Word: talismans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Talisman, King and Straub (1 last week...
...Talisman, King and Straub (1 last week...
...Sawyer is sheltering unhappily in an empty New Hampshire tourist hotel, where his mother Lily, a washed-up B-movie queen, is wasting away with cancer. A mysterious old black man named Speedy, who tends a carrousel, hints that if Jack can reach California and find something called the talisman, all will be well. Part of the journeying will be through a parallel world called the Territories, a kind of theme-park Camelot, where "they have magic like we have physics." Some earthlings have "twinners" there-Jack's mother is, almost, the dying Queen Laura, and his uncle Morgan...
...real trouble comes with the mechanical series of adventures King and Straub have invented for Jack to battle through on his way to the talisman. The hoodoos encountered in a rancid roadhouse in New York, a corrupt orphanage in Ohio, and a nuclear-wasted parallel-Nevada in the Territories are maggoty and colorful, but also wearisomely repetitive. The horrors there on the page are visually ingenious, but they never echo in the mind. Jack Sawyer has two unvarying reactions, fearfulness and pluck. The co-written sentences are so gaudy and muscular they seem phony, like the deltoids of a bodybuilder...
...Talisman, King and Straub