Customer Reviews

The Throat

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I've just finished reading this for the second time, and am even more blown away than I was the first go 'round. The details and atmosphere are so rich, so specific to place and time (a thinly disguised Milwaukee, late 40's-early 50's up through the present), and layer after layer of menace is built up in increments that make it all seem so real that you have to wonder what nightmares lie in the author's own past. The depth of character development is unusual for horror/thrillers or however this book has been marketed, and Straub's sheer writing virtuosity makes this book seem more like a literary novel than genre fiction. KOKO and MYSTERY, novels related to the Blue Rose murders detailed in this one, share several characters with THROAT but differ enough in details to further mystify and discomfit a reader who already is convinced that Mr. Straub understands something about the subtle nature of evil that the rest of us are too naive to grasp.

At the psychological junction where child abuse in its worst imaginable form intersects uneven memory stands THE THROAT, exposed. Fiction this intelligent rarely comes along in any genre. That Peter Straub is compelled to use his astounding talents in a probe of the dark side makes for chilling reading, because he is more than smart enough to make you believe. Even in the daylight.

I often see reviews that compare the writing of Peter Straub to that of Stephen King (for obvious reasons) and of Dean Koontz (purely because of the horror genre as far as I am aware). But to me they are illogical comparisons. If you want a contrived plot where man meets woman and they both find salvation from their past horrors through love for each other, read Koontz. If you want to slip into reading something that feels as comfortable as an old slipper, beacuse you've read the same story 10 times before, only in different guises, read King.

However, if you want to read intelligent novels with characters that you care for and who develop over the course of the trilogy, read Koko, Mystery and the Throat - All completely different to each other, yet interlinked beautifully.

I am the first to admit that sometimes Straub's writing can be difficult to get into - it took me 3 attempts over a few years before I was able to finish Mystery for the first time, but now i regularly re read all of Straub's novels (apart from If you could see me now, which is the only one I've not yet been able to get into) and look forward to doing so - to entering the worlds that he creates (even though I am left cold by the constant jazz references!).

Basically, if you're tiring of King and Koontz, finding them too simplistic - read Straub.

Seldom does one encounter such an exquisitly constructed novel, wherein a myriad of individual vignettes are woven together with a central focus. The Throat is a masterpiece of writing proficiency combined with a talent for good, old-fashioned story telling. The novel trancends genre and stands as an example of how books should be written.

I can't explain to you why I kept reading this book. It wasn't great. It wasn't even good. I kept thinking "how many more pages until I'm done?" And the answer was always "way too many." 689 pages - really necessary? The book's length was a problem for me in that I couldn't remember little details from early in the book because it was so long ago I had read them!

I could list all the things I didn't like about this book, but I'm going to talk about one that I haven't seen anyone else mention, and that's Straub's use of time. Put bluntly, his concept of time sucks.

At one point, our duo goes out to seek some information. They leave at somewhere around 12:30 in the afternoon (they have lunch at 12:30 and then leave, but I'll say 12:30 to be generous.) It's a very foggy day, and it takes them "a little more than two and a half hours" to get where they're going. So now it's at least 3:00. They search the house and then leave. Let's give them a half hour at the house, so they leave at 3:30. It takes them "nearly two hours" to get back to their place. It's now 5:30 at the earliest. They eat dinner and discuss what to do next. One of them goes upstairs and looks through some of the stuff they had found. Then he picks up a book to read. It's got to be 6:00 or later by now. Then we read, "Around three-thirty, John began hollering up the stairs that we'd better get going if we wanted to get to Arkham by four." Huh? Was there a time warp?

Why does he bother specifically telling us what time things happened and how long they took if he doesn't even keep track of it himself?

