Floating Dragon

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 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, show more 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

One of my favourite epic small-town horror novels. A wealthy Connecticut enclave is besieged by a supernatural menace that grows to full strength every hundred years. Whether the man-made cloud of chemicals that drifts over the town causing madness and melting is part of that or just a lucky coincidence is left ambiguous. As the situation deteriorates with murders and suicides gradually escalating to the decimation of foremen and policemen and the complete isolation of the town from the rest of the world and dead people wandering around making more dead people, four brave not-dead-yet people with connections to the town's past struggle to understand what's going on and try to find a way to fight it.

It's big and sweeping, with lots of show more characters and lots of horrible things happening. I've never been quite sure it comes together properly by the end, inasmuch as there's the evil entity and the people who fight it, but despite lots of historical stuff there's never any actual rationale, however mythic and made-up, for why it's happening, what it actually is and why these four have the power to stand up to it.

It might seem like an odd criticism, but the rest of the book is quite meticulous in its depiction of people and places and dramatic scenes. Like in It, a succesor small-town horror novel that ten-ups Floating Dragon, we eventually had a vision of where, exactly, the monster came from and what it was, sort of, and that was enough to be satisfying, here it just ends up being literalised as a dragon. That's it. Okay, before we get there there's more than enough to enjoy and this doesn't spoil any of it, it does leave things noticeably woolly, though. Straub is quite good at ambiguities (like with the cloud of chemicals) and not necessarily spelling everything out for the reader, but it definitely works better in his non-supernatural books. Nonetheless, a beloved classic of the genre. show less

*Spoilers ahead*

In 1979 Peter Straub wrote Ghost Story, arguably the greatest modern horror novel; a few years later he reimagined it as an over-the-top spoof, Floating Dragon. The author has described this book as an "exuberant valentine" to the horror genre and to fans who had devoured his supernatural-themed novels up to that point, but also acknowledges that he was distancing himself from straight horror and had set out to write something excessive and even "goofy". So, from the beginning, the reader who is about to undertake the 600-page journey which Floating Dragon represents should bear in mind that it is essentially a parody of horror novels rather than the genuine article. Straub was having fun with the conventions of the show more genre and freely admits it.

In virtually every major feature of its construction, this book replicates the formula of Ghost Story: 1.) A group of friends, so close that they are like family, must confront a supernatural menace that is destroying an entire town. 2.) In both novels, said supernatural menace has suffered temporary defeats in the past but always returns. 3.) A pivotal moment in each book occurs during the 1920s, when--as a young man--the senior member of the group of friends is terrorized by the supernatural menace in one of its various human guises. And the similarities don't end there: scary mirrors and even scarier movie theaters figure prominently in both Ghost Story and Floating Dragon.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work nearly as well the second time around. Floating Dragon is solidly written (you can take that for granted with Straub) and sufficiently entertaining, but the characters don't quite manage to endear themselves to the reader. In Ghost Story, Ricky and Sears are so vividly rendered that you can almost see them sitting beside you; here, you struggle to picture the faces of Graham and Tabby and Patsy, which makes it impossible to believe that they're real. Straub tells you how charming and special they are, and you just have to take his word for it. There are frightening, compelling scenes and situations in this novel (even if the manifestations of the supernatural do strike me as a little overbaked), but for some reason--and I don't think it's necessarily because of the exaggerated satirical tone--I never felt wholly involved. Floating Dragon works best when the reader doesn't examine it too closely and is content to just roll with the flow. show less

I love Peter Straub. He is an intelligent and literary man that has single-handedly helped raise the standards of horror writing. He may be writing about boogeymen, serial killers or things from beyond the grave, but he isn’t going to dumb it down.

Floating Dragon is an ambitious novel in the vein of ‘Salem’s Lot and Straub’s own masterpiece Ghost Story. A Peyton Place like town is slowly taken over by a supernatural force or perhaps supernatural forces?

It all starts with the murder of ‘Stony’ Susan Baxter in the bedroom community of Hampstead, Connecticut. After that we follow several plot threads: an accident at a chemical plant working on a project for the Department of Defense releases a (possibly sentient) cloud of show more nerve gas, a child actor and his wife who have moved back to his home town and Graham Williams, a retired writer who is looking into Hampstead’s past.

