The Talisman (1984)
"All will be well . . . all will be well . . . and all manner of things will be well."
My very first job began in June of 1988, working summer custodial for the USD 259 in Wichita, Kansas. I was still half a month shy of sixteen, but they cut me a break since I'd gotten the job through my sister's adoptive father who had recently served as deputy superintendent of schools for the district. It was a huge boon, not to be taken for granted, but I was still resistant to the idea and nervous about what the post might require. It paid very well, far better than the standard minimum wage back in those days (it was over $5/hour when the minimum wage was just $3.35/hour in 1988), but it required a 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., Monday through Friday schedule doing light manual labor in an unairconditioned environment.
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| Scuffed with love, gotta admire an embossed cover. |
I'd grown up going to school in the same district and was familiar enough with how uncomfortably hot those classrooms would get at the start and end of the school year, but I was soon to discover that the summers were far, far worse. I started the job in my standard street clothes, cute but comfortable, but quickly learned to mine the depths of dresser dregs to find clothes a wash or two away from being stripped to rags: torn, stained, and Not Cute At All. Aside from the work (disinfecting lockers, trash cans, desks, scraping gum from the underside of every possible place a baby teen could conceive of, swabbing toilets, wiping walls, scrub scrub scrub), all we did from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. every single wretched summer weekday was sweat. We did not glow. We did not experience localized pit-sweat to be covered by the clever shift in stance. We dripped sweat, all day, every day.
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| They look like two math teachers at a slide rule convention. This is a prime example of being spendy for spendy sake. This is a gloss, tip-in insert page, a very expensive add-on flair to the printing process. I love it because it is insane and wholly unnecessary. |
It was a gross job. I saw things I can never unsee. I cleaned things that were permanently unclean: the rancid, rusted metal trashcans from some turn-of-the-century child-labor sweatshop spring immediately to mind. Every locker was a suspenseful knock on Twilight Zone's creaking door ,where predictable avalanches of paper, notebooks, pens, and erasers might also unleash a torrent of evil odors, unidentifiable ichor, and living spoors eying us from dark corners with stupid menace. Sometimes there were prizes--I was a paper collector, especially notebooks, and was happy to take any clean offerings we found. I even scored a bitchen jean jacket once.
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| Page i, author bios |
It wasn't hard work compared to working out in the beating sun or, say, the lethal rigors of logging, but it was hard in the way that scrubbing and cleaning can be, doubly so in the constant, unrelenting Kansas heat. The pay was the thing, however, and no amount of scrubbing or sweating could deny the power of that much cash in a teenager's hot little hands. This is why I worked the custodial job two summers in a row. The second summer was far easier (and more productive) because my boss was a no-nonsense professional who I respected and liked. That first summer, however, was a different story.
I do not remember his name. I do remember the first day, reporting to work in my first "real" boss's basement office, walls filled with equipment, tools, hardware, everything layered in black grease and time. He was somewhere in his fifties, maybe sixties, gray and balding, but with an overlong fringe of locks wrapped around his head, and a permanently tanned crown smooth as butter atop. He had a very monotone, robotic manner of speaking and I have no doubt, all these years later, that he was on the spectrum. At the time, a mere fifteen years of lazy knowledge behind me, I simply thought he was creepy. His first comments and questions to me did not help. I was asked my name, where I went to school, how old I was. All standard stuff. He had these penetrating, ice-blue eyes that stared, unblinking. He commented that I was a pretty girl. He asked if I had a boyfriend. When I said no, he asked why I didn't have a boyfriend. When I had no acceptable answer other than stammering um, uh, well, I don't know, he went on to tell me that of course I should have a boyfriend, a pretty girl like me must have a boyfriend, that it was strange that a pretty girl like me did not have a boyfriend. It was--yay!--my first workplace harassment. I was, I remind you, fifteen.
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| Page ii, previous publications. This spacing makes my eye twitch. |
The one thing my boss had going for him, that everyone on the crew learned to respond to like Pavlovian dogs, was his key set. He carried an enormous confabulation of rings and keys of many sizes and colors clipped to his hip, which made his comings and goings easy to detect. For a motley crew of teens and young adults trapped in a junior high, light-headed from cleaning chemicals, sweating their body weight from 7 to 3, it was a jingle-jangly Godsend.
