The Talisman: A Novel by Stephen King (EPUB)

Description

Soon to be a Netflix series! The iconic, “extraordinary” (The Washington Post) collaboration between bestselling authors Stephen King and Peter Straub—an epic thriller about a young boy’s quest to save his mother’s life.Jack Sawyer, twelve years old, is about to begin a most fantastic journey, an exalting, terrifying quest for the mystical Talisman—the only thing that can save Jack’s dying mother. But to reach his goal, Jack must make his way not only across the breadth of the United States but also through the wondrous and menacing parallel world of the Territories. In the Territories, Jack finds another realm, where the air is so sweet and clear a man can smell a radish being pulled from the ground a mile away—and a life can be snuffed out instantly in the continuing struggle between good and evil. Here Jack discovers “Twinners,” reflections of the people he knows on earth—most notably Queen Laura, the Twinner of Jack’s own imperiled mother. As Jack “flips” between worlds, making his way westward toward the redemptive Talisman, a sequence of heart-stopping encounters challenges him at every step. An unforgettable epic of adventure and resounding triumph, The Talisman is one of the most influential and highly praised works of fantasy ever written.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I first read THE TALISMAN, collaboratively written by Stephen King and Peter Straub, when it was first published in 1984 and hadn’t re-read the story until just now. One of the benefits of getting older is a less precise memory. I didn’t remember much of my first reading at all. So I got to enjoy this book all over again. In fact, I don’t remember liking the book as much back then as this time around.Jack is a 12 year-old boy whose mother is dying. His mother was a star of Grade B movies in her heyday. Mom takes Jack from L.A. to an off-season resort in New Hampshire. There he meets a man that starts him on the noble quest to save his mother’s life.This is a mixed genre book of horror and fantasy, taking Jack from his present day life to a mirror dimension and back again, meeting many people, both evil and good.I loved the book – the well-drawn characters especially Jack’s friends, the locations that the story encompasses, and the fantastic storyline.While I enjoyed reading this story like it was a first-time read, I’m amazed how much of it I had forgotten. I am now off to read the sequel BLACK HOUSE which takes place when Jack is an adult and was first published in 2001. I just found out this was a planned trilogy. I wonder if King and Straub will ever write the third book?

⭐As my review title says, this is one of the greatest books ever written. I have 2 favourite books of all time & this is one of them. Unsurprisingly the other is also written by Stephen King, The Stand. My words will never do justice to this book so I won’t even try. Just trust that if you ever have doubt in Stephen King’s ability to transport you into another world, read this book & you’ll never doubt him again. Thank you Mr King, this book helped shape my world.

⭐Third time reading and still one of my favorite fantasy novels of all time. Wonderful, high level of diction, but not snooty. It just makes everything come alive so much more.Both King and Straub write the best villains, and there are several very good bad guys to hate here. There are also several very good guys to like, even love, aside from the main character, Jack Sawyer.If you haven’t read THE TALISMAN in a while, it may be time to read it again. If you’ve never read it, it’s definitely time for you to read it!

⭐This is Stephen King, what else can I say about it?Of course the story will be expected to have darker elements than other mainstream writings. It starts of a little slow, but quickly speeds up into a faster paced, attention keeping story. The characters have quickly endeared themselves to me and I became emotional invested in the book. This one is one of my ‘forever’ books, as I can keep re-reading it and still become involved in Jack’s world. I can honestly say that Wolf is my favorite character.I would NOT hesitate to recommend this book to any fan of an intense, attention- keeping fantasy/ reality fictional story. This was a personal purchase.

⭐A great book!! I read it years ago and it’s just as good the second time around. King writes kids so well and this kid, Jack Sawyer, is just another in a long line of great kids in King novels. Awesome plot full of a cast of characters both creepy and wonderful. Stephen King’s characters are so fully developed it’s as if you are inside their heads listening to their thoughts and relating completely to them. I love how he gives his characters life with morals and struggles and triumphs. You can’t help but root for them. King is always lumped in with horror and while his roots are there he is so much more. I think Stephen King is the best storyteller I’ve ever read and this is a great tale.

⭐Big King fan and this is no exception. A deep and textured tale that could only come from the mind of Stephen King. Straub’s influence on this story is magnificent as well. A wonderful bridge to connect Kings other place to ours. Rich characters and a lovely textured story world.

⭐I really enjoyed this read and sat for hours at a time with this book. I found it after reading the free online short story The Cookie Jar by King, which I loved. It’s a kid-inspired adventure, complete with another parallel world. I’m excited to read the second in the series soon. Highly recommend if you liked The Institute by King.

