Buy The Talisman from Bookshop.org here.

Rating: 4 out of 5 swigs of ‘magic juice’

Yep, that’s right! It’s another young male protagonist. I have to say that by this point it’s becoming something of a pattern. I’m really itching for a central female character, but I’m pretty sure my main man King won’t be delivering one of those until… IT, a couple of reviews down the line.

Boy-focus aside, honestly, this book is brilliant. It’s got all the elements of King’s best fantasy and horror writing, with a slightly poetic edge from Straub that shines through. And it’s also, subjectively, my favourite kind of fantasy or magic realist novel – where someone falls from a normal world into another that has all its own internal logic and rules that are nonetheless entirely foreign to the protagonist. Learning through someone else’s eyes is fun. If I could, I’d carry a pair of a stranger’s eyes around with me, just to get to do it more often. Thanks a bunch, police.

I can’t justifiably give it a 5/5, because it’s not perfect – there are sludgy bits that take a bit of pushing through, particularly towards the very beginning. But apart from that, it’s right on the money. I wish I’d read it when I was in early adolescence, because I’d have been besotted. Side-note: this book used the word besotted to mean very drunk, and it took that to make me realise that was the original meaning of the word. If you’re besotted with someone, you’re drunk on them. So this book is also educational, thus ticking every box and legally allowing me to describe it as that rare and beautiful thing, ‘edutainment’.

Review (i.e. Spoiler City, population: spoilers)

One of the interesting factors of this book is its progression into darkness. Jack’s first experience of the Territories, the magic-infused parallel world to ours that he can slip in and out of, is essentially the world of Merlin and King Arthur. It’s a mediaeval setting, with magic thrown in. There’s emerald-green grass and sapphire-blue skies, and the lords and ladies do titter about the size of their wimples. It is familiar, and rose-tinted. A very lovely place, barring the odd wrongun who whips people and calls Jack a goat’s penis. (Please note, if you have found this blog on a search for ‘goat’s penis’, that is all of the goat penis content I have for you. You should leave now)

But as Jack continues his journey, the tone, landscape and inhabitants of the Territories gets progressively grimmer. Evil trees, mutants created by nuclear waste, reverends – they all present grotesque opposition to Jack on his journey. I wonder whether Heart of Darkness had any influence on King and Straub’s writing process, or whether it just happens to follow the same gradual descent into the sinister (but less racist).

In the same way as Harry Potter is a sideways jump into a magical world that gradually darkens, so this is sort of its bigger brother that smokes hand-rolled ciggies without filters.

The writing is wry, and balances poetic imagery and forceful punches elegantly. There are few set-pieces that outlast their welcome – the Sunlight Home in particular is, by turns, gripping and slow. But it’s great development for Jack’s relationship with Wolf, and by making Wolf so intrinsically morally good set against a place of such evil in the name of holiness, it really cranks the sympathy lever until it snaps. I can see why they chose to linger on Sunlight Home… but it slows the pace of the novel.

No matter. This is still a brilliant novel. I’m excited to get to its follow-up, Black House, in this read-through. But given that it was published in 2001, and King apparently pumped out about 400 books a year during the ‘80s, that might take a while.