Guardian UnlimitedNovember 27, 2003 Peter Straub is associated with three things: the early novel Ghost Story, now something of a modern horror classic; his subsequent Vietnam-flavoured mysteries, including Koko and The Throat; and his co-authorship of The Talisman and its sequel Black House, with Stephen King. There is a problem with classification. Ghost Story is supernatural, The Talisman was a dark and epic modern fantasy, but the mysteries are harder to define: set in a largely conventional world, they are none the less shot through with something unstable, an off-kilterness that can threaten to push the reader through the walls of the known. If you wander into these uncertain areas, you’re not allowed to just be a “novelist”: you’ve got to have a label. So what kind of writer is Straub? What kind of book is this? Lost Boy, Lost Girl starts with a death. Tim Underhill - who will be familiar to Straub readers from the mysteries - returns to his home town after the suicide of his sister-in-law. A week later, her son Mark disappears. At the root of one or perhaps both of these events lies a madman called the Sherman Park killer, who has been haunting the neighbourhood; and also a nearby house, which had become Mark’s obsession before he vanished. Underhill begins to fear that in unravelling the house’s secrets his nephew may have been coaxed deep into darkness, seduced by lingering forces. He’s right. So it’s a haunted-house story, and a mystery too, which unfolds in a fashion both elegant and compelling. It also fits into the mould of the modern American novel, concerned as it is with the strangeness of families, the transition from adolescence to adulthood, and the further step into middle age, with its sense of drifting and loneliness and loss. Straub and King have done more than enough to be considered simply as exponents of the American novel or perhaps just “fiction”. In their novels the dead still sometimes walk - big deal. No one labels Franzen for the artifice of his conceptual structures or Pynchon for his playful surreality. It’s simply part of what they do. Neither should Straub be classified merely for his willingness to step outside the boundaries of mundane reality - as we do when we turn because we feel someone is looking at us, or react to death by seeing the shadows of the world differently, and by feeling hands reaching for us in our dreams. We all recognise these oddnesses in the margins of everyday experience: Straub is a master of bringing them into narratives about real people and their lives. Though a ghost story, this novel is not about the ghosts, but about what happens to us when we think we see them; just as, in a novel of ideas, the subject should not be the notions themselves but their manifestation in our world. Lost Boy, Lost Girl is intense and yet measured; serious and melancholy at times, but also humorous. Straub’s prose has a tart clarity that allows him to delineate the muddiness of life with great economy and richness. He has a superb ear for dialogue, both spoken and silent - notably in the churning sibling fug between Underhill and his brother. He is adept, too, with ambiguity: the emotional blur of the real world, of our tentative and ambivalent responses to each other and the things we do. These qualities create an atmosphere that lingers like the novel’s own ghost, and Straub achieves this invisibly, in the background. He doesn’t insist you notice how intelligent and subtle the novel is, and you don’t: you merely appreciate how good a time you’re having, and that you don’t want it to stop. Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited Book of the TimesNovember 10, 2003 One of the characters in Peter Straub’s new book is a successful author of horror fiction not unlike Mr. Straub himself. Another is a school principal. He asks the writer, Tim Underhill, “Would I know any of your work?” “Of course not,” Tim answers. “You wouldn’t like it at all.” Probably not. Neither Mr. Straub nor the genre in which he works (he recently collaborated on “Black House” with Stephen King) has any cachet in academia or significant snob appeal. But Mr. Straub’s latest is an unusually taut, dynamic, spooky display of horror expertise, and its story is deftly told. If Mr. Straub does not quite deliver “prose as supple as mink,” as Publisher’s Weekly recently lauded it, he does not overwrite either. Even the more ornate passages in his new book are used to enveloping effect: “After losing the yolky look of the afternoon, the sunlight had muted itself to a dispersed, fleeting shade of yellow that struck Mark Underhill with the force of a strong fragrance or a rich chord from a guitar.” As that may indicate, Mark Underhill is a teenage boy. He is Tim Underhill’s nephew. And “lost boy lost girl” is about the strange things that begin happening to Mark after his mother commits suicide, although the less you know about this from the start, the better. Warning: Skip the plot synopsis on this book’s jacket. It won’t dispel the scariness of this haunted-house tale, but it gives away more than it should. “Lost boy lost girl” has many earmarks of the familiar, beginning of course with the haunted house itself. But Mr. Straub manages to pack a lot of convoluted plotting into a relatively short novel (this one will not hold your door open on a windy day) and