Floating Dragon
A frustrating and unfulfilling read. - Synopsis:Every thirty or so years a series of brutal murders and catastrophic events devastate a small town caused by some unknown evil force within the town. Four families originally settled the town and now a descendant from each has returned to the town and the massacres are becoming worse than ever. Can they combine to defeat this force?Opinion:As many people have said, the plot has many parallels with Stephen King s It . I m not sure which was written first (and therefore who inspired who) but King s book is the better of the two. This is a tough read. Many times I had to force myself to continue to read on which is a very bad sign, a book should just flow but there are some very dull info dumps within the book. The story is told from different time periods and the novel switches to different characters and their particular story and point of view. The problem with this of course is that some characters are fleshed out better than others and when the story deviates from them you become disappointed. The main problem however is that the evil force within the book just isn t tangible, compare this to IT where the image and scenes with Pennywise the Clown stay in the mind. It s not all bad though. Some of the main characters- namely a young kid named Tabby Smithfield and an old writer named Graham Williams are interesting to read about and you can empathize with their plight to an extent.Overall this is not a great read but Straub does have something about his writing, there is a germ of a good idea here, it s just not executed well. So if the synopsis interested you, I d recommend King s IT and if you want to try Straub go for Shadowland or The Hellfire Club .
Sprawling horror - 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.
Not up to the usual Straub genius. - I recently found this book in storage at my father s house. I read it again after 13 years, and noticed that it s not nearly as good as I remembered it. Having read most of Straub s books, I think that this is one of his weaker books. Having said that, it was still a page turner and good fun.
Not A Ghost Story - Not as good as some other books by Peter Straub ( Shadowland , Ghost Story , If You Could See Me Now ) it still can impress with the style, some very dark scenes (like the sea of blood and flies), and wonderful over-the-top ideas (the leakers who seem to be an homage to the old Invisible Man movies). Straub very well describes his place of action, and in an interesting way introduces the main problems (on one hand - growing number of murders, on the other - some poisonous substance in the air), but after that, when the madness begins, it goes in too strange directions for the reader to accept them - why, for one, didn t those people just get away from the village after seeing what they did? Why did some manage to stay conscious while the others were going mad? As for suspense, yes - there could be more of it. Some scenes are nicely creepy (for example when Graham is describing the encounter with the Beast in his youth), but more would be welcome. Still, I generally liked Floating Dragon a lot, and was only let down by the middle section, it s really better than many other, more popular horror books. Read it when you re done with the Straub titles I ve mentioned above.
Ignore and go straight to Ghost Story - Ignore the comments regarding the similarity with Stephen King s It, Floating Dragon was written several years before King s novel. If anything, King was influenced by Straub!All that aside, this was a very poor offering from Straub. There is very little attention to pacing, there are no surprises, everything is utterly predictable. Straub settled for writing a horror novel with no suspense elements at all. You always know what is going to happen. In a way, this may have ruined King s later effort, since he also throws suspense out in favour of a predictable gorefest.If you want to read Straub at his best, read Ghost Story, probably the best tale of its kind written in recent years. If you want to read a novel that has plenty of back story involving the past of its characters, go for Dan Simmons s Summer of Night, it shows up Floating Dragon and It for the poor efforts they are.