OTHER WORLDS THAN THESE

King wraps up a trilogy he and fellow horror-meister Straub began 42 years ago with The Talisman (1984) and continued with Black House (2001).

Straub died in 2022, but, King recounts in a gracious afterword, he suggested that the last volume in the Talisman series pick up the story of real-life mass murderers Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate and transfer it to the otherworldly Territories. King obliges, landing hero Jack Sawyer in the middle of great unpleasantness while visiting “America-side.” Jack, whom we first met as a 12-year-old, is now middle-aged and world-weary (make that worlds-weary), but he knows he’s on to something interesting when he hears tell of the rampage inflicted on the quiet Nebraska countryside by Roy Kinneston and Tara Lynn Speckhoffer, emulating their murderous predecessors victim by victim. Because “many people on America-side have counterparts in the Territories,” the teenage killers turn up there, too, recruiting young acolytes who dye their hair red and, as if on a new Children’s Crusade, kill everything in sight, leaving behind the chilling graffito “Dead People Don’t Care.” Jack bops back and forth between realms through a kind of magic that flummoxes the America-siders, especially the cop who first jails him and, after Jack disappears because he senses that “something is wrong on the other side,” becomes a grudging admirer on his return. The action goes more supernatural still when Jack and his merry Mid-Worlder band fight back in earnest against the Kinneston-Speckhoffer cultists, a battle that takes them to a scary underworld setting that’s just right for an apocalyptic showdown. A few figures from the earlier two novels have walk-on roles, but otherwise, as King cooks up his diabolical splatterfest, he answers an old question: “What fresh hell is this?”

It’s neither King nor Straub at his finest, but there’s plenty to keep fans of supernatural horror entertained.