There is a serial killer on the loose, one who writes to the mothers ('the ex-mothers'), and who is a paedophile, a cannibal and, as this is recognisably King's world, who possesses something far worse than these merely earthbound qualities. There are already three dead - strangled, dissected and partially eaten.

In the town of French Landing, the children are being 'harvested like wheat'. At the Nelson Hotel, 'you can die on a fixed income and the last sound you hear could well be the creaking of bedsprings over your head as some other helpless old loser jacks off'. There are also pages as evocative of a certain, terrible and lonely life as viewed in an Edward Hopper painting. Together, they have produced a novel that is, on occasion, the literary equivalent of two divas singing their hearts out, stretching every last note in an attempt to continue to be heard and not to be outdone. Peter Straub, with whom King has written Black House, a sequel to the multi-million selling The Talisman published 17 years ago, is a different sort of writer more wordy, more descriptive, more literary even. As that message becomes increasingly impossible to ignore, Jack is drawn back to the Territories and to his own hidden past, where he may find the soul-strength to enter a terrifying house at the end of a deserted track of forest, there to encounter the obscene and ferocious evils sheltered within it.King's language is that of the chatty, confiding, small-town American given to statements as colloquial as they are chilling: 'His sanity may not be gone forever,' he writes of a man pushed to his mental limit, 'but it's certainly taken the wife and kids and gone to Disney World.' But is this merely the work of a disturbed individual, or has a mysterious and malignant force been unleashed in this quiet town? What causes Jack's inexplicable waking dreams, if that is what they are, of robins' eggs and red feathers? It's almost as if someone is trying to tell him something.

When a series of gruesome murders occur in western Wisconsin that are reminiscent of those committed several decades earlier by a real-life madman named Albert Fish, the killer is dubbed 'The Fisherman' and Jack's buddy, the local chief of police, begs Jack to help his inexperienced force find him.

He has no recollection of his adventures in the Territories and was compelled to leave the police force when an odd, happenstance event threatened to awaken those memories. Now Jack is a retired Los Angeles homicide detective living in the nearly nonexistent hamlet of Tamarack, WI. Twenty years ago, a boy named Jack Sawyer traveled to a parallel universe called The Territories to save his mother and her Territories 'twinner' from a premature and agonizing death that would have brought cataclysm to the other world.

Black House by Stephen King