Like Woody Allen, They Might Be Giants, and a handful of other creators, Stephen King has carved out his own genre: No one else does exactly what he does, and his work is as distinctive and recognizable as Allen's adenoidal fussing. So it's tempting to blame the glaring problems with Black House on co-author Peter Straub, since those problems aren't among King's known writing vices. But that somehow seems both cruel and cowardly, like choosing to beat up the smaller of two brothers on the playground. In 1984, Straub and King collaborated on The Talisman, a fantasy/horror/fairy tale about a 12-year-old boy named Jack Sawyer, whose quest into a parallel world called The Territories saved his mother's life. In Black House, the sequel, Jack is in his 30s, and has just retired to scenic French Landing, Wisconsin, having had a bellyful of life as a Los Angeles homicide detective. His combat fatigue is so intense that he initially refuses to help catch a serial killer who's been catching, dismembering, and partially eating local children. Eventually, inevitably, Jack gets drawn into the case, and into the inner life of French Landing, which is populated by the herd of quirky, beautifully characterized, small-town wunderkinds that always manifests memorably in King's books. Increasingly, his worlds-spanning mythology manifests in all his writing, as well: Those who haven't read The Talisman, the Dark Tower series, and Hearts In Atlantis will often be at sea here. Worse, they'll be lost amid purple prose that piles up rhetorical questions, ascribes emotions and interpretations to the reader, and chummily narrates in the first-person plural. ("We want to evoke our capacity for flight and get the hell out of here. We want to float through the unresisting roof, to regain the harmless air, but we cannot, we must bear witness," gushes one typically florid passage, in describing a murder scene.) The clutching, overly personal style, which eventually extends to King and Straub directly referencing themselves, gets irritatingly heavy-handed about two pages in, but it alternates with a more straightforward (and, to King fans, both familiar and gripping) style, as the narrative voice changes from chapter to chapter. Stylistically, Black House is far less integrated than The Talisman; narratively, its heavy reliance on King's mythology makes it seem like his book rather than a true collaborative effort. Not that it matters. The target audience of Talisman fans and adherents of King's increasingly excellent Dark Tower books will likely seek it out and soak it up, and complain later, if at all. Much like Woody Allen fans, they'll be looking for a range of familiar flavors that no one else offers, and they'll probably be only mildly irked at the cloying spices added in excess here.