So not one of his best works but not entirely a bad one either. This being my 54th book by SK, makes me one of em long time readers that SK talks about in his other books. But it's a small quibble - this is still a solid entry in the King canon. But having read so recently, and it's a favorite, I pined for more from those other lands and those who people them. The police procedural elements of the novel create an intense and readable narrative. Though he took an early retirement, Jack is pressed back into service and he soon learns there are elements of the crimes only he can understand, and only if he's willing to remember all the things he's tried to box away in his mind. Jack has become a policeman, and the evil making its way into ours has taken the form of a killer who preys on children. It still features, as the dark force trying to puncture the veil into this world emanates from there. focuses much on the lingering effects of the terrors of his young life but is much lighter on the details from that other land where Jack quested.

Jack Sawyer of is one of those endearing characters, and his journey one that begs for a follow-up.

And Uncle Stevie has himself wondered, giving us the second half of and. So many of King's feature youngsters dealing with adult sized horror, it's easy to wonder what became of these young people when they matured and how they processed the horrors of their youth, whether or not it lingers. 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. 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 travelled 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