Our hero picks up a newspaper at 9:30. The whole town has apparently already been reading it and talking about it. He reads about the arrest of a suspect in the killings. At "just after seven," the suspect had left the house, and two little boys across the street had gone over to look in his window. What they saw there made them run home and tell their parents. The parents call the police, who show up "ten minutes later." After they take a look, six more police cars show up "before another twenty minutes had passed." So now it's after 7:30. They wait for the suspect and arrest him when he returns, presumably sometime between 7:30 and 8:00. Yet by 9:00 the entire story has been printed in the newspaper and distributed to the entire city, complete with all of the gory details. There's an entire inventory of everything that had been found in the house, an assessment of how many bodies there were, an extensive listing of comparable serial killings, a commentary by a college professor in Boston, a psychologist at a state mental hospital in Chicago and a criminologist in San Francisco, and reports about the suspect's childhood. All this was written, gathered, printed and distributed in less than one hour?!?!?! If you've ever watched the news in the immediate aftermath of a big story, you know that the first few hours are completely incoherent and rife with speculation and guess-work, but there is no way that all of that detail could be released in one hour.

Later, our hero is returning from a trip. His flight touches down in Milwaukee at "quarter to seven." He decides to drive back to town instead of waiting for the next flight. He rents a car and starts to drive. He drives for a while, then "fifteen miles farther," it starts getting dark, and "a little while after that," fog starts up. Traffic "crawled along at thirty miles an hour" after that. He finally reaches his exit, and then it takes half an hour to reach the airport (where his own car is parked). At 7:30, he finds the rental-car space. It was 45 minutes from touch-down at the Milwaukee airport until he parks his car at the next airport. Really? Why would anybody ever fly between the two airports if you could drive it in 45 minutes even in a thick fog?

Then right after that, he drives away from the airport, only to find he's being followed. He is terrorized on the highway by the other driver. There's a fairly long sequence of maneuvers and contacts. He finally gets off the highway at an exit and gets out to look at the damage. He leans against the car and catches his breath "for a while." He looks around and realizes that he's "twenty minutes from Livermore Avenue," which is where he's heading. So he gets in the car and drives there. As he approaches his destination, he looks at his watch and he's "surprised to see that it was ten to eight." I was surprised, too, since he just left the airport 20 minutes ago, had all this stuff happen to him, then drove for 20 minutes.

Later still, our hero is in the hospital. His friend visits him, and our guy asks him to arrange airline tickets "for the day after tomorrow." The "next morning," he talks to another friend. That same friend comes back again "the next day." This should now be "the day after tomorrow" that the airline tickets should be arranged for. The friend who was making the flight arrangements then comes to visit and says, "I'll see you tomorrow when you come around to get your things." Did he not make the arrangements for the right day?

These represent only the most egregious of these errors, but there were other minor ones, too. It may all seem terribly nit-picky, but it represented a horrible distraction to me. I would constantly be thinking, "Wait, that can't be right," and going back and figuring out that indeed, it wasn't right.

Peter Straub's "Blue Rose" trilogy reaches its denouement (such as it is) in this almost unbearably disturbing novel. While it may be more esoteric and intellectual than some readers are used too, it is well worth reading even for the casual suspense fan. As in all his novels, Straub's allusions to religion, literature and history are brilliant (those familiar with Vietnam War history will recognize references to DISPATCHES by Michael Herr, and those familiar with true crime will recognize similarities to the cases of both Jeff MacDonald and Jeff Dahmer) and his character development is far ahead of anyone else in the genre. The alert reader may solve the mystery early, but it kept me in suspense right up to the end. Definitely a must read for anyone who likes thriller authors from Stephen King to Ridley Pearson.

"Ghost Story" was the crowning achievement of Peter Straub's 'supernatural' phase, beginning in 1974 with "Julia" and culminating ten years later with "The Talisman", the first of two collaborations with Stephen King. Then he dropped off the radar for a few years, only to return with a vengeance in 1988 with "Koko". In this complicated, Vietnam War-themed novel, Straub retained his trademark cerebral style, but the ghostly trappings were gone. "Koko" was straight psychological horror, as were its two sequels: "Mystery" and "The Throat". This final installment in the trilogy contains Straub's most mature, thought-provoking, and entertaining writing.
I'm tempted to say that you don't even need to read "Koko" and "Mystery" to enjoy "The Throat" in all its glory, but that's not entirely true. Still, this book is SO damned good that, for all intents and purposes, it's not gonna kill ya to read the other two at a later date. ("Mystery", in particular, can wait; it is by far the weakest entry in the trilogy.) Straub tells you just about everything you need to know at the beginning of "The Throat", if you aren't familiar with the books that preceded it...and you're going to like this one so much that you'll feel compelled to read the others afterward.
Is this a self-indulgent novel? Hell, yes; that's part of the fun of Straub's mature style. And for those who have read "Ghost Story" or "Shadowland" or "Floating Dragon" and are expecting a conventional horror novel...well, it should be pretty obvious by this point that "The Throat" isn't what you're looking for. Straub wrote some excellent books in that vein, but then he moved on. This tale of Timothy Underhill(the 'secret' hero of "Koko", as Straub calls him) investigating a series of murders in a large midwestern city--murders which seem to be related to a string of killings that occurred decades before--owes as much to Raymond Chandler as it does to Edgar Allan Poe. But it IS a horror novel; when you've read it, you'll have no doubt of that.
Buy "The Throat". Enjoy it. You won't be disappointed, I promise :)

