Stephen King and Peter Straub, �Black House� ALSO Frank Miller, �The Elektra Saga�
I guess it�s time for a little reminiscing. Back when I was 13 years old, there were two things I read without fail: Daredevil Comics and anything by Stephen King. In fact, since Daredevil was a monthly publication, you could practically count on a new issue coming out at the same time as a new Stephen King book.
This continued until I was about 17, when my interest petered out for both publications. For Daredevil, it was because there weren�t any comic shops in my area, although if they had been available, it�s difficult to say that I would have kept up anyway � the series was in decline, and nobody had done anything truly interesting with the title in a long time. Plus I was finally getting laid, so I didn�t have time for comics anymore. When my collection of back issues, representing about 75 percent of the entire run, was stolen I gave up. I just figured it would be too hard and too expensive to get those issues back.
For Stephen King, I moved away from my house that was located just a half block from the library. I certainly wasn�t going to pay for these books, and even on my frequent trips to Recycle Bookstore, before being employed there. I thought the price was just too high. I still think that.
Eventually, I moved back into the old apartment, and thus back to the locale of the library, and tried to start again. Of course by that time, King had released seven million other novels, and I never thought I would be able to catch up. More so, I didn�t want to, for the few that I tried to read by him at that time were bad � and even bad isn�t a strong enough term for these pieces, most notably, Cycle of the Werewolf and Nightmares and Dreamscapes.
But reminiscing does strange things to a person. Daredevil came back into my interest first, and just in time � right before Kevin Smith took over writing duties, scripting one of the best multi-issue story lines I had seen in a decade. Going back to Stephen King is a no-brainer (figuratively and literally) as I worked in a bookstore and saw more of his books come through than almost any other author. My first foray back into the King World came from sheer penny-pinching � we were discarding some of his titles on the grounds that we already had seven gazillion other copies of his works. I took these home with me, figuring they would be worth the money paid for them � in other words, nothing at all.
Some were crap but strangely enough, others were actually okay and some even bordered on pretty good. And suddenly I was picking up everything by him again, especially as they were free. (Though that�s not entirely true � there are still about eight of his books I haven�t read that I haven�t picked up yet. I figure I have time, and it�s not like they�re going to stop coming into the store.)
So since this book is a reuniting of Stephen King with Peter Straub and a veritable sequel to The Talisman, which I enjoyed as a child, I get even more of that reminiscing that usually gets me into a lot of financial trouble.
King has two standard modes of fiction writing: schlocky horror and dark fantasy (occasionally, he opts for nostalgic reminiscing in short story form such as �The Body�and �The Shawshank Redemption,� which are when he�s really at his best). I prefer the dark fantasy. I mean, really, compare The Stand to Christine and tell me which is the better book. So the fact that this is more fantasy-based is going to improve my view of it.
The strange thing is this book as a whole, while pretty forgettable, started me thinking about poor Peter Straub. I haven�t read any Straub besides The Talisman, so I don�t know the tricks he uses in writing. I see King�s standard formulas all over the place � the referencing of earlier novels, the constant mantra of �ka� which purveys nearly all of his fantasy works, and the inevitable dropping hints that somebody is going to die within the next two chapters. So what the hell did Straub write anyway?
As for Daredevil, I can�t believe how angry this book made me. Taking the story line from various Daredevil issues from #163 to 184, this is a hack job at best. Elektra has always been a side character (who will also be in the movie which comes out in one month exactly, whoo-hoo!). So the story that is revolving around Daredevil (after all, he is the main character, and thus the focus of the book) is chopped up for this collection, setting up major events and never resolving them, simply because Elektra wasn�t involved in these parts of the story.
The chops and breaks are so abrupt that I wouldn�t know what the hell was going on if I didn�t already own all these issues in the first place. I can�t believe Miller lent his name to this project, which was no better than a Readers Digest condensed version of the comic.
And so what have I learned? Nothing, except that perhaps I shouldn�t let my reminiscing influence my wallet.
