In the Night Room [Hardcover]

We have become to expect the unusual from Peter Straub. His horror never attacks you at the jugular. It never goes for cheap thrills of cheap scares. Instead, his novels brings you through journeys of despair and oddity, through madness and back. You never quite know what to expect when beginnin a Straub book, and In The Night Room is genuine Straub.

In The Night Room isn't a sequel to last year's amazing lost boy, lost girl. Instead, it somehow works as a continuation of that story. Here, Tim Underhill, a famous writer, is working on his latest invention. He's still haunted by his nephew's disappearence and he still has trouble dealing with the events surrounding his disappearence. He's also receiving strange e-mails from what seems to be an angel, weird cryptic messages that are telling him that his last book angered the other world, something he must now remedy.

Meanwhile, Willy is still haunted by the death of her husband and daughter. But when she realizes that the man she is now supposed to marry might have murdered her ex-husband, her whole world tumbles down into oblivion.

How these two stories mix, I cannot tell because it would ruin quite a great surprise. But the shock of the twist Straub offers halfway through the story quite delivers the punch. Unfortunately, after that point, the book loses some of its steam and mysteriousness and the ending just seems to evaporate. Because the story never really ends, it just slowly goes one way and then suddenly stops.

Too many questions are left unanswered in In The Night Room, as if Straub was deliberately trying to confuse his readers at times. Then again, reading a Straub book is always a treat. His writing is very poetic, his sentences always hiding many surprises for the reader. Straub is an amazing writer. Even when his stories faulter, his writing style is enough to keep you turning the pages.

In The Night Room is just weird enough to be called entertaining. This is the story of a writer and of the writer's world, of the blurry line between reality and fiction. Following lost boy, lost girl, In The Night Room seems to fall short in the end. But as it is, the novel is quite an entertaining ride you'll want to take right up until the end.

Straub stunned me with a surprise, on p.137, that I didn't see coming. I thought that this might become a rare literary achievement. But once Willy is established, she quickly becomes a tagalong with no influence in the story. She weakens, fades, almost as if the author loses interest in her. And why is he a gay man in love with a woman? Simple. Straub wanted it to be a love story and knew that a gay love story would have turned off his readership.

Other readers have pointed out that the angel and the emails from beyond are either underutilized or ultimately irrelevent and so feel like lost opportunities. I feel cheated of reunions which are promised and never arrive. Similarly, the bad guy is squandered by spreading him across identities. The logic is porous.

And the ending with all the fear that should / must be generated as our heroes cross the threshold is described but never dramatized, never made active. it just dissipates. I read the book 3 days ago and already I can't remember what the main character's great sacrifice was supposed to be. The book feels as over-controlled as it is under-realized.

This book is lobster ice-cream: well made of good ingredients but unpalatable.

Like the jazz musicians he favors, Peter Straub has always displayed a penchant for digging deep into his art, examining the tales he tells from several angles, experimenting with their basic components and rhythm. This literary improvisation plays a large role in his classic THE THROAT, which revisited characters, events, settings and themes previously treated in KOKO and MYSTERY, all in an attempt to uncover the "real" story of the Blue Rose Murders, killings which occurred in Millhaven, WI, the author's fictional recreation of his hometown of Milwaukee. It also plays a large part in Straub's latest, IN THE NIGHT ROOM.

Straub sent his alter ego (and sometimes collaborator) Tim Underhill back to Millhaven in 2003's LOST BOY LOST GIRL, a haunted house/serial killer/ghost story which netted the author both a Bram Stoker and an International Horror Guild Award for best novel. In that book, readers saw a melancholy Underhill struggling to cope with his beloved nephew's apparent death; attempting to assuage his profound grief, he pieces together a supernatural explanation to account for the boy's disappearance. In IN THE NIGHT ROOM, we discover that the events of LOST BOY LOST GIRL still haunt Underhill, but not in the way one might expect. LOST BOY LOST GIRL, it now appears, was the novel Underhill wrote to cope with the experience, featuring a character named Tim Underhill. Underhill's fictional vision is so powerful, however, that it resonates in another dimension, where Joseph Kalendar, the deceased serial killer who figured so prominently in LOST BOY LOST GIRL, reads the "perfect" version of the novel, becoming maddened and enraged over Underhill's portrayal of his daughter Lily.

Kalendar is so affronted by this perceived injustice that he reaches out from beyond the grave to strike at his tormentor; Underhill thus finds himself desperately trying to set things right in order to stave off the killer's increasingly devastating attacks. Complicating his already complex existence, another rent in the fabric of reality produces a truly fantastic traveling companion for Underhill, young adult author Willy Bryce Patrick, whose true origins won't be revealed here for fear of reducing the impact of the surprises Straub has in store for his audience. Thrown together, the duo comes to realize that some debts are so steep they require the ultimate sacrifice.

IN THE NIGHT ROOM is beautifully written, boasting Straub's characteristic inventiveness and humor. A deep affection for his varied cast is also evident. Tim Underhill and Willy Patrick are especially captivating, as is book collector Jasper Dan Kohle, Straub's most menacing villain since GHOST STORY's Gregory Bate (yes, even more loathsome than Dick Dart!). Straub toys with several compelling notions in this novel, among them the "Borgesian" idea of the "real book" ("The one you were supposed to write, only you screwed it up."), a creator's love for his creations, and the power of fiction to make sense of reality. As Straub writes of Underhill, "Tim Underhill was like a kind of Scheherazade, telling stories to save his life. Fiction gave him entry into the worst and darkest places of his life, and that entry put the pain and fear and anger right in his own hands, where he could transform them into pleasure." One suspects this is much the way Straub feels about writing himself.

The novel also adds to the list of fictional novels that you wish you had a chance to read, Straub being responsible for more than a few of these over the years. Now, in addition to books like Underhill's THE DIVIDED MAN (first mentioned in KOKO), Don Wanderley's THE NIGHTWATCHER (from GHOST STORY), and Hugo Driver's NIGHT JOURNEY (the fantasy novel at the heart of THE HELLFIRE CLUB), you'll find yourself longing to read Willy Bryce's third YA novel, the Newberry Award winning IN THE NIGHT ROOM. Unfortunately, that's a possibility that's not likely to materialize in this reality. Perhaps, though, in another?