Although I have generally found Orwell to be a politically confused thinker, 1984 stands out as one of the best and most forward thinking works I have ever read. The amount of relevance this book has today is overwhelming, considering modern government propaganda techniques and the double edged sword of technology. This story serves as a warning to all who trust the government, especially in regards to privacy issues.

Winston Smith, while not the ideal romantic protagonist, is still compelling in his own right with his inspiring (and finally tragic) fight against Big Brother. The struggle that takes place between Winston and the government in 1984 is psychologically thrilling and intense, and it is still difficult for me to put the book down each time I read it. I am particularly drawn to the character of O'Brien, who represents to me the culmination of a path that all seasoned politicians and government officials travel down.

The year 1984 has come and past, but an extreme statist government similar to the one portrayed in the novel still may haunt us in the future.

1984 is unquestionably one of the greatest books in the history of English literature. A terrifying look at the dangers of totalitarian government, it is ingeniously written and scarily realistic. George Orwell is meticulously thorough in his depiction of a world that is bleak, hopeless, and horrifying--and perhaps not as distant as we think. The writing style is factual and almost impersonal, reflecting not only the government but the people themselves, who have been reduced to unthinking robots. Protagonist Winston Smith's resistance against Big Brother (the symbolic leader of the Party) and ultimate complete acceptance and execution demonstrate the debility and irresolution of the human mind and spirit. The authoritarian government itself is eerily familiar, complete with conspiracies, cover-ups, and double-dealing politicians. While the year 1984 is long past, the book is still a relevant and potent warning of what the future may bring if we let it. The concept of 1984 is brilliant, the writing is brilliant, and it is nearly impossible not to love this book. 1984 is a definite must-read for anyone. Enthusiastically recommended; 5 stars.

This book vividly portrays the most extreme end of socialism's slippery slope. The book is terrifying to read because the eery science fiction-like society which Orwell describes is not so inconceivable. I lived in Russia a few years ago and was struck by the cold impersonal drabness of everything. In the blank, hollow, empty eyes of many of Russia's elderly I saw how tyranny had literally erased personality. The spark of humanity which puts light in the eyes had been doused, and all that was left was a shell of a human being who was no longer a person, but merely a function with no independent thought. George Orwell's 1984 has existed to a large degree in totalitarian regimes of the past, and its radical egalitarian roots exist in society today. They seem to be an integral part of human nature's dark side.

Two things in this book were especially profound for me. First was Orwell's exposition of the social conflicts between the highs, the middles, and the lows, which Winston Smith read about in Goldstein's book. George Orwell understood totalitarianism well enough to see that equality is not socialism's end, but merely the propagandistic means for replacing the highs. Self-serving tyrants inevitably usurp socialism's ideals and use them to become the highs themselves, indulging themselves in privilege at the expense of the rest of society. After reading Goldstein's book, Winston understood the how, and O'Brien explained to him the why when he declared, chillingly, that power was an end in and of itself.

The second thing which struck me as profound was Orwell's exposition of Newspeak, the official language of Oceania which robbed people of their ability to think by robbing them of their ability to express thoughts in words. Rudimentary examples of doublethink, crimethink, and the thought police can be seen in various political groups within our society today.

This book is brilliant and prophetic, a must read for all those socialist utopians who have forgotten the dark realities of human nature.

This King/Straub collaboration reads differently than a typical Stephen King novel. Some of the first half of the book does not flow well and you are drawn to writing style as much as the plot. (Wondering, which one wrote this chapter? And noticing at times that Stephen forgot to take his own advice in his recent book, On Writing. Such as slipping in needless adverbs, and some prose that doesn't advance the story much.)

The subject matter of Black House is disturbing, which made the story emotionally difficult to read at first and I almost didn't make it past the first 100 pages or so. In the story, the "Fisherman" is responsible for the gruesome deaths of several children. For me, this is going too far, even if the book is in the horror genre.

That being said, as the plot evolves, the suspense builds and there are many "real" characters. (Not that you would read a King/Straub book for realism, anyway.) You can definitely feel the pain and fear of the parents, and the different ways they react to the violence in their town. There are some interesting connections to the Dark Tower books - so a lot of this plot feels like a bridge to some future sequel that more firmly ties Talisman and Dark Tower.

I found the second half of the book to be more of the classic page-turner that I expect from these world class authors.

