“July 21, 1955” is a great chapter to start this book!

And with the first ‘portion of statement by…”, the story slowly takes on a creepy tone. Each statement foreshadowing that Miles’ return home doesn’t quite go as planned.

Which it doesn't. Unfortunately, his madness clouds the perspective of this story, and for me, made this read fairly frustrating. Girls are being killed, and Miles' erratic behavior and crazy utterings, make most folks believe that he is the one doing it. Or is it Polar Bears? Or Duane? Or a malevolent spirit bent on revenge? You have to read through a mush pot of strangeness to get to the conclusion, which for me, wasn't very satisfactory. But, I did hang it to read the whole thing, so that says a little something. Just a strange read. ( )

Bleak and dismal, with a pervading sense of hopelessness, anxiety and disoriented instability. A mounting feeling of unease that eventually reveals itself to be terror. With each page turned, one is more and more confused about just who...or what...to be afraid of. But the fear is still there. Perhaps even moreso for the puzzlement surrounding it.

Blurring many lines between crime fiction and Gothic horror, IYCSMN is ultimately a terribly, tragically human story about the irrepressible intrusion of the past upon the present. Life...and death...leave their mark and no amount of struggle is necessarily enough to come out from beneath the shadow.

This was a damned fine ghost story. A damned fine mystery novel. A damned fine exploration of a troubled mind dealing with troubled times both within and without his control. It wasn't an easy read, but it never grew dull and the compulsion to turn the pages never diminished except when I paused to digest the heavy meal. ( )

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 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. ( )

The Basics

Miles hasn’t been back to the family farm in Arden, Wisconsin in twenty years. He left behind a reputation as a troublemaker, but he feels Arden is the place to be no matter how the locals hate him. Because he has to keep a promise he made all those years ago.

My Thoughts

Let’s start with Miles. He is the main focus and our narrator, and he shapes everything we see. To the point that I wonder if he is even remotely reliable. There’s a moment around the halfway point that will have you questioning him, and throughout the entire, wild ride, Miles will seem iffy after that, if he wasn’t already to begin with. To me, this is proof positive that Straub knew what he was doing. He knew the story he wanted to tell, one in which even the audience will start to wonder if the angry, hateful locals don’t have a point about Miles.

It’s a wonderful ride to take for that reason. Everyone seems guilty, untrustworthy, and yet so is the very person telling the tale. It lends the story an air of the truly mysterious and suspicious. Straub, I’m learning as I read his work, is a master of tone. And not just with the mystery he puts forth in this novel, but with the way he sets up Miles as this haughty know-it-all faced with a town of plebeians that plague him. The point isn’t who we, the reader, should side with but rather wanting only to see how this butting of heads will go, knowing all the while that it will be explosive.

My one nitpick would be that the book doesn’t really end. It just stops. Like Straub decided he was done writing. That was all he had, so that was it. While the line it ends on is fairly symbolic of Miles’s journey and has a touch of dark comedy to it, it felt kind of cheap after all we just went through.

Straub brings class to horror unlike anyone I’ve ever read. He has literary tricks up his sleeve that will keep sophisticated readers happy throughout. I’m extra happy he’s chosen horror as his go-to genre.

Final Rating

4.5/5 ( )