⭐A little boy of 12 with the world on his shoulders, Jack is special in a way that his new friend Speedy Parker knows. He’s able to slip through to another world, a world of magic and monsters. But also a world of enchantment and beauty. Jack visits this world as he makes his way across the entire United States to retrieve a magical artifact called the Talisman.Our world is seamlessly entwined with this other world called The Territories in a way that master “word-slinger” Stephen King is known for. The characters are robust and become friends of the reader as the journey progresses.I’ve listened to the audio disc version 4 times and read the book twice. It’s a story that gets in your head, and each pass through you learn something new. A special treat is that like many of King’s books, the characters are linked in subtle (and not so subtle) ways to other stories. If you read this, you must also read “Black House” to follow Jack as an adult on another great adventure.

⭐If you enjoy Stephen King, buy this book. If you enjoy fantasy, buy this book. If you enjoy the magic of storytelling in any form, buy this book. I promise you won’t be disappointed. I’m not familiar with Peter Straub’s other work, but after reading this, I’m eager to dive in.This book is a rich blend of compelling adventure, heartfelt longing, savage darkness, wild surrealism, and vicious humour, with stunning prose throughout. Also, it’s around 250,000 words long, so you’re getting an entire trilogy’s worth of story material for the price of one book.This book is brilliant. Buy it.

⭐Still plodding through this. Clumsy sentences. Ideas from other books which are even referenced in case you are not up to speed with Tolkien, C.S Lewis or Lewis Carroll and others. The premise is exciting. Parallel worlds with parallel characters. Good versus evil. But there are long descriptions of character, landscape and appearance that clunk along and do little for the story or to ramp up any tension. You could skip a few pages and still pick up where you left off. This is not The Stand by a long way and I am not sure how the two writers collaborated on this. If it is Stephen King adding a name to a friends book to give it sales then he should have read it first.

⭐Warning: Minor spoilers for this and other Stephen King books.King is one of my two or three favorite fiction authors, so I was eager to see how he worked in tandem, but I found The Talisman very disappointing. The world-building and character development are very slapdash, not up to SK’s normal standard. I ended up taking a break of several months in the middle of reading it, when I normally can’t put down a King book once started. I only finished it as I hate leaving a story halfway through, rather than be a use I was getting much out of it. There are a number of pieces in it that show up in the Dark Tower series, and to a lesser extend the Stand – A young boy embarking on a perilous journey; alternative realities with some similarities to our own, but technologically backwards, with an onus on sorcery and the opportunity to jump between them; an army of other-worldly foot-soldiers (although this time they’re wolf-men, not vampires like in Dark Tower); an inhospitable desert crossed by rail (much like in The Wastelands) – but in The Talisman they feel like first drafts, when you’ve seen how much better SK uses them in later works.If you haven’t read Dark Tower already, you might get something out of The Talisman. If you have, The Talisman will feel like reading The Hobbit after finishing Lord of the Rings – watered down and unpolished, so I’d advise you to give this one a miss.. I’ve never read any of Straub’s other works, I’ll be interested to see how their other collaboration, Black House, turned out, but I’m not holding out a lot of hope, based on this.

⭐769 pages with a lot of repetition. I hadn’t realised it was written in 1984 and published in 1985. I felt the book was trying to be similar to King’s Gunslinger series, which I adored, but failing. Whether it was Peter Straub’s influence, I don’t know, but I found the story to be too meandering. Stephen King is usually very succinct, as in no extra words if they don’t add to the story. I can easily read a book a day but this took me over a week. It didn’t hold my attention and it felt like it was a chore rather than a treat. Disappointing really as I love Stephen King.I wouldn’t discourage someone from reading this book as they might enjoy it more than I did but for me, I felt it was not Stephen King’s best writing.

⭐I have mostly mixed feelings about this book. For the most part, it fluctuated between 3-4 stars, and it’s definitely not one of my favourite Stephen King books. More fantasy than horror, though that wasn’t a problem for me, as I loved books 2 and 3 of his Dark Tower series, as well as Eyes of the Dragon. Not sure what the Dark Tower connection was here, maybe Blasted Lands = Waste Lands, but apparently it’ll be a lot clearer once I read Black House. Which will be towards the end of my Dark Tower run.A couple of characters just annoyed me more than they should’ve, maybe I just wasn’t in a sympathetic enough mood. One of them, in particular, seems to be a huge fan favourite! I think I would have enjoyed this book a lot more if more of it was set in The Territories.

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