Mr. X

A man troubled by flashes of precognition digs up family secrets best left buried.

Straub is an extraordinarily literate writer who occasionally produces rich, complex stories like Ghost Story and Floating Dragon, and occasionally produces muddled messes like this one. Every time I started to get into the story, something confusing would throw me right out, and the ending was a thoroughly unsatisfying twist out of left field. (And when will horror writers get over their obsession with H.P. Lovecraft?)

Mr. X was Peter Straub's last major novel. It crossbreeds the themes of his two masterpieces Ghost Story (the menace of the supernatural) and The Throat (murder and politics in a medium-sized Midwestern city) to create a book which isn't quite the equal of its predecessors, but is a fascinating and complex work in its own right. (In retrospect, Straub worried that it may have been a little too complex: "I like the book but it’s so complicated, there are so many wheels within wheels that I think it might be a little hard to follow sometimes," he told fellow horror author John Langan in a 2012 interview.) Mr. X's greatest failing, as far as I'm concerned, is that it drags on for another sixty-five or seventy pages after the central show more conflict has been resolved, only to reach a murky, deliberately coy fadeout that contributes nothing to the reader's understanding. One expects such ambiguities from Straub, but it shouldn't have taken so long to get there.

Up to that point, however, I had a lot of fun. Edgerton is an alternate version of Millhaven, the hometown of The Throat's hero Tim Underhill, and Mr. X provides the reader with vivid glimpses of the city's underbelly as Ned Dunstan works his way through the winding, medievally narrow streets of Edgerton's Hatchtown district, alternately pursuing and pursued by his mysterious double and the equally enigmatic title character. Ned is likable enough as the novel's hero, but he's surrounded by a cast of infinitely more engaging players: his eccentric aunts (Nettie, May and Joy), endearingly shifty pawn shop owner Toby Kraft, cadaverous but wonder-working attorney C. Clayton Creech. Characterization is where this book really shines, and Ned's aunts manage easily to hold their own against Ricky and Sears from Ghost Story. Straub also subjects the turbulent inner life of Mr. X himself to merciless scrutiny, showing him to be nearly as much of a tragic figure as a fearsome one.

For a note on Straub's use of the character name "Cordwainer," see my 2024 review of his previous novel The Hellfire Club. show less

In Mr. X, Peter Straub writes about identity, family and the way the past influences our present. The book moves swiftly through the first of its six sections in which it describes the protagonist's childhood and draws the reader into a wonderful sense of mystery. And mystery is something that the life of Ned Dunstan, our protagonist, is full of. There is the strange premonition he gets of his mother's impending death; the question of his father, a man he has never met and about whom his mother has refused to talk; the feeling of missing something or someone in his life; and finally, the terrible attacks he has had every year on his birthday, starting when he was three years old. Only Ned knows, however, that what other people see as show more seizure-like episodes, he experiences as vividly real dreams. In these dreams, he witnesses terrible crimes committed by a strange figure dressed in a black coat and hat, a bogeyman he identifies with the name of Mr. X.

Interspersed with Ned's narrative are journal entries from Mr. X himself. Mr. X describes his own childhood and how he discovered he had certain supernatural powers. This was later followed by a revelation that he was descended from beings known as the Great Old Ones to help bring about their reign on earth. He later discovers those same entities in the fiction of weird writer H.P. Lovecraft, becomes obsessed with the author and begins to believe that the stories are prophetic.

The premonition of his mother's death has brought Ned back to his hometown of Edgerton, where he spends time with his aunts and uncles as well as some of his mother's old friends. He also begins to search for the father he never knew and becomes embroiled in a local businessman's shady dealings. As you can see, there are a lot of elements here, and had Straub managed to blend them well, it would make for a real tour-de-force.

One central problem is Mr. X, who makes an effectively creepy villain for a little while but becomes less frightening the more journal entries we read. About a third of the way into the novel I came to the conclusion that Mr. X was easily the dorkiest of the Bastard Spawn of the Great Old Ones I had ever encountered. (Mr. X would probably suffer some Cyclopean wedgies at the hands of Wilbur Whateley.) There's something to be said for bogeymen willing to be quietly ominous, or one's who know how to rant in ways that reinforce their air of menace instead of undermining it. Passages such as these just ruin much of the tension:

"I once again propose--envision--a Valhallah-like Museum of the Elder Gods. The Record of my adventures, opened to this very page of the Boorum & Pease journal, lies installed upon a likeness of my table alongside a replica of my Mont-Blanc (medium-point) pen in a diorama-like affair a few steps or slithers beyond a representation of the Master's own desk and writing implements."

