Customer Reviews

Floating Dragon

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

"I wanted to write a special effects show. Something that would make the reader's jaw drop and make them think 'I can't believe that I'm reading this.'" - Peter Straub on writing Floating Dragon.

Well Mr. Straub you have succeeded.

Floating Dragon was, at the time, Straub's last foray into supernatural horror (Mr. X marks his return to the field that made him famous). As an ancient, paranormal thing awakens to again wreak havoc on an accursed town, an equally horrid nerve gas escapes and infects the population of said town. How much of the events of this story are really happening and how much is collective hallucination brought upon by the gas? The question is not answered by Straub, who leaves a great deal to the reader to figure out. But the clues are there, you just have to dig past all the symbolic and over the top effects scenes (of which there is a HUGE amount). Granted Floating Dragon may not be Straub's best novel, but even his lesser efforts are far superior to other horror writers successes.

Peter Straub has never written a bad book, only better and worse ones. This is probably his worst, but it's still readable and has a few things going for it.

The plot is confused. The "Floating Dragon" is - perhaps - partly supernatural, though primarily it is explained as a leaked Department of Defense gas, that drives people insane and eventually liquefies their bodies. While losing their minds, the unfortunate victims hallucinate - hence, the possibility that what is being perceived as a recurring supernatural evil is all in the mind of the beholder.

I really disliked this book when I first read it, but I decided it required a re-read in later years after overcoming my initial disappointment. It was much better than I remembered it, but its flaws still gravely weaken it. Really, it's all quite good until the last seventy-five pages or so, when the action becomes completely hallucinogenic and virtually impossible to follow, and the ending is terribly trite to the point of being laughable. Straub's worst trait is a tendency to go way over-the-top, and that is at its worst here. But his characters, as usual, are quite memorable, and his writing in every other regard in typically splendid form.

If you're a Straub fan, this one may or may not put you off him. If this is your first exposure to the author, pick a different title, something like Ghost Story or If You Could See Me Now, to get a better feel for Straub closer to the top of his game.

Hampstead, Connecticut, is almost like a sister community to [the also fictional but] heavenly Stepford: gracious homes, genteel people, all the happiness money can buy.

Then, on the afternoon of saturday, May 17, 1980, a local housewife, Susan "Stony" Baxter Friedgood gets horribly murdered meanwhile her emotional cripple of a husband witness an accident at a Secret Chemical plant and -- literally, but methodically- all hell breaks loose, or rather comes to settle, on the perfectly manicured lawns and beautiful, restored colonial houses on tree-lined streets.

This is one of Straub's most ambitious horror novels... perhaps even more so than Ghost Story, although the villainess there is quite simply one of the most memorable characters ever created. But nevertheless, it breaks all the boundaries of where his work had gone before, or would go later.

The main characters are people who live and breathe and slowly move into your heart and touch you in ways that surprise you: Take Graham Williams, writer and demon-chaser, who has battled his very own private horrors for ages; adorable Patsy Tayler McCloud, sensible and sweet, but also catalyst to ever so much power just waiting to be used. Tabby Smithfield, a boy who would go anywhere just to be loved, at least a little; and Richard Allbee, a man who is always trying consciously and un- to scape himself and his child-actor past and who has returned to his hometown after 12 years in London, along with his beautiful and very pregnant wife, the kindly and very human Laura, to face his destiny and future.

Follow these characters and a few others that you won't be able to forget either (like Ulick Byrne, Sarah Spry, Wren Van Horne, Clark, Monty and Jean Smithfield, Les McCloud and the aforementioned, pivotal, and deeply moving Laura Allbee -- who evokes all the strenght and vulnerability of another memorable pregnant heroine, Rosemary Woodhouse, whom all of you surely know from a certain famous modern gothic) through a landscape that slowly but imminently shifts from a suburban paradise into a breeding ground for nightmares.

Ira Levin meets Henry James and Lovecraft? Maybe... this novel deservedly won the British Fantasy Award and has unjustly been branded as "talky" and "overlong"... actually, its lyrical nature and accurate detail of the setup is one of its most disturbing aspects, once the gory, horrifying and breathtakingly awesome denouements come around (my personal favorite? Richard Allbee's epiphany/dream sequence on which he meets Philippa, his daughter, before coming home to Laura) to haunt you.

