Monstrous

By John Skow

THE TALISMAN by Stephen King and Peter Straub Viking; 646 pages; $18.95

There is no point in complaining about The Talisman as if it were a finished product, or even an ordinary novel. In fact it is something far more momentous, the first stage in the construction--the scaffolding and a few truckloads of apparitions, so to speak--of a Steven Spielberg movie. So the publicity blurbs boast. The director of Jaws and E.T. has bought the movie rights for a pot of money. Surely, by the way, this explains the dual authorship. The story's weight and complexity are not such that it is necessary to have one author shoveling coal while the other steers. But the combined constituencies of King (Pet Sematary) and Straub (Ghost Story) are a big part of what Spielberg paid for.

The Talisman, as Spielberg films go, will very probably be a Poltergeist rather than an E.T., the Extraterrestrial. Which is to say, a succession of whiz-bang special effects without a memorable story or character to hold them together.

One thing is sure, the movie will not lack for churning, monster-a-minute energy. The plot is the oldest in literature, a quest: confront the Minotaur, find the Holy Grail, follow the yellow brick road. Twelve-year-old Jack Sawyer is sheltering unhappily in an empty New Hampshire tourist hotel, where his mother Lily, a washed-up B-movie queen, is wasting away with cancer. A mysterious old black man named Speedy, who tends a carrousel, hints that if Jack can reach California and find something called the talisman, all will be well. Part of the journeying will be through a parallel world called the Territories, a kind of theme-park Camelot, where "they have magic like we have physics." Some earthlings have "twinners" there--Jack's mother is, almost, the dying Queen Laura, and his uncle Morgan, a greedy Hollywood agent, is a medieval menace who lurks in the shadows.

Off goes Jack, equipped with a bottle of magic juice that flips him from one world to the other. Some of the authors' imaginings come appealingly to life. The air in the Territories is so clear, for instance, that if someone pulls a radish out of the ground, it can be smelled half a mile away. Clownish, somewhat dim-witted werewolves loyally guard flocks of cow/sheep, but prudent householders stay out of their way when the moon is full.

The real trouble comes with the mechanical series of adventures King and Straub have invented for Jack to battle through on his way to the talisman. The hoodoos encountered in a rancid roadhouse in New York, a corrupt orphanage in Ohio, and a nuclear-wasted parallel-Nevada in the Territories are maggoty and colorful, but also wearisomely repetitive. The horrors there on the page are visually ingenious, but they never echo in the mind. Jack Sawyer has two unvarying reactions, fearfulness and pluck. The co-written sentences are so gaudy and muscular they seem phony, like the deltoids of a bodybuilder ("The alligator-thing ran with slow, clumsy, thudding determination. Its eyes sparkled with murderous fury and intelligence. The vestiges of breasts bounced on its scaly chest").

Enchantment fails. Was The Lord of the Rings that much better, or was the difference a wondering child sitting on the reader's lap?

--By John Skow