Peter Straub

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Horror of Horrors

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SOURCE: "Horror of Horrors," in Times Literary Supplement, March 11, 1983, p. 249.

[In the review below, Bold reviews Floating Dragon's style, which he describes as "cinematic."]

Although Peter Straub makes references to writers such as Washington Irving and Wilkie Collins, the immediate sources of his huge novel Floating Dragon are cinematic. Addicts of horror and science-fiction movies will recognize images from Alien (humans stripped to their gleaming bones), The Exorcist (graveyard stench and vomit), The Shining (torrents of blood), Zombies (decomposing creatures laying hands on the living), The Invisible Man (a key character wrapped up in bandages), The Birds (with bats replacing Hitchcock's crows) and The Quatermass Experiment (the chemical transformation of a man into soapsuds). Straub also indulges in cinematic similes, with a house exploding "like the Death-Star in Star Wars", and sets a central scene around a special screening of the violent film The Choirboys.

The construction of Floating Dragon, consisting of sequences which depend on vivid contrasts and shock effects rather than continuity, is also cinematic. Straub flashes back and forwards in time, dissolves from dream to fictional reality, and presents moments of horror with a pictorial clarity: "The man's face was a grotesque parody of humanity. Nearly dead white, it was puffy and ridged with excess flesh…. A wad of flesh on the man's cheek slid towards his dewlapped chin, and Sarah's heart moved for the man … she saw that a small colony of spiders was burrowing into his thick woolly hair." It takes a strong stomach, as well as endurance, to read all of this novel, throughout which there are sickening scenes of violence and hallucination with bodies being mutilated, insects assaulting the dying and the dead, and bats and dragons hovering malevolently in the air.

All this happens in a quiet spot in Connecticut. Hampstead seems to be the perfect all-American dream-town with its well-kept streets, its air of affluence, its successful citizens making money and spending spare time jogging or sipping fine wine. The town oozes contentment as it drifts towards the summer of 1980. It has, however, a simply appalling past which is revealed to the reader by a narrator who announces himself abruptly: "Instinct tells me that now is the time to emerge from the cover of the godlike narrator who knows what all his characters are thinking and doing at all times and who takes an impartial stance towards them."

Graham Williams, the narrator, is a writer with a history of political liberalism. More pertinently, he is one of the descendants of the original four families which had founded Hampstead. The others are Richard Allbee, whose life is haunted by the fame of the soap opera he made as a child; Patsy McCloud, whose husband beats her black and blue by way of celebrating his business triumphs; and Tabby Smithfield, a young man who has inwardly grown old watching his father deteriorate with drink and depression. Inevitably the children of the founding fathers get together to try to save the town from what threatens it. Their weapons are paranormal: telepathy, telekinesis, precognition.

The enemy of the people of Hampstead is an evil force so formidable that it can assume human form, infiltrate the imagination and wage chemical warfare on unsuspecting citizens. At one moment the dragon is a man hacking a woman to death, then it is a swarm of flies feasting on a human head, then it is a battalion of bats frightening a woman, then it is poisonous gas contaminating the air, then it is thousands of little dragons spinning out of the smoke.

At times the book reads like an anthology of the worst nightmares ever recorded by human beings. We observe the man who sees his pregnant wife's body opened up and "the opening torn in his wife's belly … filled with flies;" and we are taken to the toilet with a man who sees that the "bowl was filled with tiny spiders as red as his hair."

Floating Dragon, beneath its remarkable repertoire of horrific details, is a simple moral tale of the confrontation between good and evil. (To do battle against the dragon it helps to be a saint, so occasionally the four protagonists are haloed with light and provided with a sacred sword-or a "wide dazzling beam" courtesy of Star Wars.) Nevertheless, it represents a new level of sophistication in the Gothic novel. Straub plays games with the structure, rapidly switching from third-person to first-person narrative, and teases the reader with biblical symbols and red herrings. The novel is sustained with great skill as the battle between good and evil is impressively, if agonizingly, stretched over the disturbingly supernatural plot.

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Yikes! Peter Straub's Floating Dragon Scares Suburbia