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Summary
Summary
A riveting new thriller from the award-winning author of Ghost Story. Nora, a bored housewife, married to a weakling of a husband, is kidnapped at gunpoint by Dick Dart, a man who is suspected of committing four recent murders. Now Nora can stay alive only by feeding Dart's ego and outwitting him without seeming to do so.
Author Notes
Author Peter Straub was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1943. He earned degrees in English from the University of Wisconsin and Columbia University. He taught English at his former high school for three years and worked for a time on his doctorate in Ireland. He began writing in 1969 and published two books of poetry in 1972. His novel Julia (1975) was an attempt to find a successful genre in which to work, after his first novel, Marriages (1973), did not sell well.
He found that he had a talent for writing horror thrillers in the Gothic tradition. His stories are complex and well paced, with authentic settings that add to the believability of the plot. He is particularly good at creating grotesque characters and gruesome situations; the eeriness of his work is captivating. He has won numerous awards including the British Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the World Fantasy Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Continuing his shift away from occult horror toward terrors inspired by the ragged social fabric of American life, Straub (The Throat) turns in another violent yet richly nuanced thriller. As in much of his work (Mystery; Koko), the past impinges on the present through secrets kept, then revealed. Here, the secrets are both familial and literary. Four women in upscale Westerholm, Conn., have disappeared from blood-spattered bedrooms. Meanwhile, Westerholm resident Nora Chancel, who's newly menopausal, broods about a stalking wolf while her husband, publisher Davey Chancel, a decade her junior, obsesses about the novel trilogy (begun in 1939) written by Chancel House's most popular writer, Hugo Driver. When yet another woman disappears, Nora learns that Davey once had an affair with her. Then the woman shows up, only to accuse Nora of kidnapping and torturing her, leading to Nora's arrest. But also at the police station is Dick Dart, scion of an old local family, who is being questioned about the killings. Dart steals a cop's gun, grabs Nora as his hostage and, he believes, potential future accompliceand the woman's real agony begins. Dart, a serial killer who has always loved ``cutting things up. Loved it,'' rapes Nora and takes her on a grisly spree of terror. In time, Nora manages to escape, but in a surprising yet, with hindsight, seemingly inevitable turn of events, she again finds herself in mortal danger. Dart is a memorable villain, funny, bold and charming (and as difficult to kill as Rasputin). Nora proves his equal, however, gutsy and clever, and as the two clash, the secrets that Straub intimates early on reveal themselves. These secrets manifest neither easily nor predictably, however, for, as is said of characters in a Driver novel, Straub's own characters are ``colorful and involved, full of danger, heroism and betrayal''as is this supple, exciting book. Major ad/promo. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Nora Chancel has begun to lose all sense of herself. Wracked by nightmares from her stint as a combat nurse in Vietnam and unhappily married to the weak-willed scion of a famous publishing company, she is also rattled by the fact that four women from her hometown have recently been murdered. Called down to the police station to help with the investigation into the disappearance of a friend, she is kidnapped at gunpoint by suspected murderer Dick Dart. Over the course of the next 10 days, Nora courageously faces down her brutal, talkative kidnapper, emerging with a newfound appreciation for her own abilities. This is one odd page-turner of a book. All of Straub's characters are deeply neurotic, and his scenes veer erratically from the brutality of rape and murder to witty repartee that could come straight out of the Thin Man movies (although the fact that this banter is being tossed back and forth between a vicious serial killer and his intended victim adds a whole other level of weirdness to the proceedings). But Straub, whose background as a horror novelist is readily apparent, can write circles around most of the authors topping best-seller lists these days. Although his worldview is pretty strange, he also makes it pretty interesting. (Reviewed November 1, 1995)0679401377Joanne Wilkinson
Kirkus Review
A plucky heroine is forced to distinguish between literary illusion and existential reality in this murky sins-of-the-father metafiction from Straub (The Throat, 1993, etc.) Vaguely discontented with her marriage to a 40-year-old manchild named Davey, ten years her junior, Nora Chancel (who served as a frontline nurse during the Vietnam War) resolves to turn their lives around. Barring the way to any immediate breakaway, however, is Alden, her domineering father-in-law and head of the publishing house that employs Davey. Along with several generations of devoted readers, moreover, Davey is mesmerized by Night Journey, an allusive allegory whose perennial bestseller status has sustained the family firm down through the years. Meanwhile, the brutal murders of four well-to-do divorcées and widows (all in their middle or late 40s) rock the upscale Connecticut exurb in which the Chancels all reside. The culprit turns out to be Dick Dart, a local attorney and former classmate of Davey's at Yale. A remorseless and resourceful monster with a wealth of grievances, Dart soon escapes from the town jail with Nora in tow. The fugitive, who's been killing off clients to undermine his father's law practice, is also pursuing a brand-new agenda: to prove that Hugo Driver, the long-dead author of Night Journey, did not actually write the book. Though on the run through backcountry New England, he and Nora manage to gather a considerable amount of testimony in support of his thesis. The final proofs are unearthed at a sometime writers' colony, where Nora wastes the sporadically charming but consistently vicious Dart in a climactic and bloody confrontation. After a hellish ten-day journey, then, she returns home to dump hapless Davey--and put paid to Chancel House. Despite an eerily captivating villain in the person of Dick Dart, an ultimately tedious odyssey--unredeemed by its quixotic quests for the truth about times long past.
Library Journal Review
Straub (The Throat, Dutton, 1994) delivers a complicated two-fold thriller. A former nurse in Vietnam, Nora Chancel lives in Westerholm, Connecticut, with her ineffectual husband, Davey. While visiting the local police station to identify the most recent victim of a serial killer, Nora is kidnapped by the accused killer, the satirical villain Dick Dart. Intertwined with the kidnapping plot is an account of the terrifying events that followed the writing of a horror story at the Shorelands writers' colony in 1938. Fighting her own demons from Vietnam, Nora becomes stronger and braver as the story progresses. The climax brings the two stories together, as Dart and Nora visit Shorelands. Horror meets horror in this bizarre, enigmatic tale, which reveals itself in onion-like layers. The Hellfire Club will be popular with Straub's fans as well as readers of horror. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/95.]-Stacie Browne Chandler, Newbury Coll. Lib., Brookline, Mass. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
