Andy Hageman and Ryan Gjerde
The sequel to The Talisman (1984) by Stephen King and Peter Straub has been hiding in plain sight for twenty-five years. Like the eponymous building at the dark core of Black House (2001), the novel itself has largely eluded the readership of scholars and fans alike. Considering the long-running popularity of The Talisman, including the recent boost from Duffer Brothers adaptation rumors, this overlooking is especially odd. With the final novel in the trilogy (Other Worlds Than These) set to release on October 6, however, now is an ideal time to read, research, and teach Black House. Beyond its present timeliness, Black House deserves attention as a terrifying, and often poetic, tale of a serial killer, the Crimson King (who is also central to King’s Dark Tower tales), the beloved protagonist Jack Sawyer, and other wonderful characters both new and returning from The Talisman. In this essay, we provide an ecohorror approach to the novel’s setting in a small Midwestern town on the Mississippi River, including insights on Straub’s personal connection to this region that ripple across Black House’s pages and into King’s other works as well.
Figure 1: Mississippi River and coulee topography as seen from downtown Trempealeau, WI–aka French Landing, WI in the novel.
Black House opens approximately twenty years after The Talisman. Jack Sawyer has retired from the LAPD and moved into a farmhouse outside of the small town of French Landing, Wisconsin (modeled on the actual town of Trempealeau, Wisconsin). The local police chief, Dale Gilbertson, who enthusiastically sold the family farmhouse to Jack and his close friend, pulls the retired detective back into action when a serial killer starts murdering and partially eating local children. The serial killer is a proxy for the Crimson King, who abducts children in our world and transports those who possess strong psychic powers through the Black House, which is a portal to End-World. In helping to identify the killer, Jack discovers that his rural property allows him to flip into The Territories that were the integral adjacent dimension in The Talisman. The rest we will keep spoiler-free.
Coulee Country
From the start, Black House invites ecohorror attention as Part One is titled “Welcome to Coulee Country.” For readers unfamiliar with western Wisconsin and the Driftless Area more generally, a coulee is a long, narrow ravine that did not get scraped flat by ice-age glacial drift. This part of Wisconsin – the novel’s locations are based on a cluster of towns and townships including Trempealeau, Centerville, Tamarack, and Arcadia in rural Trempealeau County – is defined by its myriad coulees, which create geological pockets of homesteads, farms, churches, and cemeteries. Yet, these coulee residents remain interdependent with people, capital, infrastructure, and culture beyond their narrow valley walls. This illusion of isolation and stasis obscuring the presence of adjacent dimensions and lines of entanglement is an ecologically-poignant theme that runs explicitly throughout Black House.
Early in King and Straub’s invocation of Coulee Country in Black House, they write:
At this moment in our progress–and through everything that follows–we would do well to remember that this strange flavor of the dreamlike and slightly unnatural is characteristic of borderlands. It can be detected in every seam between one specific territory and another, however significant or insignificant the border in question. Borderlands places are different from other places; they are borderish…Borderlands taste of unruliness and distortion. The grotesque, the unpredictable, the lawless take root in them and luxuriate. The central borderlands flavor is of slippage. (30–31)
The passage literally instructs readers to hold this geographical theme in mind across the entire tale, making this rural Midwest place no mere backdrop. The big river and the coulees are borders and slippages that shift and flow, all at provocatively different scales. This particular part of the country offers a powerful parallel to the novel’s adjacent dimensions of our world, End-World and The Territories. Jack’s rediscovered ability to flip across dimensions after decades of repressed memory and experience is deeply grounded, moreover, in this particular homestead farmhouse area. As such, the vitality of Black House’s locations and interconnections open weird approaches to reframing ecological perception and thought, even as the crimes and plotlines are not explicitly environmental.
French Landing and its infrastructural highways
Figure 2: Melchoir Brewery and Hotel Ruins in downtown Trempealeau–likely inspiration for the Kingsland Brewery that the intellectual biker gang operate in Black House.
One key place where the isolated coulee residents connect with each other and larger social networks is the small town of French Landing, located on the eastern bank of the Mississippi. King and Straub’s sustained description of the town in Part One features economic dynamics over time in conjunction with geology, flora, and fauna. We learn of industries risen and fallen–from a defunct nail factory to an emerging micro-brewery, low-income housing that the factory built for its blue-collar laborers, and new upscale neighborhoods inhabited by white-collar folks in banking, insurance, and farm implement sales. Across the diverse architectures that embed class borders runs a horizontal line that stains every downtown building with the high-water mark of a historic flood. Unifying the town is a residual reminder of the river’s power and the humbling unpredictability and strangeness that flow through this liminal borderland.
To follow the infrastructural highway from French Landing to Arden (based on the actual town of Arcadia), King and Straub emphasize a scenic overlook pullout located both fictionally and actually along Highway 93 just south of Arden/Arcadia. This vista provides solace, perspective, and love to multiple characters, counterbalancing the weird woods that surround French Landing and the eerie night fog that creeps up from the river. By taking a temporary withdrawal from the asphalt flow, several characters in Black House discover an enhanced capacity to ponder the simultaneous diversity and unity of the coulees inscribed upon the land by forces and timeframes that transcend human scales. This roadside stop facilitates a form of Midwest sublime as an antidote to the Midwest gothic darknesses within the tale.