"I realized atlast that the thought of seeing Millhaven again filled me with dread. Millhaven and Vietnam were oddly interchangeable, fragments of some greater whole, some larger story -- a lost story that preceded the fables of Orpheus and Lot's wife and said: You wil lose everything if you turn around and look back. You turn around, you look back. Are you destroyed? Or is it that you see the missing, unifying section of the puzzle, the secret, filled with archaic and godlike terror, you have kept from yourself."

In this searing novel of psychological terror. Tim Underhill, the haunted Vietnam vet-hero of Koko, courts ultimate destruction as he dares to look back to a dark past that holds the secret of the evil which signs its name Blue Rose.

Tim Underhill has been summoned to Millhaven,the site of old crimes now plagued by new demons, by his childhood friend, John Ransom. After decades of silence, it appears that the Blue Rose killer has struck again -- brutally murdering John Ransom's wife, April. Ransom enlists Tim Underhill's help in uncovering the true identity of this madman who was supposed to be dead, having committed suicide over 40 years ago . . . Millhaven's resident sleuth, the brilliant and reclusive Tom Pasmore, last seen in the pages of Peter Straub's novel Mystery, comes out of apparent retirement to assist his friend Tim Underhill, and the two men are drawn into a dark labyrinth of lies and deceit, each turn punctuated by jolting shocks that reveal connections between the tantalizingly mysterious Green Woman Taproom and the elusive truths buried inthe steaming jungles of Vietnam . . . between the peaceful surface of everyday life and the secret shame that seethes below.

The Throat is Peter Straub's ultimate thriller, his most powerful book to date. Brilliantly executed, it tightens the screws of suspense as it toy with our expectations and primal fears. This harrowing novel strikes resonant psychological chords and demonstrates a literary mastery that has never been more dazzling. It confirms Peter Straub as one of America's premier writers of profoundly terrifying fiction.

The last, longest, and best of Straub's "Blue Rose" murder mysteries is also the most involving read, wrapping up all that has come before, and then some. The three books might almost be looked upon as single acts in an overarching drama, and appropriately, the last act finishes up the grandest.

Of the three books, The Throat is the one probably most accessible to the average reader as a stand-alone. The characters are rich, the plot clever (if a bit contrived at times), and - as always - Straub's writing is superior.

Be warned, however, it is very, very long. Straub could write many of his novels just as well at shorter length, this one included, but for whatever reason has a tendency to really run with the written word. Fortunately, he is one of the best writers around, and every sentence is a sheer joy to devour.

If you want a literary feast, The Throat will satisfy. If you'd prefer a nice hors d'ouevre, you'll choke on it.

In this sequel to MYSTERY Straub writes a complex, riveting tale rich in atmosphere in which past crimes return to plague the present. Straub is a master at making us see a character with only one brilliantly worded sentence.. The characters of Tim Underhill and Tom Pasmore are unforgettable, as is the remarkable and elusive "Blue Rose Murderer.". I have read the book three times and each time find something new. This is not a book for readers who like to "figure out" who the killer is by the mddle of the story. I consider it a classic of the genre.

The most recent in a series (sincerely hoping to see manymore), "Throat" grabs the reader and doesn't let go. If youwant to read a "10," read "Mystery" first. Peter Straub is a magician of the genre.