The Talisman was the first book by King and Straub that I ever read. I have been a fan of both since that time. Reading Black House was like a stroll down memory lane. Old characters brought back (at least mentioned in some cases) was like visiting old friends that you haven't heard from in a while.
I thought the tie in with the Gunslinger seriers (Dark Tower) was a brainstorm. That Straub bought into the premise is a wonder.
Jack, now middleaged, is called from retirement to help solve brutal murders of children. Gradually he is drawn into crimes so gruesome that they stretch credibility. Of course, after the twin towers were laid low, can anything be doubted.
New characters, Henry, Beezer (an educated and lovable brute) Sophie, and others.
As expected, the territories play a major role in this new story, but not to the extent as in the Talisman. This is typical King/Struab...tight story, believable characters, suspensful storytelling. Don't listen to the nay sayers. Buy (or borrow from your public library) the book, read it and make up your own mind.

Black House is Stephen King's best book in the past ten years, granting the exceptions of Hearts in Atlantis, which I think might be his best book ever, and The Green Mile, which probably comes in a dead heat with this one. Black House is also easily the best Peter Straub book since 1993's The Throat. In fact this new collaboration, a sequel of sorts to King and Straub's 1984 fantasy epic The Talisman, is nothing short of a horror fiction tour de force, the dark literary equivalent of the Beatles getting back together.

You don't need to have read The Talisman to enjoy this new book, however. In fact, the tone of this new one is sufficiently darker than the first book that it feels not so much like a sequel, but rather an updated re-imagining of the life of the main character, Jack Sawyer. If you've read any of King's Dark Tower books, or the many books that tie in with the Dark Tower cosmology (practically anything King's written in the past ten years) you'll be right at home in Black House.

You could actually consider Black House book four-and-a-half in the Dark Tower series. Anyone who's been waiting patiently (or not so patiently as the case may be) for the fifth installment owes it to themselves to read Black House. This book offers you a glimpse of how King might actually finish the Dark Tower series for once and all. In many ways, this book feels like the volleyball equivalent of a set-up for the final smash over the net that the last installment in the Dark Tower story promises to be.

Aside from its Dark Tower connections, Black House also happens to be a hell of a tale on its own merits. The story concerns the grown up child Jack Sawyer, who once traveled across an alternate version of our country known as the Territories in order to save his ailing mother in The Talisman. Twenty years have passed since that adventure unfolded (The Talisman was released in 1984, but set in 1981) and Jack now resides in the idyllic town of French Landing, Wisconsin, where he has no conscious memory of the fantastic events that befell him as a boy. Jack's now a prematurely retired police detective in his early thirties who has moved east from Los Angeles to try to find some peace in his life.

Jack is soon enlisted by his friend, the Sheriff of French Landing, to help track down a particularly brutal child murderer known as the Fisherman. Some odd things have been happening in Jack's personal life recently. Once he unofficially joins the investigation of the case he begins to see how these strange events might have some bearing on helping him find the identity of the Fisherman. He also realizes that the roots of these strange events might lie in the long-forgotten events of his childhood. He discovers that in order to solve this case, he's going to have to remember what it was like to be a child, and he's going to have to be able to believe again in places and things that he hasn't believed in for a long, long, long time.
What makes Black House particularly satisfying is the breadth and depth of rich thematic subtext that lies just below the story's surface. It soon becomes clear that the role of the imagination in our lives is the book's controlling metaphor. Everything feeds into the idea of imagination as a means of transport from where we find ourselves to where long and ache to be. As Jack remembers the first time that he ever visited the Territories, while listening to old jazz records his father was playing when he was a young child (you can't get much more Straub than this), it becomes obvious what it really means to be transported to the Territories. It doesn't happen often, surely, and most adults have willfully forgotten how to do it. But as Jack's new adventures in Black House make it clear, it's only by having the faith to travel that you're going to end up where you need to be.

Another interesting angle to the imagination subtext lies in the ever-present symbolism of borders. Everywhere you look in this book you find borders of one type or another. From naturally occurring borders, such as the great river that French Landing lies on, the Mississippi, to the Black House itself, an eerie, headache-inducing border between worlds. There's also a reference to the "night's Plutonian shore," Edgar Allan Poe's term for the great border between life and death. There are also the social borders that abound between many of the characters, as well as the borders of personality that exist in our own minds There's a great passage towards the beginning of the story that describes the "slippage" that often occurs along borders. In places where two worlds meet, there's bound to be a powerful friction.

All of this makes perfect sense in light of the way Black House was written: two separate imaginations coming together to travel to a common place that neither could have gone to on its own. And there's a great heat generated by this collision of imaginations that sets the story on fire and keeps it burning brightly to the very last word on the last page. There's no problem of the wandering aimlessness here that has plagued some of both King and Straub's recent longer works. Black House is a long book, but it doesn't read like one. Straub and King seem to be good for each other, strengthening one another's occasional weaknesses and compounding one another's strengths. When I first heard about this book, I was a little worried that it might not live up to having both authors' names on the front cover, but believe me, it does. Black House manages to be truly creepy, compelling, and at times moving and profound while never outstaying its welcome. Imagine that.