Peter Straub (1) (1943–2022)

Peter Straub's novel The Hellfire Club begins with a nightmare, and the opening chapters are filled with emerging conflicts and ominous portents. Then it abruptly turns a corner into headlong action, seasoned with garrulous psychopathy. There is one more major lift and drop to the roller coaster of the plot, but throughout it all the book combines features of the suspense thriller, literary fiction, and mystery genres. It's more than a whodunnit, since it's even a mystery as to what was show more done. Meanwhile, there's plenty of current "doing," with multiple murders, kidnapping, rape, arson, etc.

The protagonist Nora shares a name with the lead character of Ibsen's A Doll's House, and there is more than a little concern with gender roles in this book. Her husband Davey is a milktoast product of the decline of the Chancel line from his rapacious tycoon grandfather Lincoln through his domineering father Alden. As Nora enters a childless menopause, the domestic situation is fraught and freighted with secrets. The extra-familial monster who becomes her abuser and foe is redolent of an elaborately-repressed gender dysphoria.

When an intricate, twisted work of fiction like this one concerns itself with several novels in which different authors were deliberately communicating secrets, and when the chapter structure of The Hellfire Club itself mirrors one of these imagined texts, i.e. the "wildly successful" fantasy Night Journey by Hugo Driver, a reader can be forgiven for wondering whether The Hellfire Club itself contains a secret message of some kind. I'd like to reflect further on this possibility, but that means the remaining bulk of this review will need to fall under "spoiler" masking, so that I can freely discuss the details.

The first novel-within-the-novel to carry secrets is the work-in-progress manuscript by Nora's dipsomaniac mother-in-law Daisy Chancel. It is a roman à clef about the Chancel family, seeming to spare no sordid detail. Later, when it is revealed that Daisy was the true author of the two "posthumous Hugo Driver" novels, it becomes apparent that they were her vehicle to express the truth that she was forbidden to voice about Davey's parentage. In addition, Night Journey itself was the means for Hugo Driver to indicate the evidence of Lincoln Chancel's guilt in the death of the poet Katherine Mansfield, even while Chancel documented Driver's plagiarisms of Mansfield's work in Night Journey in order to keep Driver silent and cooperative.

In Daisy Chancel's books, the key to their message is built into the characters, and The Hellfire Club certainly has an abundance of interesting characters with intense, changing relationships among them. Although Daisy wrote her Night Journey sequels to put Davey in the role of the protagonist Pippin Little, The Hellfire Club shows that Nora, by dint of solving the puzzle in the original Night Journey, becomes the "real" Pippin Little. Other characters are correlated throughout: The Hellfire Club's Dick Dart to Night Journey's Lord Night, "Paddi Mann" to Paddy, Helen Day to the Cup Bearer, etc. But clearly Driver/Mansfield could not have been writing about some of these people some forty years earlier, and we lack in any case the full intricacies of Night Journey itself. Did Straub deploy these Hellfire Club characters in order to make statements about actual historical people? Nora must be a cipher for the "successful" reader, as Pippin Little was. But who are the Chancels? Dick Dart? Helen and the Deodatos? Perhaps these are not literary ciphers for actual people, but genuinely literary characters, as they appear to be.

Hugo Driver's code in Night Journey is not one of person, but place. He has incorporated the features of the Shorelands literary colony into Pippin Little's itinerary, which eventuates at the vault that is the office safe at Shorelands, containing Driver's signed testimony regarding the death of Katherine Mansfield. Nora's story starts in the imaginary town of Westerholm, Connecticut. While horror readers might at first fancy a new Arkham country here, it seems that the place is simply Westport, Connecticut, which has been Straub's home since 1979. Still, the reality of the place seems to be a first toehold to climb towards an actual secret.

Just as we first find Nora in Westerholm, her odyssey culminates at Shorelands, the primitive resort that had been a literary colony in the 1920s and 1930s. There is in fact a Shorelands resort with rustic cottages in New England. It is in southern Maine (indicated by a feint in the novel: Dick Dart plans to go to Maine, Nora persuades him to go to Shorelands "instead"). The closest town to the real Shorelands is Kennebunkport, the retreat of the accomplished and notorious Bush family. Could a Nazi-abetting Prescott Bush be Lincoln Chancel, and George H.W. Bush be Alden? The "Hellfire Club" so conspicuous in the title, but so puzzlingly marginal to the actual novel, would then be the Yale Skull and Bones Society, to which it clearly tips its hat in any case. The Hellfire Club was first published in 1995, shortly after the first Bush Presidency. Is Chancel House the White House? Er, I don't know that I even want to know, if so. It would probably make the Dart, Morris law firm into the CIA.