Give this book a chance and you will never forget it. Wondering, why was it never made into a film? It woyuld be so much better -- if well-adapted- than much of the unbelievably horrid stuff we get these days.

Definitely one of my all-time favorites.

Peter Straub is a literate, intelligent man, who has raised the standards of the horror genre by his involvement with it. His prose reads more like that of Henry James than the pulp fiction hacks too often associated with horror stories. With Straub, sentences never end in prepositions, tenses are never mixed, and (sometimes unfortunately) one word is never used where ten might work as well. One other thing I noticed years ago is that Straub also portrays female characters more realistically than any other male writer I can think of off the top of my head.

I really like Floating Dragon and have read it cover to cover at least three times over the last decade, and also will pick it up a couple times a year and open it at random just to let its vibe affect me, as it is guaranteed to do to anyone. The story here of a wealthy Connecticut suburb called Hampstead, which lies off Long Island Sound, and the series of serial murders with which it is beset with a frequency of about one in every two generations, is augmented by the release of a top secret chemical a local firm is developing on behalf of the Department of Defense. The chemical agent, which escapes to pass directly over the little town of Hampstead, causes severe hallucinations in anyone exposed to it, death in some cases, and in a small percentage of those deaths, the flesh of the afflicted seems to melt from the bone and become a fluffy, slimy ooze. Pretty gory!

In Floating Dragon, the scene is set in the summer of 1980 for a cast of literally a couple thousand characters to survive the presence of both the chemical and the return of a supernatural killer who possesses his chosen agent and then proceeds to become a ripper-killer who leaves his horrendously mutilated victims behind, one after another. A small group, more aware than their fellow townspeople of the dual threats they are all facing, join to find out more about the evils besieging their community. Their research locates records of similar killings from the early 19th century through the 1890's, the 1920's, and the 1950's. They work as one to foil the plan to destroy Hampstead, Connecticut, and around them Straub tells an extended tale of insanity, murder, tragedy and darkness on a scale the likes of which few writers have ever attempted.

This is a dreamy, uneasy, yet pleasing novel that exceeds its author's hopes and successfully brings together a plot of staggering dimensions.

This was only my second Straub read. I can see now how he and King could blend so flawlessly for the Talisman and The Black House. They both seem to share my feeling that nothing is more frightening than what the human mind can do to itself. The ability of the evil doer to pick from our heroes' minds the situations which will most torment them is the perfect torture.
I've heard that this isn't even Straub's best book!! I can't wait read more!!

After reading the Talisman and Ghost Story, i was pretty sure that Peter Straub was a good writer, but now i am quite certain. I don't remember the last time i read a book as completely engrossing as this. The way Straub flows things together is just brilliant, especially in the prologue, and combining the DRG cloud with the Dragon makes it seem like you are getting two books in one, tossed together in a wonderful mix of insanity.
While the cycle that things occur in is similiar to the one in Ghost Story, i feel that the difference between the two, explaining why it happens once every generation, makes more than enough sense to show that Straub is not simply rehashing a plot device from a previous story. I've read most of the other reader reviews of this book, and while I don't agree with some of them, it just goes to show that every person takes a book a different way, comparable to how someone feels about a song they are hearing for the first time. Some may love Floating Dragon, others may hate it, but if you like anything else Straub wrote, i highly recommend you read this title.

I found this book in a Salvation Army/Volunteers of America type store a few days ago, and was curious enough to grab it. I'm very glad I did. From the start to the end, the novel held my attention, and I frequently found myself in bed before sleep, reading far longer than I intended to, dozing off with the book and STILL trying to read. Well worth the read. All four of the main characters were believable and interesting, and while the book takes place in the 1980's, it's nice to see that little has changed and that a good book is STILL a good book.

I have read this book three times since it was released in the early '80's. I think this is Peter Straub's best all-out horror novel. There are several chapters that still raise chills when I read them. I love the narrative and the pure descriptive power that he is able to build into each chapter. Peter Straub has never disappointed me in any of his books, and this one certainly ranks as one of the best !!