to draw on new elements involving computers and crime. So in addition to the standard-issue frissons to be found here (and one of the most startling involves only a light bulb), this book also attempts a Google search for a serial killer. Talk about scary: a snoop is able not only to identify his prey but also to learn that the killer has a size 18 neck and orders James Patterson novels online. With a section of his book entitled “A Rip in the Fabric,” Mr. Straub centers his story on the possibility of slipping from the ordinary into an adjacent evil world. To the book’s credit, this does not seem drastic. Just before she died, Mark’s mother showed signs of having been shellshocked by something indescribable (“I’m fine,” she tells Mark, despite her empty-eyed zombie’s gaze), and so her son is naturally susceptible. And he begins to notice odd things about an abandoned house in his neighborhood. The oddest thing: he never really noticed the place before. Bit by bit, Mr. Straub brings the menace of this building into focus. And what is most frightening about the house is not graphic (this book is eerie, not bloody) but instead is implied. Once Mark screws up his courage and begins exploring it, he discovers a powerful visual metaphor for the idea of a secret life. “The house was a honeycomb,” Mr. Straub reveals, in a part of the story best not read home alone on a dark and stormy night. When it turns out that Mark’s mother was distantly related
to a serial killer, and that the serial killer once lived in the
house, and that there is at least one other serial killer rambling
through this novel, it may sound as if Mr. Straub has pressed his
luck with his material. Not really: he just takes the real-life
horror of our treating serial killers as celebrities and makes it
one of this book’s undercurrents. He has also incorporated
an all-too-tabloid-ready brand of child. Most frightening of all
is the way he shows evil hiding in plain sight. Neighbors are aware
of the house but don’t notice its terrible power. But to Tim
Underhill, once he begins Tim Underhill bridges the gap between his brother, Philip, Mark’s cold, priggish father, and the teenage boy who sends Tim messages in computerese (“4 u 2 c”). Inquisitive and open-minded as Tim is, he makes it easy for Mr. Straub to move from conventionally hair-raising effects (“the wooden surface felt furry and scratchy, and softer than it should have been, like the hide of a long-dead bear”) to the more happening teenage world of cyberscares. Strongly visual without resorting to second-hand cinematic imagery, the book is equally well equipped to play both kinds of tricks. Beginning in the realm of the everyday, this becomes a novel whose denouement can play out, in part, on a computer. And Tim is ready to marvel at what he sees there, knowing that here, as in the haunted house, a parallel universe can be found. “Moving quickly but without running, they briefly occupied the dead center of the Windows Media rectangle, then moved rightward toward the margin,” Tim observes about the images flashing before him. Like readers who are susceptible to Mr. Straub’s dark visions, he is too entranced to recoil at what he sees. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company Publisher’s WeeklyFor its high artistry and uncanny mix of dread and hope, Straub’s 16th novel, his shortest in decades, reaffirms the author’s standing as the most literate and, with his occasional coauthor Stephen King, most persuasive of contemporary novelists of the dark fantastic. The book, a brilliant variation on the haunted house tale, distills themes and characters from Straub’s long career, including two of the author’s most popular creations: Manhattan based novelist Tim Underhill (from Koko, Mystery and The Throat) and Tim’s friend, legendary private detective Tom Pasmore (from Mystery and The Throat). Written from multiple viewpoints, the narrative shuttles disturbingly through time and space as Tim travels home to Millhaven, Ill., to attend the funeral for his sister-in-law, a suicide. In that small city based loosely on Straub’s hometown of Milwaukee, Tim spends time with his callow widowed brother, Philip, and his nephew, sensitive Mark, 15, who found his mother’s naked body in the bathtub, wrists slit and a plastic bag over her head. Meanwhile, a serial killer is snatching teen boys from a local park, and Mark and his sidekick, Jimbo, begin to explore a nearby abandoned house. Mark grows obsessed with the house, eventually revealed as the rotting source of the evil that stalks Millhaven but also as the harbor of a great marvel; when Mark disappears, Tim pursues his trail and, with Tom Pasmore’s help, that of the serial killer who may have taken the boy away. Straub remains a master of place and character; his insight into teens, in particular, is astonishingly astute. His myriad narrative framings allow multiple interpretations of events, making this a story that works on many levels, yet they also increase the urgency of the story, up to its incandescent ending. With great compassion and in prose as supple as mink, Straub has created an exciting, fearful, wondrous tale about people who matter, in one of his finest books to date. BooklistSeptember 1, 2003 Once more, Straub employs the scene (Millhaven, Illinois) and the protagonists – ’nam-vet novelist