Black House

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.

Jack’s Back: Thoughts on the Sequel

How did Peter and I come to write not just one but two books about Jack Sawyer and his travels to another world called the Territories? And how did we manage these collaborations?

I suppose the initial collaboration happened because Peter and I enjoyed each other’s work, and each other as well (we met for the first time in the Crouch End district of London, where Peter and Susie Straub were living in the late seventies). We had been ruled horror novelists and pretty much dismissed by the literary-establishment types, who were at that time deeply entranced with writers like John Gardner, E. L. Doctorow, and Philip Roth (always Philip Roth). Being ghettoized in such fashion didn’t hurt Peter’s feelings or mine, but we didn’t necessarily buy that classification, either. We were just writing books, and doing the best we could to create people who behaved realistically under sometimes fantastic circumstances. I was impressed with Peter because he had such a beautiful grasp of how people behave. Also, the man had a sense of humor and could tell a story. My memory is that we started talking about collaboration at that first meeting in London. The talk got serious after Peter and Susie moved back to the States in the early eighties (to Connecticut, actually, just down the road apiece from Maine, where Tabby and I lived with our three kids). The result was The Talisman.

Although published in 1984, The Talisman was set in 1981. When Jack gets his first inkling of that other world called the Territories (on September 15th, the proposed publication date of Black House), he’s twelve years old. His creators were in their thirties. And then . . . well . . . how shall I say this? “Funny how time slips away” is how one old song puts it, and that’s as good an explanation of what happened as anything else. Jack’s adventures had a satisfying run on the best-seller lists, first in hardcover and then in paperback; The Talisman then settled down to a quietly prosperous life on the active backlist. (Gratifying but not surprising—good fantasy novels have long lives.) Peter went on to write a series of Vietnam novels; I went on to write what I came to think of as the Lady Trilogy (Dolores Claiborne, Gerald’s Game, Rose Madder). And at some point, Peter and I started talking about where Jack Sawyer might be as the twenty-first century approached. The boy would have become a man, we realized, and in order to be a successful man—a sane man—he would have needed to find a way to integrate his mad boyhood adventures into his adult life. And what about his friend Richard? What was Richard up to? (While preparing for Black House, which went under the title T2 for most of its gestation and creation, Peter at one point wrote four spectacular single-spaced pages about the absurd, successful, and unhappy life of Richard Sloat. Very little of it ever made its way into the finished novel, but it’s there if and when needed.) What about Jack’s mother? Alive or dead? What was going on in the Territories? But mostly it was Jack Sawyer who interested us. He was, in a sense, a childhood friend with whom we had lost touch. We wanted to find out what had happened to him. Which we could do . . . but for guys like us, finding things out means writing things down. Imagination can take guys like us anywhere, but you have to engage it first, and that means writing. We decided to engage. To the best of my recollection, this decision was made at lunch on a day in early April 1999. The plan was to start that very summer. As it turned out, I had a serious accident two months later, one I was lucky to survive (I was struck by a van as I took an afternoon walk), and we didn’t get going until the winter of 2000.

What I remember with the most pleasure is how quickly Jack Sawyer became real to us again. In both of our first exploratory discussions (New York) and our later, more serious ones (Longboat Key, Florida), we spoke of Jack Sawyer as an actual living person. Peter would say, “Jack must have gone into law enforcement, don’t you think?” I’d reply, “Well, he could have become a lawyer.” Peter, shaking his head emphatically: “No, no, not our boy. Richard Sloat might have become a lawyer, but never Jack.”

Little by little, we built up the underpinning of a story—a plausible history of Jack Sawyer, the Missing Years. While we were writing The Talisman, Peter had mentioned—half joking, half not—that if we ever wanted to revisit Jack Sawyer, we could write the ultimate haunted-house story. Books are slippery things,