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