This is horror on a grand scale with a cast of well written characters that are more than just fodder for a monster. Straub bounces between these characters right from the beginning. It is very disorienting at first, but helps give the novel real depth.

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t some sensitive character study. If anything, in this book Peter Straub pours on the horror. There is some eye-popping stuff in here. Not usually extreme or graphic, just way out there and all over the place.

In fact, one fault with the novel is that it’s maybe a little TOO ambitious. There are more ideas packed in this one book than any three books you would normally read. Peter Straub kicked out all the stops and at times you’ll feel giddy there’s so much going on.

This was my first Peter Straub book and it impressed me enough to go out and buy everything else of his I could find. However, if you were considering trying Peter Straub for the first time, I guess I would suggest Ghost Story, Mr. X or Koko to get your feet wet. show less

A government experiment goes awry and a deadly gas is released over the affluent suburb of Hampstead, Connecticut. Meanwhile, the decendants of the town's original founders return to Hampstead for the firts time in over 100 years, igniting a firestorm of events that are the continuation of an ongoing curse.

After I read (and was completely scared shitless) by Ghost Story in high school, I was afraid to read anything else by Straub. I remember passing up Shadowland and this book; by then I was involved with reading too many other writers to be concerned with him. But rereading Ghost Story last year got me thinking about investigating more of Straub's work and the 30th Anniversry edition of FD seemed like a good place to start.

I was show more mistaken about that as this book was a huge disappointment.

I think the biggest problem with Floating Dragon was that it couldn't decide if it wanted to be a supernatural or science-gone-awry tale. It begins with a pretty good setup of a DOD expereimental project getting released into the atmosphere and then becoems the tale of a curse over Hampstead that recurs every 30 years or so. Even as the two threads continue, they never mesh in any significant way--in fact, the narrator of the story decides that the chemical accident was merely a coincidence. So the reader is left wondering why it was needed to bloat an already over-wrought story.

Then there is the narrator of the story, a black-listed author of novels/screenplays who ex-patriated himself to England and alcoloholism until the McCarthy-era ended. He begins his story in the third person, but then breaks in with a chapter of first-person narration to explain his role in the affair. He says he got most of his information from the diaries of the three other protagonmists, but he may have made some stuff up himself--he's a writer after all, and he may not have remembered stuff very well. Then it's back to the first-person (though he does break in two more times for pointless POV narration.) So now we have a unrealiable narrator to deal with.

Finally, the overall tone of the book is one of Straub being in love with his own writing. His unrealiable narrator speaks as if he is smarter than everybody else in the room and he knows it. Add to this a setting of affluent people who are feel they are better than everybody else and there's very little to care about in this confused and off-putting tale of death and destruction. In the epilogue to the story he talks about the narrator finally publishing "the excellent book Floating Dragon"--that actually made me laugh. But it just went to the overall arrogant and confused prose relating this tale.

There was about 100 pages (divided by one of the narrator's interludes) that were pretty good--they dealt with the main storyline of the curse, not the chemical accident. And I liked the climactic scene in the Gorge at Kendall Point. But overall, this was not a memorable reading expereince. If you are a newcomer to Straub, start with another title--I recommend Ghost Story; if you're already a fan, you'll probably like it.

But Cemetery Dance's edition of the book is beautiful (I gave it and extra 1/2 star for that!) show less

The concept of a whole town subjected to evil promises so much, yet this Straub effort delivers so little. A chemical weapon leak creates confusion in a small coastal town at the same time a recurrent malevolent presence turns up to subvert the town to it's own despicable end. Ultimately, it is not the plot of the novel nor the plethora of characters that make this such a tough read; it is the time shifting as Straub tries to paint the real-time events that actually stop you becoming engaged. Also much of the content is redundant, this book is just too voluminous. In summary, Floating Dragon offers nothing new to the horror genre, it's unoriginal and at times is poorly executed.

This book took forever to get through.
Nearly 600 pages in large sized paperback and the narrative goes on forever. The author can definitely write well but there are pages and pages of the story where nothing really happens. The last third of the book does move quicker but it is very predictable how it will be resolved.
I have read 2 other books by this author and they were also wordy and overly long.