Straub's characterization doesn't just misfire when it comes to the villain; I found myself pretty bored with all of the characters. Ned is compelling as a confused young man beset by mystery but less so as a pulp detective figure hunting down the various threads of family and criminal intrigue. His aunts and uncles are a motley crew who are meant to be sort of charming in their weirdness, but every time one of them said some variation on 'We are Dunstans' to reference the family's low standing in Edgerton, they drifted closer to self-parody. (There have always been Dunstans in Cold Comfort Farm, after all.) Ned also has a love interest, Laurie Hatch, who is tangentially connected to the criminal dealings. (She's the husband of a local, corrupt businessman.) She has a cute kid with musical talent and is quite sexy in a panther-like sort of way but sadly lacks much in the way of a personality.

The lack of engaging characters ends up undermining what would otherwise have been the novel's strengths. For example, Straub's prose is often quite nice and literary, such as when he describes Ned and Laurie's lovemaking thus:

"Some of the women I had known may have been more passionate than Laurie, but none were more gracefully attuned to the capacity of each individual moment to spread its wings and glide into the next. She also had the gift of what some would call a dirty mind and others inventiveness. The more we explored our bodies and celebrated their abilities, the more unified we became until we seemed to pour into each other and become a single, profoundly interconnected thing."

It's nicely written and would be almost transcendent if I felt some connection to the characters, but since I don't it just seemed sort of purple to me, high-toned Harlequin romance.

This deleterious effect also extends to the novel's twists. We learn three different backstories for Laurie, and if she were a character I had cared about, I would have been struck with a feeling of suspense and wanting to know which was true. I didn't really care, though, and so felt that reading one backstory was punishment enough. Other twists were undermined by Straub's decision to riff off certain elements of Lovecraft's 'The Dunwich Horror.' This isn't bad on its own, but since I was familiar with the original, it gave me a strong sense of what was coming up.

As much as I like Lovecraft's fiction (which was one motivation for reading Mr. X), I think Straub erred in incorporating the homage into this novel. Using Lovecraftian elements without matching Lovecraft's sense of the cosmic can be a bit of a gamble, and here the effect is to highlight the soap opera feeling of the material. Overall, the Lovecraft homages seem poorly thought out. Straub throws in some Lovecraft Easter Eggs which don't really add much and which the average reader won't get, but then he writes a library scene (a stock element in many Lovecraft tales) which falls so flat that one wonders why he bothered.

Though there is much that doesn't work, the novel is not without its strengths. Straub's prose has its usual polished middlebrow quality. Edgerton--especially its seedier side--really comes alive sometimes. There also a certain audacity to all the twistiness, which I probably would have enjoyed if I had engaged more with the characters or didn't know what to expect. Overall, though, this is not one of Straub's best. show less

At heart this dark fantasy novel is about the twisted truths that lie at the heart of one's family history and whether it's better to leave secrets buried or dig them up. Peter Straub does an amazing job of unraveling pieces of information that slowly form into at larger picture. His characters are complex and fascinating, which makes the story absolutely compelling with an ending that kind of blew my mind and makes me want to go back and read it again. Fantastic book.

I really, thoroughly enjoyed this book. Rarely do I read a book that doesn't make me want to skim the minutiae, but this is one. My favorite aspect of it, though, is the characters. Even the tiniest bit parts are interesting and colorful and not two dimensional. The ending was thought provoking. I think, if you like Clive Barker, H. P. Lovecraft, and don't insist that every book has to be horrific, you'll like this book.

(it should probably be noted - my mother did find this book gruesome and horrific, but to me it was more just a dark fantasy. And she watches a lot of horror movies. So, I guess what I'm saying is, it's probably best to read this when you are open to letting it be whatever kind of book it's going to be to you.)

Very subtle and sophisticated--a nice companion piece to something like "The Secret Sharer," but very slow starting and not as entertaining as Straub's best books. I'm not sure this book came off quite as well as Straub hoped, but he clearly had high aspirations for it. Plus, the book references Lovecraft quite a lot, and I just don't understand the fascination with Lovecraft.

I'm not really sure how to classify this book, part paranormal, part horror, part mystery it was an interesting read. I initially found it a bit hard to get into but after 50 of the 620 pages had passed I had a decent layout of things in my head and started to enjoy how things were unfolding. It's a bit of an odd one in that the blurb doesn't really give a good picture of what the story is really about, it's far better and complicated than the blurb would leave you to believe.

Overall, an interesting story of family history with a paranormal touch.