While no one ever tried copping a nap or anything so egregious, work would slow and even stop when we knew he wasn't around. We'd talk, lay in the middle of the floor with a long line of lockers open at attention in the dark inner gloom of a sleeping school, lights out unless needed, sweating, sweating, always sweating. Then, in the distance, we'd hear the tune (ting! ting! Ting!) as he approached, rising to the full jangle as he finally arrived, blue eyes wide and assessing his crew, now scrubbing, wiping, scraping the undersides of desks, closet corners, drawers.
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| Page iii, full title page |
It was a good summer job that paid extremely well. I would not trade it for another. It gave me perspective, for one, but it also gave me hot cash money of my very own. The two babysitting jobs that preceded the custodial gig provided cash money, too, but I never count them as "real." It is not because I do not respect the responsibility of child care. The truth is the exact opposite. They were not real jobs to me because I barely did the jobs at all. The cash was just as green in both circumstances, but the experience of spending that money was completely different. The custodial job was repetitive and boring, but I was never unclear about what I had accomplished at the end of every day. With my first USD 259 check, I bought a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). With my second, I bought a VCR, a treasure my little family had never owned. My two biggest dream purchases that I had coveted so keenly were mine, bought with my money, made with my sweat. There's no comparison to the thrill of buying something you always wanted but could never have and doing so with your very own, truly-earned money.
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| Page iv, crite page. I do not pretend to know the nuances of early 80s trade paperback publishing, but it is weird to see no printing line on a copyright page. I'm sure there was a reason for it. Also note: mimeograph (!) |
I was paid for the babysitting gigs, but the circumstances were very different. The first was too easy because the kids were asleep the whole time (my absolute angel cousins) and I got to watch MTV all night. It could not have been easier. The second was a summer-long job I fought against tooth and nail but was given no choice but to accept. I was living with my grandparents at the time, I was fourteen, and I had been deemed to be sinfully lazy. It was decided that I would babysit the neighbor's nine-year-old, petty criminal, half-feral son every weekday for the entirety of the summer. I was a child who did not particularly care for children so it was not going to go well.
Little Damian immediately busied himself with testing my boundaries and found that as long as he left me alone he could get away with anything short of murder. I let the were-boy run wild. If he tried to argue with me I would use manipulation tactics to shut him up (wait 'til your dad gets home), but most of the time he just ran the streets, doing God knows what, and I let him. He would get into trouble somewhere nearby, then hightail it home to hide, pretending nothing had transpired when his guilty face was all I needed to know he'd committed a crime against humanity somewhere in the neighborhood. I'd hear about it later via hectoring from my grandmother, the mastermind to this whole, misguided endeavor; how I'd failed the kid, how my job was to look after him, how I would be paid at the end of the summer for my work and didn't I want to learn a Good Work Ethic? (My childhood was one lecture about work ethic after another, with dust rags and cans of Pledge and pennies hidden under planters to "pay" me for my labor. A day's work might earn enough for a whole nickel bubblegum; the pink, sticky kind wrapped in blue and red wax paper that filled your mouth with sickly sweet chemicals and sugary shame. I was already suspicious of this whole "work ethic" concept.)
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| Page v, credits |
On one occasion, little Damian's flights from crime brought with him a very out-of-breath, red-faced adult, erupting in fury for whatever trespass, destruction, or injury the demonoid had wrought, and I was left stammering at the door as young Damian cowered in his bedroom closet. I somehow got the man to leave (after some threats were lobbed and fingers were thrust inches from my face) and it was enough to pull me from the MTV-induced stupor I'd been swimming in for the past two or so months of "watching" the Tasmanian devil-child. I did not yell at him, but instead drew on an authoritative persona that mirrored my mother at her most intimidating. I clenched my teeth, widened my eyes, locked my posture, and whisper-purred that he would stay in his room until his father got home and that he was in the biggest trouble of his long and probably very short life. Much to my surprise, he burst into sobs, begged forgiveness, and vowed to be the best boy this planet has ever known if I would not tell. Despite my shock at this human turn of events, I informed him that his dad was going to know about what he'd done because one of the repeated threats from the aggrieved neighbor was that he would most definitely return. Best to be honest now...or pay double later.
