Customer Reviews

If You Could See Me Now

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Thirteen year old Miles Teagarden and his one year older racy cousin, Alison Greening, went skinny-dipping in the quarry in Arden, Wisconsin, and made a pact to reunite twenty years in the future. Only Miles left the quarry alive. He doesn't remember what happened, but Alison drowned and everyone blamed him for it - though, hypocritical prudes that the townsfolk were, they felt the girl had it coming.

Now, twenty years later, Miles has returned to honor the pact. With his return comes a shocking wave of serial murders and abductions - all of young girls of Alison's age and appearance. Suspicion falls upon him, and Miles has a knack for making it all worse. He's ruffling a lot of feathers, figuring out what really happened to Alison all those years ago. And before long, he's got much bigger worries than being the prime suspect in the most horrific crimes Arden has ever seen - because it seems someone is trying to kill him...

This is a flawed novel, but it's a great flawed novel. Written between his debut book, Julia, and his most popular work, Ghost Story, Straub's If You Could See Me Now is a bridge between his supernatural horror fiction and his later Blue Rose murder mystery trilogy. The suspense in this book is superior, never letting up and continually adding new surprises in plot development.

The book is thematically rich, and could easily become the subject of any number of contemporary literature research papers. It is mostly a murder mystery, and a well-written one at that. The supernatural element in the story is ill-explained and seems somewhat inconsistent, yet it works. Alison's motivations are not understandable, though in large part Straub seems to have intended her character to be enigmatic - her name, and her method of manifestation, suggest a change in her akin to becoming some sort of perverse nature elemental.

If you like suspense - supernatural, or more mundane crime melodrama - this is the book for you.

This Peter Staub is probably one of the most wonderful, chilling, scary, and thoughtful books you will ever read. It kept me on the very edge, and let me say VERY EDGE of my seat for hours. It is a rather wonderful book about the past coming back for one more bite. It is very descriptive, romantic, and frightful. If there is one horror story you should buy this summer, it should be this spectacular novel. I'm really head over feet about this one. Good job Mr. Straub

Miles Teagarden, the narrator and focal character, in Straub's early "If You Could See Me Now" is one mixed up guy. At times, you have to wonder if he's got all his cookies; but in some ways, that's what makes this book an eerie, if not classic, thriller. Straub is a wonderful writer, and even though at times, he gets too wordy, he sets a very suspenseful mood, and keeps an impending sense of doom permeating the novel.
When Miles returns to the scene of a horrifying "accident" after twenty years, we wonder when and if his beloved Allison will keep the vow she made those many years ago. If you've read a lot of this type of book, you pretty much know what the big revelation will be halfway through the book. Once you find that out, the story loses a little of its punch and the rest of the time, Miles is involved in finding out whodunit, although it's pretty obvious who did! At any rate, the novel moves along rather nicely, but the ending seems somewhat rushed, and the murderer's identity is something that is obscure and not fully fleshed out. Overall, though, if you are a Straub fan, this book fits nicely in your library, although "Ghost Story" and "Floating Dragon" are his best works.
RECOMMENDED.

The main problem that I have with this book is that the main character is such an idiot that he gets himself into much more trouble than he needs to. Then again, that's half the fun of the book: it's fascinating to watch Miles self-destruct and/or cluelessly do exactly what will get him into the most trouble with the locals, in the way that watching a car wreck is fascinating. (Not that I would hope anyone would get into a car wreck.) He reminds me in some ways of the Richard Dreyfuss character in Close Encounters. In fact, the supernatural aspects of the book seem almost superfluous: with a little more work this could be a straightfoward and compelling character study in self-destruction. However, such as it is, this is a very nice, very concise little ghost story, and well worth reading

The best thing about "If You Could See Me Now" is the eerie, dream-like atmosphere that Straub builds from the very beginning. It contains so many weird, quirky goings-on before any "supernatural" elements are introduced, I kept thinking to myself as I was reading, "No way that just happened!"

The plot surprises are effective, too. Straub baits you along for practically half the book before revealing even ONE of the surprise mysteries. The ending is a good twist, too.

I liked Ghost Story, but this book made me a bona fide Peter Straub fan.

This is a great story that Straub tells very well and in a rare book, does not "over-write" or become overly wordy, the only fault I can find with Straub's writing.

Straub is a master craftsman and a very good storyteller, but like I said his books sometimes get "wordy". However, here he has not encountered that and writes a great "short novel" about going home and dredging up the past.

This is an easy read and flows smoothly, however Miles is just clueless. He gets in all types of trouble and seems to have no common sense at all. He is not one of Straub's more memorable characters.

Still, two thumbs way way up!!!

There are books you read and forget as soon as you're done with them, and there are books you never forget. Rarer still are the books that haunt you for a lifetime. If You Could See Me Now is, for me, one such book.

