The Gospel According to Prisco

The Hellfire Club by Peter Straub

Eh.  Once again, Peter Straub, you’ve let me down.  I’ve noticed that with Straub, he tends to adapt to the style he’s obsessing about in his writings.  Almost always, his stories are about novels, or novelists, or playwrights, or people who are ravenous fans of an author.  In Mr. X, it was Lovecraft.  Here, the story revolves around a publishing magnate, and his one great success, a novel that quickly became a trilogy, but the first novel is called Night Journey, and it’s a kind of The Hobbit meets Lewis Carroll.  Anyway, the publishing magnate had a son, or maybe he adopted him, or maybe not.  And this son is a milquetoast who married a mildly psychotic former nurse.  And they live in New England, under the thumb of daddy and the maddening upper class.  The story itself quickly draws upon the gothic, as a serial killer is savaging the single older women of the town, and when the killer is caught, he kidnaps the wife of the publishing magnate’s son.  And then chaos and literary hijinks ensue.

If you’re having problems following what I’m talking about, it’s because I have problems explaining what the novel was about.  It’s this meandering lumbering oliphant, that crashes along this path that seems so forced.  As the serial killer and Nora, the least enjoyable heroine I’ve ever encountered (and that includes Jane Eyre), pursue this quest to determine the truth behind the mystery within a mystery in the true authorship of Night Journey, Straub seems to believe he’s taking you on a meta-journey.  But the problem is, he’s interwoven so many plots and story threads, that instead of coming up with a rich tapestry, he’s got a ball of yarn savaged by kittens.  And the characters are so stock and stuffy and unlovable, that you really don’t want to bother with it. 

I’ve been told that these were bad novels by a Straub fan, and that I should take up Ghost Story.  So that’ll go on my list, but it’s going way, way down.  This is the same guy who told me he didn’t like Heart-Shaped Box. 

Mr. X by Peter Straub

I was introduced to Peter Straub through his collaborations with Stephen King on Black House and The Talisman.  It was during my obsessive journey along the Dark Tower quest with Roland and his fellow gunslingers.  The Straub/King books introduce you to the world of the Territories, and the way it affects people from our world.  This notion of the other worldly would play heavily in the rest of Straub’s work.   As far as I know, King hasn’t done any other collaborative work on his novels, so its spoke strongly for Straub.

Mr. X is the tale of Ned Dunstan, a computer programmer from a strange town who stuggles with the curse of his family’s strange legacy.  Every year on his birthday, he suffers painful visions of a murderous stalker.  He returns home to find his free spirit mother dying in a hospital bed.  He then begins the quest of trying to find out who this mysterious stalker, as well as the true identity of his father.  

What begins as a promising gothic horror story quickly crumbles under the convoluted weight of its multiple story lines.  There are so many plates spinning in this novel, it is inevitable that it will come crashing to earth, and it does so in a rather lame and predictable way.  Ned, our protagonist, is not a particularly endearing or charming character.  And the mysterious Mr. X is no better.  

Straub gets so caught up in making this tale a Lovecraftian homage that he seems to have some sort of absinthian brain surge, and the multiple plot twists and secret true identities of characters gets muddied.  Even when H.P. was writing about Cthulhu and spouting bizarre rhetoric, he at least kept it somewhat clear headed.  Straub goes berserk, offering us a number of bizarre characters with strange mystic powers, and you’re never quite sure who’s good and who’s bad and what everyone is ultimately after.  It’s less intriguing than nervewracking.  While the villain proves himself to be an obsessive Lovecraftian nutjob, it seems more that we’re being subjected to the author’s own particular neurosis.  Straub seems so intent on forcing the Lovecraft into this story as if he were making a very strenuous turducken.  There’s just layer after layer of greasy filthy crap and it all ends up tasting like gravy. What ends up being most disappointing isn’t even the groan-worthy dunh dunh dunh moment he tries to tack on at the last minute like a lazy screenwriter running over his heroine with a bus.  It’s the fact that when he’s not writing about the lame supernatural elements, he’s actually managed to craft a pretty goddamn intriguing novel.  The Dunstan family is worthy of Flannery O’Connor, with just the loveliest touches of crassness and truth and menace.  Even when they begin to share their secrets, and it delves into the realm of the other, it’s still wonderful.  You almost wish the novel was about the Dunstans versus the rest of the town rather than droll Ned and his epic quest against his momma’s babydaddy.  

I’ve been told Straub’s other novels are better, and based on how he wrote parts of his novel, I’m willing to give him a second shot.  But unless you REALLY REALLY like Lovecraft and are REALLY REALLY bored, don’t pick this up.  It was worth the $1 I paid for it at the used bookstore.