What did Damian do? Throw rocks at a house? Key a car? Levitate a running lawnmower? Explode a dog with his mind? We'll never know. The aggrieved party was so wild with rage, he wasn't communicating clearly. I recall there were repercussions, most directly for Damian, but for me as well. I was too old to spank, but I got a serious talking-to, and there was a question as to whether I would be paid for the summer at all. The condition, of course, was to finish the job with no further incidents. I got the message. While I found the experience did nothing for my work ethic, I was able to control the boy for the rest of the summer, specifically by never letting him step foot outside the house. He spent the rest of his vacation destroying his room, asking for snacks, smashing his toys, asking for more snacks, and reinforcing my feelings about children for all time.
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| Page vii, dedication page. I have always wondered if King was in some part inspired to write this novel because of his own mother's death from cancer. If he addressed it in either of his non-fiction works (or via articles, interviews), I am unaware. Either way, the book is dedicated to their mothers. |
At the end of the summer, the neighbor begrudgingly handed over the cash to my grandmother who, in turn, dictated exactly how it would be spent: back-to-school clothes. I remember being excited to get new clothes, and I remember a very specific pair of boots procured on that long day at Towne West Mall, but I also remember the trip was not without punishment. As we walked from store to store, I endured lectures about money not well-earned, and how I was lucky I got anything at all. After that, the purchases were effectively sullied. Every time I would look at the white boots I would remember what a piece of shit I was, how I had no work ethic, and how I didn't deserve anything half as nice as those boots. I had done a bad job.
You can see why it doesn't count, right? Folks. Teach your kids work ethic by example. There are better ways to develop healthy, engaged, well-adjusted future capitalists. Employment via coercion and emotional manipulation are not helpful to the foundation of a "good" work ethic.
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| Page viii, epigraphs |
By the time I was almost sixteen I was ready to work for my own money, though honestly all I wanted to do all summer was a whole lot of nothing: hang out with friends, listen to music, flirt with boys when possible, giggles, gossip, go to the mall, and so on. Were we richer types, my dream would have been to live in the pool June through August, sleep under the stars. But driving around town with the windows down and 107.3 KKRD blasting the bops would certainly suffice.
Aside from just wanting to chill over break, most of what made that first summer of janitorial work challenging was the combination of the aforementioned elements: the work itself, the weird boss and his random awkward and sometimes inappropriate comments, and the oppressive summer heat. Sometime midway through that first summer, a new element was introduced by way of one of the work crews that came through to complete a particular service for all schools. My sister had worked one of these traveling crews when she was on the USD 259 circuit, specifically the typewriter cleaning crew. I believe the crew in question may have been one of the light crews were in charge of checking and replacing lights throughout the district.
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| Pages ix and x, contents. Look. At these Margins. |
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| Paperbacks are notorious for skating the edges of safety in terms of margin control, so skirting up against the edge of insanity where the paper is cut is standard if not entirely acceptable . . . except look at the spacing between sections. Wide plains of nothing! White space for days! WHHHHYYYYYYYYYYYY |
One member of the crew, a tall, almost-attractive, blond, 20-year-old married man, decided I was the Ren-fest fairy goddess of his dreams and proceeded to try to seduce me. He no doubt imagined himself some elfin warrior, stepped out of time and universe to this plebian existence in the wastelands of Wichita, anchored to some withered woman once winsome and stirring, now older and dulling by the moment. And here I was, young and supple and hopefully stupid.
And how did fair knight charm the young fairy goddess? With McDonald's cheeseburgers, of course. I would talk to him as I worked, he'd sweep back his thin, feathered hair and adjust his mirrored sunglasses and stand as knights do, leg cocked, tight jeans and concert T pristine. He'd talk about their work crew, where they'd been, where they were going next, how his boss thought he was the greatest thing since Iron Maiden ran for the hills, what he did last weekend, what he was doing next weekend and, eventually and almost entirely, what an ungrateful bitch his wife was. He had a mole on his upper lip and I would watch it jut and jive as he talked, endlessly talked, about himself and all things as they pertained to him, the center of this universe and all universes, that mole working overtime.
