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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent. Not Straub's best book, but my favourite., 10 Feb 2004
Peter Straub is far and away my favourite author, and this - while not his best novel - is my favourite one. I've just recently finished reading it for a third time, and I absolutely adore it.There's so much to savour. I have so many favourite parts - the history behind "Night Journey" (which is obviously reminiscent of "The Lord of the Rings") like Paddi Mann and The Hellfire Club of the title, Dick Dart's wonderfully twisted campness, Daisy freaking out at Nora's opinions of her sprawling novel (the Poison family are very funny!), the brief but intense flashbacks to Nora's Vietnam experiences, the story of Katherine Mannheim, Davey being reduced to a child by his father, the excellent finale in Shorelands, and ... oh, so much more! One of my friends thought Dick Dart was too unbelievable to be scary, but I disagree. His over-the-topness certainly makes him scarier and a change from the usual brooding, boring sociopaths in most other novels of the same themes. I highly recommend this excellent novel. If you've read Straub before, you'll love it. If you've never read him before, it makes the perfect introduction to his world.
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2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Oh no! Not another serial killer novel?, 3 July 2002
By A Customer
How many serial killer novels do we really need? I realize that there's a nearly insatiable market for this type of fiction, but surely saturation point had already been reached when this book was first published in 1996. No matter. If taken on its own terms, The Hellfire Club is an okay read. For better or worse, it's a typical Peter Straub novel, both in form and content. For instance, we get a crime from the past that is still veiled in mystery; people carry personal demons, both great and small; there are plenty of literary allusions. The author also returns to the well of fairy tales, so thoroughly visited in Shadowlands, only here the main emphasis is on more modern variations. For this, Straub has to conjure up an additional universe to the one his characters already inhabit. This universe is that of Night Journey and its sequels, vastly popular books along the lines of The Lord of the Rings. I don't like it when a completely imagined work of fiction is included within another work of fiction, especially when it's so central and has to work as a pillar for the story. The suspension of disbelief can be difficult enough as it is. We're supposed to be seeing the parallels between Night Journey and general narrative as the story unfolds, but how is that possible when we've never read Night Journey because it doesn't exist? See my point? How on earth can we understand the imaginary readers' laughable yet scary devotion to Night Journey? Still, we get an examination of the kind of fan devotion that's often ladled on works such as Star Trek and those of Tolkien, and this is fairly interesting. I wish I could say the same for Dick Dart, the serial killer. He has all the prerequisites of a nut job: strange sexual practices, a cleanliness fetish, a complete lack of emotion, a brilliant Hannibal Lecter-like mind etc. In other words, there is nothing new about him, and he subsequently becomes almost too perfect in his villainy, too much of a calculated invention. But although the components of his personality are familiar from the works of other writers, Dart is very much a Straub character. In fact, particularly in speech, he reminded me of Zack Hovre and Jim Hardie, teenage nuisances in If You Could See Me Now and Ghost Story respectively. In my mind, this is an unfortunate resemblance, which partly undermines the main character's psychotic authority. Seems like I've taken a sledgehammer to this book, right? So how could I possibly give it three stars? For starters, Straub writes intelligently. In less than stellar form, he still beats much of the competition. His phrasing is at times unnecessarily ornate, but he is still easy to follow. Also, he is good at building mood, a vital component in the suspense genre. He knows the locales of the book, too, because he has lived there. The characters are educated and affluent, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that some of them are based on real people. The various story threads mesh nicely, and despite the elements that grate, you still want to see how things turn out. And that's saying something.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Dishonesty Among Publishers, Authors, Editors and Lawyers, 11 Dec 2003
On one level this book is about dishonesty among publishers, authors, editors and lawyers. It is also about strong-willed fathers whose destructive acts affect succeeding generations. There are many different strands to the book, even one dealing with ultra-secret societies at Yale. Peter Straub is able to weave these pieces together with skill and the result is a riveting story.
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