Customer Reviews

In the Night Room: A Novel

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

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?

Peter Straub has completely confused me. I have been an avid reader of his for better than ten years, and I have never been disappointed... well until now. "In the Night Room" is well below the standards that he has set. It is hard to put your finger on just one thing but here is a partial list of the things I found disppointing.

- This should have been a short story... there isn't enough material here for even a novella.

- Straub has borrowed very heavily from Stephen King ( "The Dark Half" and "Sun Dog") while borrowing isn't inately bad, Straub did very little on expand on the idea.

- This is an extremely confusing book... I never have trouble following plot lines in a book, but this one was major work for me. Examples.. Why did Willy go into the Dark Room? Why did Faber appear once (and only once) in Millhaven? Why exactly were dead people emailing Tim?

- Straub really didn't develop any of his characters- he depends on the reader remembering everyone from "Lost boy, lost girl". However, the new characters are very poorly developed.

Typically, Straub does a fine job of tidying up endings so that everything makes sense... he certainly failed here. While I remain a Straub fan I have to tell everyone (but die hard fans) to steer well clear of "In the Night Room".

Peter Straub is a wonderful writer and his character Tim Underhill has meant a lot to me as a protagonist of best-selling horror/suspense novels who was gay, but whose sexuality was not a big deal, just part of who he was. I enjoyed the first half of this book tremendously. To have Underhill suddenly fall in love with a woman, even one of his own creation, felt like a sock in the gut. Every day in a hundred ways, the world seems to express its belief that homosexuality, unlike heterosexuality, is merely a "preference" that can be easily changed if the homosexual person just meets the right member of the opposite sex. I didn't expect that from Peter Straub and it was a big, big disappointment. I am not sure this is a valid criticism, since Mr. Straub shouldn't be expected to write with any political/sexual agenda in mind or to please anyone but himself, but it destroyed my suspension of disbelief and spoiled my pleasure in a heretofore wonderful story.

Peter Straub doesn't just tell a story...he pulls you into his mind and lets you live it. He is the absolute king of the supernatural thriller, a genre he may have created (as far as I can tell).

I got a bit of flak from my dean when I said I was going to include Straub in my American Lit class. Then I challenged him to read the man's work before judging based solely on a "genre". Let's just say I won that bet.

If you haven't read Straub yet...then go do yourself a favor. Start with Ghost Story and keep going.

I have read all of Peter Straub's books -- he is one of my favorite authors. I felt very cheated by this book. I put in an advance order for it and expected his usual great story. This seemed like the tag end of "Lost Boy, Lost Girl," composed only of character and plot relating to that book. It does not stand on its own and even as a companion to "Lost Boy, Lost Girl" it has little value. I don't know how to explain how this book could be so bad. The "trick" plot device was not impressive -- no technique is more valuable than the story, and there was no story here.

Imagine that you are a writer discovering the personalities of the characters that you have created or which have evolved as you unearthed your story. Is it possible that you could fall in love with a character, who could appear to be a dream come true as he or she emerges from the mists of your mind? Or maybe the protagonist has come from such a dreadful place that you want to find a way to salve the miseries in her or his soul. And what if you were so entranced with the intersection of fiction and reality that you wanted to merge the milieu to bring the fictional characters into your own world of supposed reality?

This is the road that Peter Straub masterfully traverses in his thought-provoking, excellent novel In the Night Room. The story could appear to be a mystery or an expose of the day-to-day realities of a prominent writer, sometimes pursued by sycophantic fans. Or it could be a romance as the hero of the story, a famous author of course, falls in love with the woman who is the heroine and who, herself, is a well known author.

The story lines of each of these stories emerge in clever sequence. I found myself wondering what was real vs. imagination of the various writers. As a writer, one inevitably becomes involved with characters, provided that they have reality to the writer. How could this not be the case, as one seeks to understand the motivations and actions of the personalities that provide life to an otherwise dull background narrative.

"Story-within-story" is a well accepterd means of storytelling. My own favorite is Willa Cather's adventure set within The Professor's House. In In the Night Room, Mr. Straub takes this an interesting step further to blend the stories into a fascinating narrative.

If you enjoy envisioning how writer's write and think as they compose their stories, as I do for sure, you will be as fascinated with this book as was I.

"It was OK" is the most damning-with-faint-praise expression I can think of for a book like this. It's an adequate read, but who has time for adequate reads? Straub has his pet themes like all writers, but unlike most seems happy to just riff on the same notes, over and over and over. I particularly hate his portrayal of women: they're either beautiful, winsome, perfect creatures (we know this because he tells us, they actually come across as needy and childish) or they're the staff. Ick.

Actually this book deserves 2 1/2 stars. It wasn't that bad, it just wasn't good.