So, I can't imagine that Straub's genuine code, if there is one, would be susceptible of cracking on a single read anyhow. I'm not about to go in for an immediate re-read to emulate the "Driver fanatics" in the book. But I trust that if and when I get around to a second reading of this book, which has certainly earned one, my notes in this review will serve as breadcrumbs in the selva oscura, allowing my decryption to be picked up where I left it. show less

So many of King's feature youngsters dealing with adult sized horror, it's easy to wonder what became of these young people when they matured and how they processed the horrors of their youth, whether or not it lingers. And Uncle Stevie has himself wondered, giving us the second half of [It] and [Doctor Sleep]. Jack Sawyer of [The Talisman] is one of those endearing characters, and his journey one that begs for a follow-up. [Black House] focuses much on the lingering effects of the terrors show more of his young life but is much lighter on the details from that other land where Jack quested. It still features, as the dark force trying to puncture the veil into this world emanates from there. Jack has become a policeman, and the evil making its way into ours has taken the form of a killer who preys on children. Though he took an early retirement, Jack is pressed back into service and he soon learns there are elements of the crimes only he can understand, and only if he's willing to remember all the things he's tried to box away in his mind. The police procedural elements of the novel create an intense and readable narrative. But having read [The Talisman] so recently, and it's a favorite, I pined for more from those other lands and those who people them. But it's a small quibble - this is still a solid entry in the King canon.

4 1/2 bones!!!!!
Recommended show less

Peter Straub's second foray into the horror genre, and i find it odd that I haven't read it, being such a big fan of his stuff when I was a teenager. Nowadays I prefer his later books, the Blue Rose trilogy and The Hellfire Club, big, chunky literate and literary thrillers with no supernatural element. Oddly enough, this book anticipates the move from horror to thriller in a few different ways, and even retains a certain amount of ambiguity about the ghost story element, up to a particular show more point. The blurb of my copy of the book manages to drop three spoilers in the space of two sentences, and then reiterates one of the spoilers just in case I was slow on the uptake. I shall endeavor to avoid doing something similar. Though I think the Goodreads blurb is similar so I don't know why I bother.

Miles Teagarden returns to his family's old home, ostensibly to write his thesis on DH Lawrence, but more likely to keep a childhood promise. Right off the bat, things go poorly for him. A girl has been murdered and strangers are greeted with suspicion, and Miles himself didn't have the best reputation when he left. Miles exacerbates the situation by being generally clueless, clumsy, rude, and not a little bit cracked in the head. Soon he is surrounded by hostile neighbours, including his cousin Duane. His only allies are an old great-aunt and Duane's teenage daughter. Another girl goes missing, suspicion and resentment turn into violence and rage, and one or two ugly secrets from the past, as is often the case in books like these, come back to haunt the guilty and the innocent alike.

Miles is an academic, so the book is mostly written in a rather purple, prolix style, which, in fairness, Straub pulls off very well, and it does heighten Miles' sense of alienation from the farmers and shopkeepers and housewives he collides with. As a character, you do want to reach into the book and slap a bit if sense into him, but it's clear that the style also conceals just how unhinged he has become. As a murder mystery it's a compelling read; as a ghost story, it's strange and chilling spooky. He just about manages to merge the two by the end, but this isn't his strongest book by any means, which isn't to say that it isn't worth a look. show less

As I type this, there is blood and fire pouring out of my ears, my skin is falling off the bone, soon I will have to bandage myself back together, Then I will be known as just another Leaker :(
I have just knocked down 30 mailboxes on my home from work. Then I painted my entire house Pepto Bismal Pink, the entire inside is painted yellow... then I tore off my clothes and ran naked through the woods laughing and screaming hysterically about the man in the box I know for certain died last show more week. I mourn my pet cats, I wonder if they will ever come back. Where did all my neighbors go?

I am typing this from up in a treehouse . I only have a few moments before I am discovered so this will be short and sweet.

This book was terribly gripping, TERRIFYING, raw to the bone, shocking, intricately layered, intriguing original plot, loveable characters.
I couldn't get to the end fast enough and now I am sad it is gone forever.

When you read this book, come back and find me! SAVE ME, Ill be here waiting....Forever, or at least until the trains stop coming, then I will have to walk into the ocean. HURRY show less