Tim Underhill and rich, super-attentive and -intuitive P.I. Tom Pasmore – of his hefty best-sellers Koko (1988) and Mystery (1989), and The Throat (1993). Relegating Pasmore to the secondary cast and using Tim as both first-person recorder of events and third-person general narrator, Straub explores two appalling tragedies. Tim’s sister-in-law, Nancy, an appealing woman whom many pity for marrying ill-tempered Philip Underhill, kills herself for no apparent reason. Mere days later, Philip and Nancy’s handsome 15-year-old, Mark, disappears. Since a serial killer has been “disappearing” middle-teen boys from the park in which Mark and his best friend, Jimbo, hung out nights, the worst is feared. With Pasmore working behind the scenes, Tim sets out to understand his two losses. Mostly, he must get Jimbo to reveal all that he knows. As he succeeds with the boy, Tim discovers that in the abandoned house across the alley from Philip and Nancy’s are the keys to the puzzles of her death, Mark’s vanishing, and other mysteries. Much of what Tim learns is hideous, but some of it points to transcendent redemption for Mark and a girl who disappeared long ago in even grislier circumstances. This is the great novel of the supernatural Straub has always had it in him to write, one as beautiful, moving, and spiritually rich as the best stories in his dazzling collections Houses without Doors (1990) and Magic Terror (2000). — Ray Olson Rocky Mountain NewsOctober 24, 2003 Since the 1970s, Peter Straub has been known as the “literate” horror writer, kind of a modern-day Henry James. Stephen King, Straub’s sometimes-collaborator (The Talisman and Black House), has compared himself to a burger and fries. Using the same type of allusion, one might refer to Straub as filet mignon and a baked potato with chives. Maybe the combination of the authors’ styles is what makes their two novels so successful and deliciously frightening. King goes for your jugular; Straub goes for your brain. Straub’s 14th solo novel only reinforces his reputation. Rather than scream-in-the-night scary, Lost Boy Lost Girl is pit-of-the-stomach disturbing, a novel that readers (especially parents) will carry with them like a gladstone loaded with bricks. And it won’t take long to feel the effect. Compared with his recent efforts, Lost Boy Lost Girl is short and tightly constructed, not an extra word to spoil the atmosphere. Although having read Straub’s previous novels is not necessary to follow the plot and understand the several themes presented, those familiar with his work should find additional depths in Lost Boy Lost Girl. Straub reprises significant characters from Koko, Mystery and The Throat. And knowing what happened to them in those books aids in understanding their motivation in this one. The narrative begins with Tim Underhill, successful horror writer (who many feel is Straub’s alter ego), on the way to his hometown of Millhaven for the funeral of his brother’s wife. The brothers have never gotten along, and Phillip’s obvious animosity toward, and jealousy of Tim makes the situation even more difficult. Particularly frustrating to Tim is that Phillip seems to have no idea what is happening in his own family. He never appreciated his wife and cannot communicate with his son. When Tim discovers that Nancy Underhill sat in the bathtub, tied a plastic bag over her head and cut her wrists, and that the body was discovered by her 15-year-old son, Mark, things become even more dicey. Straub alternates point of view between Tim’s observations in the present and Mark’s experiences in the recent past. Thus, the events that led up to Nancy’s suicide are revealed to the reader while the participants are limited by their objective senses. Shortly before his mother’s death, Mark became obsessed by the house across the alley, a building that, inexplicably, he never noticed before. After the funeral, the abandoned house is all he lives for, and, in his explorations, he discovers secret passageways, tunnels, torture chambers and all that might be expected of a haunted house in the true Gothic tradition. He also discovers a beautiful girl who may be alive, may be a ghost, or may be something altogether different. She will be either his salvation or his destruction, or both. In addition to the tension of Nancy Underhill’s death, there is evidence that a serial killer is operating in Millhaven. Adolescent boys have been disappearing from the town and its environs. It isn’t long before Mark disappears. And Tim sets out to find him. At times the book takes on a surreal atmosphere, as readers don’t quite know what is supernatural and what is gruesomely real. Yet all comes together in a bitter-sweet conclusion. No one can argue that the author is an expert when it comes to the haunted house mystery. His ability to put readers in his settings in Lost Boy Lost Girl is reminiscent of those in his previous masterpieces, Ghost Story, Shadowland, Floating Dragon and (with King) Black House. As he proved in Ghost Story, Straub may be the best there is at describing the relationships among different generations. And his depictions of Mark as troubled adolescent and of his psychologically dysfunctional family are amazingly astute. Lost Boy Lost Girl is literate without being stuffy — a hard-hitting, quick read, but one to ponder. —Mark Graham |