I was first given a copy of this short, rapid-paced genre novel in high school by a friend who has since passed away. He was heading back up to college at the time and putting some of his books in storage for the year and when he came across this one, he said to me, "Read this, Ellie, but don't let it screw with your mind." I thought he was kidding around; a book screw with MY mind? Ha, as if, right? But, no, this book is dark. And it got to me in a way many others simply could not have done. The tragedies at its core, loss and the effect of that loss on the central character, represent probably the deepest of the negative themes out there in literature, as well as in life. In this book, Mr. Straub does a great job of holding down a sense of mystery-via-confusion and we alternate between wondering about the odd events in the present of the novel (set in rural Wisconsin in the summer of 1975) and the abrupt end to the more straightforward description (set in the same place in 1955) at the start of the work. Some have said they saw the revelation coming at about the 2/3 point of the novel but I didn't and I remember I stopped in mid-sentence and felt stunned. And sad. Very sad. I recall thinking: I didn't want it to be that way...

See, okay, granted this wavering novel of unequal merit is a genre story penned by a man most known for his ghost stories, but until it makes up its mind what direction it wants to go, this works as an extremely engrossing study of the behavior of an inexplicably neurotic and haunted main character. The characterizations,and the emotions these characters feel, are as realistically cast as those of any men and women from "serious" literature.

This book holds meaning to me for the personal history I touched-on at the start of this review, but it is also a book with a story that deserves more readers than it's had, being overshadowed as it is by some of Straub's later, more well-received works, such as Ghost Story and his collaborations with Stephen King. I gave it four stars instead of five for several reasons, the most glaring of which is the annoying ending Straub imposes after the contortions of plot that kept me rapt through the first two-thirds of the story. Trailing after the gloomy depression this psycholgical study left in me when I read it a dozen years ago, was a feeling of accute frustration that this novel I cared about was ended in the way it was. I was ticked off and I'm guessing you will be, too. Still, my advice, if you want to spend a week reading a dark tale of obsessive youthful love gone very wrong, read this. With apologies to Peter Straub, forget the superficial elements of horror that come late in this psychological mystery and concentrate on the first 200 pages. This book works as a carefuly unfolded story of love, loss, and grief. If he had left it as that in its final third, If You Could See Me Now would go down as his masterpiece instead of a mild letdown.

Peter Straub's best fiction can be summed up as someone committs a crime (generally against a woman) sometime in the past and then that victum becomes a ghost who haunts her tormentors after 20 or more years. The people involved with the crime have by that time grown up and attempted to distance themselves from the act. But they don't really get away as mysterious and strange things plague them just as they think they have gotten away. Its what made his masterpiece, Ghost Story, work so well. But it took some time and other novels before Ghost Story could be written and If You Could See Me Now, is an example of a stepping stone in the right direction. The first novel, Straub wrote, using his classic ghost theme was Julia followed by If You Can See Me Now and both together show how he has progressed.
If You Can See Me Now is about Miles Teagarden, a middle aged, English professor, who decides to leave the city to wrote his dissertation in the quiet rural town of his childhood. That's when the fun starts.
The closer Miles gets to Arden, Winconsin, things begin to go wrong.
When he finally arrives in his hometown, no one wants him there. His childhood friends who have all grown up and are well established in careers want nothing to do with him. His cousin who allows him to live in his grandmother's old house to write, is hostile to him. That hostility grows and increasing as the novel prgresses. In a way it does make sense, in that certain country towns have this suspicion of new folks, even people returning to revisit their childhood, and sometimes make trouble.
Straub exploits this point to the max as everyone in Arden turns on Miles. He can barely go into the bar and ordered a drink before the owner is ordering him to get out. Its bad enough to have an entire town hate you but when a certain ghost comes to haunt him, it does get worse.
This is a fast paced entertaining novel that really picks up in the last 40-pages. Reading the ending, I wanted to yank the phone cord from the wall jack and shut myself off from the world. Straub paints realistic characters and builds suspense and mystery that have you wanting to know what going to happen next. Before Straub starting writing supernatural novels, he went out and bought the best American and British ghost stories books he could find. You can see his influences and how he modernizes it to suit the latter part of the 21st century. There are elements of H.P. Lovecraft, Henry James, Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, and even Ambrose Bierce.
As I write this review, the Fall is just starting and the time is right for scary stories late at night.

to meet each other in 20 to 30 years know matter what you or they were doing.No matter what.You would see each other on this day this time.Nothing will stop you.Now suppose your friend died.That would pretty much stop things don't you think? Not in this storie.
Read it.That good

Having been an avid Stephen King fan since I was 13, I thought I should try reading Straub. I was very pleased that I did. From the first page, I was hooked. Miles Teagarden, because of his obsession and love for his cousin, Alison, is drawn into a world of suspicion and danger. And, we are along with him. Returning to Arden, Miles finds himself a suspect in recent murders of young girls. As he awaits the day when Alison returns, he faces much internal conflict and outside interference. It makes for a very exciting and terrifying read.