Joshua Minton’s Online Pulpit : What’s Your Favorite Novel?

Posted by Joshua Bradley Minton in March 21st, 2007

I’ve been asked this question several times in my life and the answer really hasn’t changed since I was twelve. My favorite novel of all times isn’t a perfect novel although it’s an excellent novel which doesn’t require it to be perfect. If one is looking for the perfect novel, one need look no further than The Sound and the Fury by Wiliam Faulkner which I didn’t really care for all that much although I respect the hell out of the form.

No, my favorite novel is much more modern and much more interesting. It’s not Hearts in Atlantis, The Gunslinger, Love in the Time of Cholera or even Where the Red Fern Grows which are all very good books and would certainly make my top ten list. No, my favorite novel of all time–the one I could read at least once a year is The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub. It is the story of a young twelve year old boy named Jack Sawyer who must save the world by saving his dying mother. Jack is a Hamlet-type hero whose father was slain by his evil “Uncle” Morgan, his father’s business partner and all around douche bag whose seeking to secure total control of the company by pushing Jack’s dying mother into signing away half the business in exchange for lifetime annual stipend for Jack.

Jack’s mother takes him across the country from LA to the Alhambra Inn on the East Coast where she plans on dying in the very run down hotel in which Jack was conceived twelve years earlier. But Jack meets an old black man who is the handy man at the nearby fun park named Speedy Parker. Speedy calls him “Traveling Jack” which is the same name Jack’s father used to call him before his “tragic hunting accident.”

Speedy pursuades Jack that he must travel back across the country to a black hotel on the opposite shore, an evil place which holds an object of such immense power that it can both heal and destroy the world in the same instant. And Speedy introduces Jack to The Territories, an alternate universe which contains a world filled with “Twinners” of people in our world. Every step in the Territories is like twenty steps in our world but the Territories are a dangerous and mysterious place where magic rules instead of science. There are creatures half-men and half-animals and Jack’s Uncle Morgan is the evil bastard who is seeking to take over rule once Jack’s mother’s Twinner, Queen Laura dies of a very similar illness to the one Jack’s mother is dying from in our world.

Jack learns that his father’s Twinner was also killed in an accident on that side and that his murderer was a stranger, not from that world (hence from ours or another universe altogether). Jack also learns that his Twinner, Jason, died in his crib as Jack almost did when his Uncle Morgan tried to smother him with a pillow when he was six months old.

So Jack convinces his mother to let him go on a trip across the country, by himself, to save her life. He meets unbelievable hardships along the way but the one that pushes the book into the “best novel I ever read” category is when he befriends a very large werewolf (aptly named “Wolf”) who is a shepherd of a cow-like animal. Jack ends up flipping back over here with Wolf when his Uncle Morgan’s Twinner attacks them both in the territory. Poor Wolf is befuddled and tortured by this world of bad smells and strangeness.

For some reason, the concept of a werewolf as a shepherd of the Queen’s private flock of cows really hit me as a deep archetype. These werewolf shepherds are considered very noble creatures in The Territories and live their lives according to a strict moral code they learned from The Book of Good Farming (similar to The Bible over here). Once they both flipped over to our side, Jack became Wolf’s herd and Wolf protected Jack, sheltering him from the most brutal trials on his journey. Wolf locked Jack in a shed for three days to protect him from being eaten by Wolf when he changed into a werewolf and fed on hundreds of animals in the Eastern Indiana backwoods.

But it was Wolf’s heroic sacrifice of his own life to save Jack from the Sunlight Gardner Home for Wayward Boys (a Holy Horror of a place where Jack and Wolf are placed by an Indiana judge when they are picked up as vagrants). Wolf protects Jack and is murdered by an absolute maniac and this sacrifice profoundly affected me when I first read the book. That doesn’t really do it justice. I was a fucking wreck. I must have cried for an hour after reading this section and to this day, I find it hard to stomach knowing what’s coming. The friendship between Wolf and Jack was so pure that it really has become the measure of what I consider boundless friendship to be. Plus, I was always a smaller kid growing up so the image of a little boy being protected by a gigantic werewolf shepherd quite appealed to me.

Jack has many more trials ahead of him before he makes it to the Talisman and saves the world but the coolest thing about the story is that it is intimately connected to the Dark Tower series (as all of King’s books are). In fact, in the Dark Tower, there are several of these Talisman-type crystal balls and each of them is infinitely powerful (one, a purely evil black one, was stored in a storage locker in the World Trade Center in 1999 and we all know what happened there). And Jack himself became protagonist again as an adult in the recent sequel to The Talisman, Black House which saw him again flipping back into the Territories to save the world.

The archetypes I am drawn to most strongly in novels are those which deal with the love of friend for friend and for father to son and this book hits home runs on both of these. It amazes me that two very talented writers were able to blend their ideas and their writing styles together to produce a masterpiece of this caliber. I would really be interested to learn the method by which they collaborated. Did Straub write portions and then sent them to King and he did likewise? Did they work in the same room together? Did one come up with the concept while the other wrote the book and they both collaborated along the way? I just find it fascinating, twenty years later after reading the book for the first time that words on a page can move me so deeply. If I’m being honest, this is the book that made me want to write for a living.

If I’ve got one book in me as good as this one, I’ll die a fully satisfied man.