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| Page 1, section plate (1). We love a stylized plate. It sets a tone from the very start. |
It went from being flattering, to a nuisance, to a concern in no time flat. This is where we forgive my first boss, he of the staring ice-blue eyes, for all his trespasses. He didn't like Sir Tightpants one bit. He couldn't get him fired (remember, yon elven knight could do no wrong), but he could control me. This is how I was assigned the insane task of scraping decades of floorwax from the entire perimeter of the school's cafeteria. It required me to sit on the floor using a little hand-held scraper blade to remove wax along the curved floor/wall, inch by inch, for three solid weeks. And because it was his kingdom, my boss dictated that absolutely no one was allowed in the cafeteria at this time, including loathsome lotharios.
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| Page 3, main text. The thoughtful use of classic, ye olde, serif typeface also sets the tone. You are about to go on a journey and it is going to be Epic. |
Sometime earlier that summer, my mother had procured a paperback copy of The Talisman, but I had been putting off reading it for two reasons. First, I was tired all the time. I'm a lifelong night owl and those 7 a.m. start times were brutal. Second, I wasn't excited to read something co-written by someone else. I knew who Straub was from Ghost Story, but I wasn't sure he was going to be the complementary peanut butter to my beloved chocolate, Stephen King. The jacket description didn't sound much like horror and it was about a Dumb Boy which little Damian and many other Dumb Boys my own age had proved less than heroic or even redeemable over the past few years of my pre- and teen existence. I would read it eventually, but I wasn't tripping over myself to get there.
As you might imagine, working alone scraping wax for seven hours a day (one hour for lunch) was incredibly dull. The boss would come in from time to time to assess my progress and give me pointers, sometimes asking me to do whole sections over again, and it wasn't entirely mindless work since I had to make sure I was scraping wax without cutting the actual flooring, but for the most part I was alone for hours at a time. Scraping, thinking, scraping, sweating, scraping, scraping, scraping. Early on in the task I slyly remembered that my boss had his very own built-in alert system via the jangly keys one could hear well ahead of the man himself given the long, bare halls' acoustics. I decided to bring The Talisman to work so that I could "read during lunch."
No lie, I absolutely read during lunch. I also read between scrapings. Scrape, scrape, scrape, read, scrape, scrape, scrape, read. Always with an ear out for that jingle jangle. Of course I was dead wrong on my assumptions about The Talisman. It was riveting from the start, and absolute thrill of a read, and I loved every fantastical page of it. I got so completely immersed in the adventures of Jack Sawyer, his were-friend Wolf, and his best friend Rational Richard Sloat, that I inevitably got caught by my boss, cacophony of keys and all, and had to make up some story about "resting my wrist," which really was smarting at that point because of the repetition and awkward angles of the task at hand but ohhh man, what a little liar. Wrist or no wrist, I still would have been pouring over those pages. And even though the boss's visits increased, and I was obliged to keep part of my mind on alert at all times, I still continued to take breaks to flip into the world of The Talisman.
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| Back matter, ad/sales page (recto). I love how all the 70s and 80s horror works sound exactly the same and could mean just about anything (Whispers! Phantoms! Night Chills!) |
To this day, it remains an incomparable first-read of my life. We all have adventure books that are foundational to our upbringing (even if they are just adventure movies, they still count)--the Huckleberry Finn epigraphs at the start of The Talisman are a likely tell for King and Straub, and they'd no doubt count Lord of the Rings, as well--but for myself the apex of adventure began with Star Wars, peaked with Empire Strikes Back and, a bit later, grew deeper and more meaningful with A Wrinkle in Time. The Talisman, however, holds a specific place in my heart all on its own, apart and above.
Perhaps it is because I first read it at an age that I could truly appreciate Jack's predicament, to be a kid on the cusp of learning about adulthood, not being trusted to care for yourself, make decisions, or do anything of real consequence, and in many ways rightly so (see: babysitting Damian). Coming to terms with having to do hard things when you don't want to, to press on even when you are tired and wish to be carried, to be strong when all you want is your mommy. Worse, when that sole protector, your only parent, is in some way compromised. Jack's mother has cancer, my mother suffered other demons. I understood that feeling of helplessness, fury, and the overwhelming drive to fix things. In The Talisman, Jack is given the opportunity to do just that, but he must toughen up on the road to be able to achieve his goal.
