The Talisman

Jesus, look at the number of updates Stan has lately compared with my few- I've been slacking. Perhaps it helps that he's been reading children's lit, but I have the next best thing- a fantasy novel. Fantasy was a genre that for a long time I refused to give any credit. Friends would praise The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, and I would call them books for nerds obsessed with wizards and dragons. I guess that makes me quite the hypocrite, because this book is just as nerdy, but I've been binging on Stephen King books lately and I found The Talisman to be really good. In it, a boy journeys across America (and a smaller world similar to America, but in another universe called The Territories ) to find the Talisman which can save his cancer-stricken mother's life. On the way he befriends a werewolf, avoids his best friend's villainous father, and eventually becomes god. You see, I told you it would sound really nerdy. There's not much to take away from the book aside from a well-crafted story- a concluding moral about the idea of ownership seems a little bit tacked on at the end, but isn't really forced on the reader. The Talisman was written during a time when King was on all sorts of drugs (I hear he had no recollection of writing Cujo) and the creativity shows. His prose is usually good enough to keep my interest, but King really is on top of his game writing about gunfights, which I couldn't get enough of. The Talisman was meant to be a stand-alone novel, but a sequel was made back in 2001 that ret-conned the whole story into the Dark Tower series, which is what got me into Stephen King in the first place, so I had to give them both a read. Now, I think it's time to get back into the original series- Dark Tower V, Wolves of the Calla is up next.