another world. Where did he come from?

Ol’ Burny? One of the beautiful things about this great country of ours is that everyone who is however briefly a child here sooner or later, and most often before the age of eight, comes into contact with a sour, pissed-off, malicious, malodorous, horribly dressed old dingbat who hates his or her guts, and does so on principle. Get off my lawn! Don’t yell! Where did you get that apple? I’m going to tell your mother, you little brat! Burny is an affectionate composite of these lovable neighborhood characters.

12. The actual black house in Black House is, in an alternate world, a dark tower. Should this ring a bell with readers of King’s Dark Tower novels? How does Black House fit in with that series?

Black House is, I guess, a sort of adjunct to the Dark Tower books and the world they evoke. The Talisman was too, but nobody knew it then, not even the authors, since—at least as far as I know—the first of the Dark Tower novels had not yet been written.

13. Are you finished with Jack Sawyer or are there more adventures to come?

Given the tendency of fantasy novels to parcel themselves out in units of three, it would be entirely reasonable to propose a third part to the Talisman series. After all, the first book is set more or less equally in this world and the Territories; the present book takes place mainly in this world; and the third could be set mostly in the Territories. There’s a nice balance in that structure. And, as we learn at the end of Black House, Jack Sawyer is going to be spending a great deal of time away from home.

14. Both of you have great websites. Do you feel you’ve gotten closer to your fans through your use of the Internet?

I can speak only for myself, but I hope so. Steve’s website, set up an maintained by Simon & Schuster, is beautiful and glossy and wonderfully informative—his fans must learn a lot from it. Mine, on the other hand, was set up and designed by my brother John, and it includes a lot of stuff I wrote more as entertainment, as comedy, than as straightforward information. In fact, if you wander into my website and take everything at face value, you will emerge in a state of profound befuddlement.

15. Do you ever troll around on the Web to see what fans are saying about your work? Any surprises?

I know that Steve does not do this, but I do, shamelessly. Yes, there have been surprises. Um. Let us not go into a great deal of depth on this issue. However, some of my work, I might say, has not quite met with universal approval. This occasional disapproval—and even, I feel I must add, dislike—seems utterly rational to my old friend of the swing-set and sandbox era, Professor Putney Tyson Ridge, but it has at times required the services of psychiatrists working in platoons, around the clock, not to mention the expertise of several highly skilled mixologists, to restore my equanimity after encountering a particularly harsh dismissal. Yes, all right, it is true that after The Talisman had been completed, Stephen King asked me to go through it once more and put in the boring parts, but that was supposed to remain a secret. (He felt I had a particular gift, perhaps even a kind of genius, for the boring bits.)

16. When you go to bed at night, can you put your stories and your characters away or are they always with you while you’re writing a book?

I’m sure you know how it goes—children and cats behave the same way. You try to send the little darlings off to slumber in their own beds, you tuck them in, the buggers, you mutter soporific nothings until your own eyes are drooping, and then tiptoe off to your own bed and try to get some much-needed rest. And four nights out of seven, what happens? They come windmilling into your room, screaming at the tops of their lungs; they leap up onto your chest and dig their nails into your skin. They’re hungry, they’re thirsty, they had a bad dream or a scary thought, they are afraid they you have forgotten about them, that you don’t love them anymore, that you will give them the wrong destiny. On top of all that, they’re angry. You never understood how brilliant, how funny they are, you never really comprehended their pain, you got them all wrong, you knothead! The funny thing is, when you line them up the next morning and give them their orders, more than half of them drift off, paying no attention.

17. Which writers have influenced your work?

My collaborator would provide a very different list, but some of the writers who have influenced me are: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Raymond Chandler, Iris Murdoch, Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, John Crowley, Donald Harington, Ross Macdonald, John Updike, John Ashbery. Stephen King influenced me, too, in a completely salutary way.