Figure 3: Vista of coulees extending to the horizon from the Scenic Overlook on HWY 93 in both the novel and the actual Wisconsin roadway.
To assist the slippage of the novel’s settings and the actual places that inspired them, we include a photo shot from the Highway 93 pullout. In an ecohorror twist, on the day we drove to Trempealeau County (16 July 2026) forest-fire smoke from northern Minnesota and southern Canada tainted the sky the color of a used cigarette filter. As if the novel’s Furnace Lands of End-World were pumping their infernal pollution directly into Coulee Country’s atmosphere, the air burned our eyes and throats each time we stopped to explore a location that matched a place in Black House.
Peter Straub’s Wisconsin connections
This Wisconsin setting along the Mississippi River also connects with Straub’s personal attachment to place, with many street and character names grounded in its history. In an interview that Susan Straub generously gave us recently, she shared that Peter Straub’s mother grew up outside of Arcadia, Wisconsin, and his grandparents’ farm was the site of numerous summer vacations and reunions throughout Peter’s life
Figure 4: Peter Straub with two of fifteen 1st cousins, probably from a 2009 family reunion, with a view of part of the fields one could see from the porch of Grandma’s house. Photo used with permission from Susan Straub’s personal collection and caption by Susan Straub.
The home that Jack Sawyer buys from Police Chief Dale Gilbertson in Black House is nestled in this same coulee that meant a great deal to Straub from childhood on, and that in the novel is a place of positive power that reconnects Jack with The Territories. Further commenting on the setting, Mrs. Straub said, “Arcadia is practically on the great divide that is the Mississippi River. It fitted into the otherworldliness – that you would be able to flip if you’re on a border.” So, Straub in particular combined the personal intimacy with a coulee family home and the iconic fluid border that partially defines the nation and its history of colonization, extractivism, and self-mythologizing.
Furthermore, Straub’s personal geographic contributions to this trilogy echo in King’s Dark Tower series. Because The Territories connect with the other adjacent dimensions in the Dark Tower tales, readers and critics may presume that King directed this aspect of their collaboration. However, Straub also set his 1977 novel If You Could See Me Now in another fictionalized version of the same Trempealeau County valley, meaning that well before Black House this deeply-familiar place was fueling his literary imagination. He titled the second part of the novel “I Light Out for The Territories,” which clearly alludes to the ending of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884): “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before” (363).
Clearly Straub found The Territories an evocative placename, one that he linked deeply with this part of western Wisconsin along the Mississippi. Therefore, it seems likely that he influenced the collaborative adoption of The Territories as the dimension into which Jack Sawyer flips in The Talisman and only remembers how to flip into after being called to the “Tom Sawyer-Becky Thatcher country” of Trempealeau County in Black House (39). Straub’s influence therefore puts Black House into an American literary lineage and dialogue with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (an ecohorror novel in its own right); it shapes the geography of King’s opus Dark Tower works; and it reframes the rural Midwest, especially the Driftless Area with its unruly waves of stone and soil.
On a closing note, we confirmed with Susan Straub that her family had made plans with King to visit Trempealeau County together to gather visual impressions of the geography and architecture and a sense of the people and the Midwest gothic vibes of the surrounding wetlands, bottomland forests, and the coulees during the creative process.
Figure 5: Intersection of King and Chase Streets in Trempealeau. Chase Street appears frequently in the novel, while the author-evoking King Street outside of the novel hosts a city-block-sized salvage lot that conjures a powerful Midwest gothic aesthetic.
That journey didn’t happen – and so it’s clear that the setting of Black House emerged from Straub’s lifelong familiarity and connection, which accounts for the depth of intersections between economy, ecology, community, and history that distinguish the novel from King’s solo works and even from The Talisman. Ultimately, Black House delivers ecohorror in a Midwestern small town and rural surrounding that is grounded in existing conditions and that resists the demeaning redneck depictions of rural folks in hick horror. Akin to what King would later achieve in The Outsider, this novel holds both very nasty monsters and very big hearts in the nation’s Heartland.
Whether you’re a Midwesterner eager for excellent horror that engages the region deeply – or you live elsewhere and are open to bypassing the stereotypes of the region at a time when solidarity is direly needed, do yourself a favor and enter Black House. It is a monument of literary history as two astonishing authors reciprocally influence each other. And it is a gripping horror story engrained in water, land, and woods capable of sparking ecological narrative insights and inspiration.
Works Cited
King, Stephen. The Outsider. Scribner, 2018.
King, Stephen and Peter Straub. Black House. Random House, 2001.
King, Stephen and Peter Straub. The Talisman. Viking, 1984.
Straub, Peter. If You Could See Me Now. Coward, McCann & Geohegan, 1977.
Straub, Susan. Zoom interview with the authors. 11 August 2026.
Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Random House, 1996 [1885].
Andy Hageman is professor of English and director of The Center for Ethics and Public Engagement at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. He researches and teaches ecocinema, David Lynch, and intersections of speculative fiction and race. Andy recently published in the Los Angeles Review of Books an essay on his discovery regarding The Dark Half in the Stephen King Archive. @andyhageman on instagram.
Ryan Gjerde is the Digital Initiatives Librarian at Luther College, in Decorah, Iowa, where he administers library systems, manages digital collections, and consults with students and faculty on research. Ryan is an aficionado of horror in all forms, and has a passion for projects that engage with Midwestern historical and genealogical collections.
