The Talisman
I’m writing this as a Good Steve fan, which I’ve been ever since I read Salem’s Lot back in 1979. And as much as I love him and will always buy his books, I’ve come to learn that sometimes I’ll be buying a Bad Steve.
The Talisman is both*.
When it’s good, this tale of a young boy travelling west through both a hidden, almost mediaeval land (The Territories) and 1985 USA is absolutely riveting. The chapters describing his hellish work as pretty much a slave in a dying town’s bar are so good you can smell the sweat and tobacco and spilled beer and liquor. It’s as vivid as anything he’s ever written. As are the scenes in a boy’s home run by a two-faced, bible-spouting sadist of a fake preacher. And I loved Wolf.
But then we get to the last 300 pages and Bad Steve arrives. Bad Steve is Steve on a deadline, sitting down to work and hammering out the pages as fast as he probably can, but without much of an idea what’s actually happening. Page after page after page repeats what we already know and draws out the action so much you can safely skip ahead because you know that when you pick up the story again, nothing much will have happened to advance the plot.
It's all well-written. The grammar’s good. The spelling’s correct. But it is all so deadly, deadly dull and repetitive, going nowhere and taking an awfully long time to do it.
So do I want to tie Bad Steve to the stake in the centre of town and set him on fire? Not at all. The man gets up and goes to work, writing his ten pages a day. But as we all know, some days at work are slow and totally lacking in inspiration. We get through them, go home, and hope tomorrow will be better.
It even happens to Stephen King.
*I know this book was co-written with Peter Straub, but I’m not going to start trying to apportion blame. My comments about Bad Steve would apply just as much if he’d written this all on his own.
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