Book Review: In the Night Room
Here's the good thing about being a book lover in love with a book lover: you get to introduce each other to things you may never have read otherwise. A while back, my girlfriend gave me a copy of Peter Straub's lost boy lost girl, which I liked quite a bit. But the real reason she had me read it was so she could then get me to read the sequel, In the Night Room, which actually blew me away.
Some months after the events of lost boy lost girl, novelist Tim Underhill has written a book fictionalizing the tragic loss of his nephew and the truth about a killer that rocked his hometown. Now, work on his new book is being disturbed by a crazed fan with a weird theory, spectral apparitions, and bizarre e-mails with no domain names in the address.
Meanwhile another writer, young adult novelist Willy Patrick, is planning her upcoming wedding to a ruthless man with a secretive job. An unexpected violent act of nature reveals a horrible secret, and Willy goes on the run.
For the first half of the book, Straub develops the two stories concurrently, but without any connectivity. Then the two tales, Tim's and Willy's, collide in a wholly unexpected and incredibly creative twist. Everything we have read thus far is suddenly cast into a new light, and the understanding of what's truly happening to our heroes makes for a brilliant dark fantasy.
The powerful blend of spirituality and metafiction causes us to go back to the beginning of the first book to question the nature of Straub's reality. The story is about writing and creating as much as it is about murderers and demons. Straub is also a more reflective writer than others of a similar stripe. Where Stephen King (for example) would end this book with a physical battle against the evil, Staub engages in a war of words and understanding -- the goal of this book is not to kill the beast, but to truly comprehend it, and this is every bit as engaging as a more conventional battle.
The book's only real flaw comes in the form of a sort of "guide" Tim occasionally converses with. The character, whom Tim only encounters online, insists on speaking in the online "l33t" slang, which is sort of clever when we get the explanation as to why, but then becomes frustrating as he continues to speak in that fashion. Maybe I'm just oversensitive because I'm a ninth grade teacher, but I've got to read papers with poor spelling and grammar all day, I don't want that in my pleasure reading as well.
Still, it's a really strong book and one that spoke to me in a lot of ways. I'll definitely keep looking for more Straub.