though; while the haunted-house thing was certainly part of the plan when we started work on Black House, it quickly became secondary to the monster who’d built the haunted house. But that’s okay. If a book comes alive, it tells you what it wants . . . and Black House was very lively, even when it was nothing but a letter and a number—T2.
What else do I remember about the creation? I remember Peter remarking that an old monster would be hard to catch. “Everyone overlooks old monsters,” he said. From there we started talking about old folks’ homes, retirement communities, Alzheimer’s. I might have been the one who said Alzheimer’s would be the perfect cover for an old monster. That’s the way we did it, I think. It’s like playing tennis with no ball, no net, no rackets, no court, and then gradually thinking those things into existence. We’d set The Talisman in New England, at least to start with; Stephen King territory. Peter wanted to revisit the Wisconsin settings of his early books in T2, and that was fine with me. The final focusing touch? My wife and I have a summer house on a lake in western Maine (it is the house, in fact, where Peter and I finished writing The Talisman in the summer of 1982). My study there is in a second-floor room that overlooks the living room. One night I was in my study, goofing around with something (I think it was spot rewrites for Dreamcatcher), while Tabby watched TV down below. It was the History Channel, and they were talking about a serial killer named Albert Fish. “Who in their right mind would have suspected such a distinguished old man?” the narrator asked, and then my wife changed the channel. I ran to the rail overlooking the living room and shouted, “Change that back!” My wife’s a wonderful woman who understands my frenzies. She switched back to the Fish documentary without a single question. (But with at least one comment: “Steve, this is really gross.” “I know,” I said happily.) Later that night, I wrote Peter Straub an e-mail suggesting Fish as the template for our villain, a villain who eventually became known as the Fisherman. There was more to it than this— the creation of Black House happened in a series of layers—but I think you get the idea. The actual creation of the story was a nearly perfect collaboration. It would move forward . . . pause . . . move forward again . . . pause again. And we always had Jack Sawyer at the center. He was the axis from which the entire story spun itself out. Even before we wrote anything down, there was that powerful, unifying curiosity: how does the child become a man, especially when the child has been through a series of fantastic adventures in another world? How does such a person attain maturity and an adult’s rationality? How would he maintain those things if he discovered that the world of the Territories was not just a dream? And what if he found it necessary to return there? Those were the questions that energized us and guided our imaginations as we went from talk to outline and finally to book. Answering them was not always easy, but the act of collaboration has some unique comforts. One of them is that if you find yourself absolutely and completely stymied, you can turn things over to your running buddy!
The actual writing of Black House was accomplished in much the same fashion as The Talisman: by turns. Peter would write for a while, then send the book to me. I’d write for a while and then send it back to him. We had rather more consultations this time (both by phone and by e-mail), because Black House is very different in structure from The Talisman. T1 was a quest novel, mostly populated by young people. T2/Black House has a wider range of characters, and holds a pleasingly complex mystery at its core, as well as some interesting connections to the Dark Tower novels (and that, Constant Reader, was actually Peter’s idea). Complex plot or not, the writing went quite smoothly.
In the end, we tried to write the kind of page-turning suspense novel that readers will like. And in order to do that, we had to please ourselves. It should be enough to say that in this case, we did. It was a complete pleasure to revisit Jack Sawyer and to revisit the Territories.
Steve King
July 3, 2001
Copyright © 2001 by Stephen King and Peter Straub
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
A limited edition of this book has been published by Donald M. Grant, Publisher, Inc., Hampton Falls, New Hampshire.
Permission Acknowledgments
I CAN’T GET STARTED, by Ira Gershwin and Vernon Duke © 1935 (Renewed) Ira Gershwin Music and Chappell & Co. All Rights o/b/o Ira Gershwin Music administered by WB Music Corp. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.WARNER BROS. PUBLICATIONS U.S. INC., Miami, FL 33014
QUEEN OF THE WORLD, by Gary Louris, Tim O’Reagan, Bob Ezrin © 2000 Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. (BMI), Absinthe Music (BMI) & Under-Cut-Music Publ. Co. (PRS). All Rights o/b/o Absinthe Music administered by Warner- Tamerlane Publishing Corp. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission. WARNER BROS. PUBLICATIONS U.S. INC., Miami, FL 33014
WHEN THE RED, RED ROBIN COMES BOB, BOB BOBBIN’ ALONG Written by Harry Woods © 1926, renewed All rights controlled by Callicoon Music. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
King, Stephen.
Black house: a novel / Stephen King and Peter Straub.
p. cm.
1. Ex–police officers—Fiction. 2. Serial murders—Fiction. 3. Wisconsin—Fiction. I. Straub, Peter. II. Title.
PS3561.I483 B57 2001
813'.54—dc21 2001031657
eISBN: 978-1-58836-054-0
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