How was The Talisman written between Peter Straub and King, and who wrote which bits?
Well, thanks to the fact that we now have the honour of Mr. Straub’s company on alt.books.stephen-king, we can now have the story from the source (thanks to Antti Matikka for sending me a copy). Over to Mr. Straub… Soon after we had become friends, King came over to my house for dinner. (We were both living in England at the time, 1977 or 78.) Late at night and after many beers, he said that we might have a lot of fun if we wrote a book together. I agreed – it did sound like fun. Besides that, collaboration was an interesting way to alleviate the loneliness inevitable in writing. The first thing we did was to work out when we could begin – it sounds absurd, but we found that existing contracts for books meant that neither one of us would be free for another four years. So we made a kind of provisional date to begin thinking seriously about it four years later. When the time came, Steve and I spent a lot of time talking about what sort of book we’d do. (Most of the crucial stuff was d
