[1] King and Straub followed up with a sequel, Black House (2001), that picks up with a now-adult Jack as a retired Los Angeles homicide detective trying to solve a series of murders in the small town of French Landing, Wisconsin.
[2] Jack Sawyer, twelve years old, and his mother Lily Cavanaugh have moved from California to Arcadia Beach, New Hampshire, to escape his father's old business partner Morgan Sloat.
Jack's journey takes him simultaneously through the American heartland and "the Territories", a strange fantasy land that is set in a universe parallel to that of this world.
Jack sets off to seek the mystical Talisman in the parallel world, with help and encouragement from Speedy Parker.
He evades Elroy long enough to return to the Territories, where Jack remembers another associate of his father named Jerry Bledsoe, who died in a freak explosion.
Once back on the road, Jack runs into Morgan at a rest stop, flips into the Territories, and meets a large werewolf creature, named simply Wolf.
Wolf is a friendly young male, whose family are the dedicated herders and guardians of the Queen's livestock, animals which resemble cow/sheep hybrids.
Wolf, having been placed in a solitary confinement box, transforms into a werewolf, and wreaks havoc on the school, massacring numerous students and breaking into Gardner's office.
After the school is transformed into a grotesque version of itself and the students turn into mutants and attempt to goad Richard into throwing out Jack, the two escape and flip into the Territories.
In the Territories, the duo meet a man named Anders who is sending a shipment of weapons to Morgan's soldiers for a final stand against Jack.
They travel via a battery-operated train through the Blasted Lands, a hellish landscape full of fireballs, mutated creatures, and smugglers.
Jack and a sickly Richard bombard the army base, destroying most of Morgan's armada and killing Elroy and Osmond's son.
Inside the Black Castle, Jack battles stone suits of armor defending the Talisman and takes it, triggering an earthquake and disbanding the rest of the mutants who allied with Morgan Sloat.
Their literary friendship continued after The Talisman was published; in 1999 they began working on the sequel, Black House (2001), which deals with Sawyer as an adult.
Beyond them, the western region of the Territories is a destroyed area known as "the Blasted Lands" (analogous to the American Southwest – primarily New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was tested).
Near the end of the novel, the Oatley Tap bursts into flames after a grill explodes, killing Smokey and Lori and burning down the town.
When Jack and Wolf are accused of mischievous "hitchhiking" and "trouble-making" by a highway police officer, they are sent by the court to a camp/school for troubled youths run by evangelist Robert "Sunlight" Gardner/Osmond.
It is located in eastern Indiana and parallels a terrible open pit mine in the Territories where slaves are used to gather radioactive ore for Morgan.
Sunlight Gardener escapes during the attack and Wolf is shot four times by Sonny Singer (a prefect at the school) and dies of his injuries.
Jack notes that some students are rebellious and despise Gardner, notably a boy named Ferd Janklow who attempted to run away but was caught and murdered.
Because Straub and King were both immensely successful and popular horror and suspense writers in their own rights, anticipation of this book was extremely strong.
The publisher financed a USD$550,000 promotional budget and several articles ran which hailed the collaboration of the two writers and speculated what would be “the greatest horror novel ever written.”[4] Actual popular and critical reception, however, were mixed and ran the spectrum from "worst" (People: "Worst of Pages" list) and "best" (Twilight Zone: Year's Best Novel).
A feature-length film version has been in planning for decades, and was in development by Amblin Partners and The Kennedy/Marshall Company with a script by Chris Sparling.