I don't know that I've ever read anything Peter Straub wrote by himself. I read a couple of books he co-wrote with Stephen King, 15-20 years ago. So I can't say if this is typical for Straub's style.
But it feels a lot like a Stephen King book. It, especially, although this book is a few years older. The small town menaced by something ancient, something that can attack you physically or mentally, take different forms to do it. Most of the characters involved have encountered it before, survived it without even really grasping how much danger they were in.
In this case, you have a group of older gents who formed their own little social club, gradually being picked off, the nephew of the first of their members to die, and one teenager that seems to have survived his own encounter mostly by luck and will. Honestly, the kids in It seemed like they had a much better grasp of what they were up against than these folks did. Maybe because they were kids, and their brains were more malleable.
In this book, I really figured the creature was going to win, because the ones fighting it seemed to be mostly flying blind. By the time they had pieced together what they were dealing with, it looked to be too late in the game. So credit for that, I guess, although it isn't too difficult to get me to believe the heroes are all going to die in a horror story.
The book moves back and forth between time periods as we get flashbacks to earlier encounters the main characters had with the creature. Some of those get tedious because it doesn't feel like we're learning much that's new about the threat, so I want them to return to the main timeframe so things can advance. On the plus side, Straub writes some extremely tense scenes very well. The kind where they're creeping through the creature's lair, and you know something is going to happen, but you don't knew when, or what form it's going to take.
'But eight years of living in Milburn had changed Freddy Robinson. He no longer took pride in his ability to sell, since he had learned it was based on an ability to exploit fear and greed; and he had learned half-consciously to despise most of his fellow salesmen - in the company's phrase, the "Humdingers".'
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2 comments:
I think I read this in the late 80s - I was a massive Stephen King fan and loved "The Talisman" that they wrote together, and ended up reading a bunch of Straub's stuff - "Koko" sticks in my mind particularly.
After a while, though, I found they all blurred into one and that there weren't enough distinctive characters in Straub's books; I can list most of the characters from King's early books from memory, but can't think of a single named character from Straub's.
Not saying he was a bad writer - pretty much everything I read, I enjoyed at the time, just didn't stick with me.
That's an interesting point. I think I might have the same issue with Dean Koontz' stuff, although it's been several years since the last time I read one of his books.
I don't know whether this book's characters will stick with me or not. I'd probably have to read another of his solo works and see if the two got mixed up in my head.
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