I would never directly compare the hardship Jack Sawyer endures to the rigors of my first, official summer job, but parallels have since occurred to me in subsequent readings, especially as my work life expanded and matured, and in a different way when I suffered through my own personal demons to somehow come out the other side, alive and happy. It is impossible to "what if" a trip through dependency, to play that "if only" game, because I was not the person then that I am now. It's not possible to be standing here as I am in the present without having traversed that hideous, painful, humiliating path through addiction. Might I have somehow avoided it some other way? Perhaps. But forays into regret must always be accompanied by the brutal truth that you are who you are at any given time and no amount of hindsight can change your trajectory or development. Jack Sawyer couldn't have put his hand on the talisman and survived without suffering the experiences of his journey across the States and the Territories any more than I could have packed up a car with camping gear and set off for a seventeen-state journey across the American West, sleeping in my car, setting up campsites, and successfully, safely, and joyfully experiencing the ultimate road trip without first suffering through the harrowing process of addiction and recovery.
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| Back matter ad/sales (verso). Good lord that's a lot a freaking ink. |
What's been particularly fun this read around is the treasure trove of memories The Talisman has churned up, all shiny and bright and spectacularly weird. Some memories are mundane, like how my favorite lunch during that summer was a tuna sandwich with O'Grady's Au Gratin potato chips (long discontinued, hark! an angel has lost its wings for such an outrage). Or how I eventually came to picture the talisman itself as a white/rainbow variant of the spiritual stones from 1998's blockbuster videogame, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (even though the description in the book is not even close).
As I encountered the villainous character Osmond for the first time in years, I remembered how I'd imagined him during that first reading, sort of an amalgam of the lead singer from Device (Paul Engemann) and the "snotty" restaurant host (Jonathan Schmock) in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which led me to remembering that I'd always imagined the primary villain, Morgan Sloat, as another character from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the single-minded school principal, Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones). While that particular actor's legal troubles may make him villainous in real life, this likely doesn't translate to wanting to see him on film in any capacity. When I was a kid, though, his face fit the bill to a T.
Reliving those first impressions led me to Jack Sawyer, the main protagonist (and not at all "Dumb Boy" I'd feared). Who had I envisioned in that role? For obvious reasons, instead of calling forth a famous face, my mind settled resolutely on a boy from my school. Someone real that I could identify with . . . even if I was only projecting my impressions of the heroic Jack Sawyer. We were not in the same grade and I don't remember his name or even if we shared any classes. He was one of the poor kids, the shop-class kids, and a big fan of those omnipresent, 80s muscle shirts. He was very shy under that pretense of machismo. Still, I barely knew him, not even enough to say whether he was nice or mean, but he had a closed, handsome face, a guarded and self-conscious way about him that was still affecting. I remember thinking he was cute in a passive, non-committal way when school was still in session, and for whatever brain-chemical-associative-mindclick reason, he became Jack Sawyer to me before I was even out of the first chapter.
Isn't it wild to think that all these years later, someone would remember you so specifically and in such an auspicious light? As the years stretch, it is harder to remember the people I did talk to back when I was young. Not close friends of course, but passing friends, History class friends, frienemies, acquaintances, contraband hookups, friends of friends. But I remember that guy. The memory is a little blurry, but it's there.
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| Back cover. It's no surprise that the copy is so misleading. King was so hot at this point in his career he could have put out a cookbook of Maine coastal cuisine with a picture of a happy lobster on the front and the damn thing would have sold millions. But why take the chance of missing even a single sale should the buyer believe the book is anything but HORROR? At least the first praise quote tells it like it is. The Talisman is solidly a fantasy/adventure novel with some scary elements. It's no more "horror" than Lord of the Rings. |
The best recollection of the events of that first read through The Talisman, by far, I have saved for last. There was a great swath of time during my younger adulthood that wild horses would not have dragged this information out of me. Now, in my early elderlies, I just think it's a hoot.
My mother worked for the city government of tiny Medicine Lodge, Kansas, for less than a year in 1986. From that, she gained two things: The knowledge that small-town life was not her Jam and an assortment of massive poster paper pads. I did not understand what they could have been used for in a city finance office (as an innocent youth, I had not yet experienced the hellfire that is corporate meetings) but I was a gleeful recipient, busying myself with expansive, awkward drawings of desert landscapes heavily influenced by the music video for Fleetwood Mac's "Hold Me."