_Floating Dragon_ by Peter Straub introduces the reader to a seemingly normal town in Connecticut, the town of Hampstead, a New York City bedroom community. It has everything a town of the time (the book is set in 1980) might have, including a bustling main street, a commuter train station, a small town police department, restaurants, a movie theater, tennis courts, a golf course, and a nice swimming beach. Oh, and a buried, ancient evil that periodically emerges and nearly destroys the town every 10 to 30 years. No place is perfect I guess.

Being a horror novel, things get pretty bad fairly quickly in the town, though most of the residents are slow to catch on and in denial when they start to notice things. In addition to the signs of an incipient, ancient evil rising once more, one dating back to the town's 17th century origins, a Department of Defense experiment goes awry, leaking a sometimes deadly but mostly hallucinogenic nerve gas into the community, a disaster that is kept quiet for a disastrously long length of time. Naturally, this gas makes it hard to parse the hallucinations from the supernatural evil. Are those real hordes of creeping red spiders coming down that wall, or it is a hallucination? Or does it really even matter?

This ancient evil capitalizes on the DOD disaster (apparently, though the evil being, while very intelligent, is not really given any point of view chapters, quite a shame) and it falls upon an unlikely quartet of people to oppose this creature, all of them descendents of townsfolk who help found the town and bested the evil when it first appeared in the 1600s. Graham Williams, an older gentlemen, writer, once an alcoholic and nearly blacklisted as a communist sympathizer in the 1950s, a man who has fought this evil once before. Patsy McCloud, a sweet woman trapped in an abusive marriage, perhaps possessing incredible hidden powers. Tabby Smithfield, a good-natured, shy teen who has bounced from home to home, state to state, with his alcoholic father who just barely manages to stay out of jail. Richard Allbee, returned with his wife Laura from living in London, hoping to continue his successful antique home restoration business and escape the long shadows of his years as a child actor on a popular sitcom.

I know this book is well loved by many fans and is considered a classic (why I read it to begin with). I really wanted to love it, hoping maybe it was something comparable to Lovecraft at his best.

I liked some aspects of it quite a bit, the small town, real feel of the city before evil started to consume it, some of the compelling secondary characters (nearly of all of which meet untimely demises), and I liked the four main characters and their final confrontation with evil. I enjoy books set in seemingly normal settings, the suburbs, areas I am quite familiar with, focusing on people dealing with something extraordinary, whether it is the apparent end of the world (_Spin_ by Robert Charles Wilson to an extent), an entire town being ripped to an alternate universe (_Mysterium_ also by Wilson), or the existence of faeries (_Songs of Earth and Power_ by Greg Bear).

The evil to me seemed very random though. I know part of that was the result of the nerve gas, but it seemed almost arbitrary at times. Sometimes a vision of something was just that, a vision, but other times it was quite real, and it was hard to distinguish what was occurring much of the time. Townspeople became compelled to do awful things to themselves and others but was that the fault of the ancient evil or the gas? Or I guess one might ask the question again, does it matter.

The exact nature of the ancient evil, while named and depicted, was never fully explained to me why it was evil, at least to my satisfaction. Also, while I liked the final confrontation scene with it, some aspects of that were hard to completely understand.

The book had a slow pace at times, though it did allow for some good character development of the four principal protagonists, and the opening chapter was very confusing, a disjointed jumble of flashbacks and vignettes of various characters' lives from different points in the town's history, though thankfully that writing style doesn't last very long.

Overall it certainly wasn't a bad book, though I think it could have used some changes. I think the book might do better in a more visual medium perhaps, maybe as a graphic novel or movie.

By far, my favorite work by Mr. Straub. The bizarre events of the story and interesting characters fill the reader with deep concern for the outcome of this tale. Although a frequent complaint of Straub's works is a lack of cohesiveness and the side tales that some see as "false leads", these features only add to the eeriness and gives a dimension to the book that keeps it from being what so many other, less intriguing novels in this genre are- cut and dry. This one is definately not "cookie cutter". I found myself thinking about this book long after I had finished it, and found myself reading it again several months later. Straub did a fine job of truly creeping me out, which is what I look for in this genre.