Stream the three-hour book episode below and return next week when the Losers invite another special guest to the Derry Public Library for a spirited chat within King’s Dominion. Is its stark portrait of good and evil simplistic or subversive? They also discuss its role as a narrative bridge in King’s Dark Tower saga, and how its portrait of Mid-World dovetails with the fantasy world of The Talisman. In this episode, Losers Randall Colburn, Jenn Adams, Dan Caffrey, and Dan Pfleegor grapple with the story’s tonal irregularities and celebrate its unbridled nastiness.
Called Black House, it nudged up against King’s Dark Tower mythos in its tale of a serial killer in a small Wisconsin town.īlack House is an odd duck, a behemoth of a sequel that’s as funny as it is grisly. It took them 17 years, but in 2001, a sequel followed. Together, the pair wrote 1984’s The Talisman, a fantasy epic about a gifted boy who pivots between two worlds as he crosses the country in search of the story’s magical namesake. He’s collaborated with numerous writers, filmmakers, and innovators, but no one’s challenged him quite like Peter Straub, the writer of books like Ghost Story and Julia. The Breakers in the basement, making all the money…”
READ MORE: How the Great Depression Helped End Prohibitionīy the post-World War II era, a larger cultural shift toward earlier marriage and suburban living, the advent of TV and the anti-homosexuality crusades championed by Joseph McCarthy would help push the flowering of gay culture represented by the Pansy Craze firmly into the nation’s rear-view mirror.ĭrag balls, and the spirit of freedom and exuberance they represented, never went away entirely-but it would be decades before LGBTQ life would flourish so publicly again.“The King is in his Tower, eating bread and honey. This not only discouraged gay men from participating in public life, but also “made homosexuality seem more dangerous to the average American.” In the mid- to late ‘30s, Heap points out, a wave of sensationalized sex crimes “provoked hysteria about sex criminals, who were often-in the mind of the public and in the mind of authorities-equated with gay men.” The sale of liquor was legal again, but newly enforced laws and regulations prohibited restaurants and bars from hiring gay employees or even serving gay patrons. Each gay enclave, wrote George Chauncey in his book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, had a different class and ethnic character, cultural style and public reputation. In addition to these groups, whom social reformers in the early 1900s would call “male sex perverts,” a number of nightclubs and theaters were featuring stage performances by female impersonators these spots were mainly located in the Levee District on Chicago’s South Side, the Bowery in New York City and other largely working-class neighborhoods in American cities.īy the 1920s, gay men had established a presence in Harlem and the bohemian mecca of Greenwich Village (as well as the seedier environs of Times Square), and the city’s first lesbian enclaves had appeared in Harlem and the Village. “In the late 19th century, there was an increasingly visible presence of gender-non-conforming men who were engaged in sexual relationships with other men in major American cities,” says Chad Heap, a professor of American Studies at George Washington University and the author of Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940.