The summer I read The Talisman, I was wrecked with an overabundance of imagination and excitement over Jack Sawyer's incredible adventure across America and the Territories. Nothing had inspired me like King and Straub's story since The Empire Strikes Back (which had set my little 8-year-old brain ablaze for months afterward, utterly obsessed). One night in a frenzy of adoration and inspiration, I sat on my bed with the oversized sketch pads and created The Talisman Board Game. It had dual twisting roads (one for the States, one for the Territories) that you could flip back and forth from, all the characters, all the plot points (and clever side quests), and an ending objective to attain (what else?) the talisman! I wish I could remember more, but since it has been decades since I've even remembered that it existed at all, most of those synaptic connections have died. It was detailed, and I think I may have given it a different name like maybe the "Heart of Glass" but in French? Something "coeur," anyway, because I, a sixteen-year-old Kansan in 1988 Kansas, believed in copyright laws, I guess?
At some point that year or the next, I grew ashamed of my "babyish" board game and threw it out. I never even got a photo of it. Frankly, I think I shuttered the whole memory because it embarrassed a slightly-older version of me and then simply forgot all about it. Now, all these decades later, in a moment of reverie after just completing my most recent reread of The Talisman, I am turning over the experience in my mind. What to write, how it connects to me now, my first childish forays into "work ethic," the changes we all experience through hardships, victories, and time. Then POINK!: I remembered the board game. And of course my very second thought was not one of shame or self-consciousness: it was unvarnished glee. Joy. Rainbow! Rainbow! Rainbow!
I read a book on the sly at my sweaty first job. I loved it so dearly that I created a board game in honor of it. It lit up my whole life with rainbow! Rainbow! Rainbow! I applied a little work ethic in the midst of slovenly teen mopetown drudgery to create a sweet, immersive homage to a one-of-a-kind tale. Decades later, after a very sad couple of years, I was gifted with this memory salvaged from the deep; another, better boon than even that bux deluxe custodial gig in 1988. A perfect gift from The Talisman.
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| Scene of the Crime, first custodial job, 1988, Allison Middle School. Many of the schools around the district were retrofitted with add-ons to the original buildings so Allison doesn't look like it did back in 1988. I suppose there was no other way to add space, but it sucks that the brick doesn't match. |
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| Thanks to Google Maps for documenting the area surrounding Allison Middle School (which really hasn't changed much). Those golden arches peeking over the Taco Rio are the very same from whence the solicitous cheeseburger offerings were procured. |
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| Jardine Middle School, second custodial job (1989). I am pleased to report that most (if not all) USD 259 schools now have air-conditioning. |
Grade: A+ (without reservation, forever)
Scary? (0-nope to 10-you will die): 2. While I would categorize The Talisman as an adventure fantasy, there are dark elements and terrifying moments that do deliver the scares. There are harrowing chase scenes and more than one instance of were-violence.
Artifact: Once again, I relied upon the magical resources of the Internet Archive to download the PDF scan of the same paperback edition I owned back in 1988. I wanted to give the audiobook a try, but the sample was too grating and dreadful to bear. This was the first time I seriously considered the possibility of engaging with the public library again, but I just could not bring myself to do it. I am vaccinated, but my lungs are less than perfect and my curves are extra curvular, so I'm not playing games with even the slight possibility of catching covid. I feel much safer, for sure, but not enough to borrow a book from the library to have in my home and somehow read without a mask, gloves, and tongs. It was a huge stretch by my germaphobic nature to check out books and DVDs from the library before all this covid crap started, so yeahhhhh, NO. Maybe someday, but frankly, the way things are going, this may just be a new way of life.
Endnote: When doing some research prior to writing this post, an inevitable and oft repeated question surfaced in my mind: Why has this book never been adapted to film? Well, apparently there have been attempts, with varying levels of promise, but alas, The Talisman has stayed firmly imprisoned in book form. Until Now! When the news broke in March that the Duffer Brothers would be creating a Netflix limited series of The Talisman I was deep in the grieving process for my mother. That is the only reason such news would have escaped me. I had no idea that Steven Spielberg owned the rights to The Talisman in the first place, but to then collaborate with the Duffer Brothers??? For a series???? My cup hath exploded. I couldn't think of a better time, a better set of creators, or a better platform to finally bring this story to screen. To say that I am excited is an understatement.
