Black House (with Stephen King)

Twenty years ago, a boy named Jack Sawyer traveled to a parallel universe called the Territories to save his mother and her Territories "Twinner" from an agonizing death that would ahve brought cataclysm to the other world. Now Jack is a retired Los Angeles homicide detective living in the nearly nonexistint hamlet of Tamarack, Wisconsin. He has no recollection of his adventures in the Territories, and was compelled to leave the police force when an odd, happenstance event threatened to awaken those memories. When a series of gruesome murders occur in western Wisconsin that are reminescent of those committed decades ago by a madman named Albert Fish, the killer is dubbed "the Fisherman," and Jack's buddy, the local chief of police, begs Jack to help the inexperienced force to find him. But are these new killings merely the work of a disturbed individual, or has a mysterious and malignant force been unleashed in this quiet town? What causes Jack's inexplicable waking dreams-if that is what they are-of robins' eggs and red feathers? It's almost as if someone is trying to tell him something. As the cryptic message becomes increasingly impossible to ignore, Jack is drawn back into the Territories and his own hidden past, where he might find the soul-strength to enter a terrifying house at the end of a deserted tract of forest, there to encounter the obscene and ferocious evils sheltered within it. Copyright 2001 by Stephen King and Peter Straub. Published by Random House.