The Talisman Research Paper

The Talisman In 1981, Stephen King and Peter Straub teamed up to create the first "dark fantasy" novel, two horror novelists' take on a classic adventure story of a child moving from the mundane real world to a larger-than-life fantasy world right next door, for the sake of a quest critical to the survival of each world. While the form is an old one, aside from Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" and L. Frank Baum's Oz novels, the genre is traditionally almost entirely British or European: Alice in Wonderland or through the looking glass, the British children entering Narnia through the wardrobe and painting and so on. More importantly, the actual consequences of such adventures are rarely dwelt upon to any degree: Twain's story is a comedy, Alice wakes up into the real world at the end of her adventures, and if the children forming a new Royal Family in Narnia has an repercussions, they aren't felt on this side of the wardrobe. In contrast, the repercussions of the adventures that take place before the opening of "The Talisman" - the adventures of the parents of the protagonists, to be specific - are what
Events that might be magical in the hands of other writers - voices coming from small funnels in the sand, talking animals, animated trees - takes on a hallucinatory, runaway feel, like the reader is falling down a well, or riding a roller coaster no longer under the control of the operator. While the adventure may have begun, in part, with self-determination on the part of 12-year-old Jack Sawyer to save the life of his cancer-ridden mother, he soon is in over his head, sucked relentlessly from one danger to another, both mundane and magical. The violence and danger he faces are conveyed with a visceral reality, enough to make the reader flinch and wince in sympathetic