The bestselling collaboration between #1 bestselling author Stephen King and Peter Straub - an epic thriller about a small American town held in the grip of unspeakable evil - and the spectacular follow-up to The Talisman. Twenty years ago, a boy named Jack Sawyer traveled to a parallel universe called the Territories to save his mother and her Twinner from an agonizing death that would have brought cataclysm to the other world. Now Jack is a retired Los Angeles homicide detective living in the nearly nonexistent hamlet of Tamarack, Wisconsin. He has no recollection of his adventures in the Territories, and he was compelled to leave the police force when an odd, happenstance event threatened to awaken those memories. When a series of gruesome murders occur in western Wisconsin that are reminiscent of those committed several decades earlier, Jack`s buddy, the local chief of police, begs Jack to help find him. But are these new killings merely the work of a disturbed individual, or has a mysterious and malignant force been unleashed in this quiet town? What causes Jack`s inexplicable waking dreams - if that is what they are - of robins` eggs and red feathers? It`s almost as if someone is trying to tell him something. As this cryptic message becomes increasingly impossible to ignore, Jack is drawn back to the Territories and to his own hidden past, where he may find the strength to enter a terrifying house at the end of a deserted tract of forest--only to encounter the obscene and ferocious evils sheltered within it.