In the Night Room
-
- 22,99 lei
-
- 22,99 lei
Publisher Description
A dazzling chilller from the bestselling author of KOKO and LOST BOY LOST GIRL.
Award-winning children's book author Willy Patrick seems to be having a breakdown. Figures from her past are coming to visit her, most frighteningly her dead daughter, Holly, who was murdered together with Willy’s first husband. Then Willy discovers her mysterious fiancé may well have been responsible for the deaths of her husband and daughter.
After fleeing the house they are renovating she runs into Tim Underhill, also an author haunted by the deaths of loved ones. In fact, his long-deceased nine-year-old sister recently appeared to him on the way to his favourite diner, and he's been getting strange emails from people in his home town – none of whom are still alive. But what really spooks him is the realization that Willy seems to be the heroine of the book he is currently working on, in precisely the mortal peril he has invented for her…
Reviews
PRAISE FOR PETER STRAUB:
‘Straub is a master at creating fear out of everyday life.’
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
‘No one is better than Straub at having whole communities rocked by the forces of wickedness.’
OBSERVER
PRAISE FOR IN THE NIGHT ROOM:
‘Master of the macabre Straub sits fear on your shoulder in a tale which is blacker than the night.’ NORTHERN ECHO
‘Unforgettable’ GUARDIAN
PRAISE FOR LOST BOY LOST GIRL:
'Lost Boy Lost Girl is intense and yet measured; serious and melancholy at times, but also humorous. Straub's prose has a tart clarity that allows him to delineate the muddiness of life with great economy and richness. He has a superb ear for dialogue, both spoken and silent. He is adept, too, with ambiguity; the emotional blur of the real world, of our tentative and ambivalent responses to each other and the things we do. These qualities create an atmosphere that lingers like the novel's own ghost, and Straub achieves this invisibly, in the background. He doesn't insist you notice how intelligent and subtle the novel is, and you don't: you merely appreciate how good a time you're having, and that you don't want it to stop.' Michael Marshall, GUARDIAN
'Stephen King's mate and co-author puts the monster master into the shade. This'll have you anxiously contemplating the shadows' MIRROR
'Mr Straub's latest is an unusually taut, dynamic, spooky display of horror expertise, and its story is deftly told.' NEW YORK TIMES
About the author
Born in Milwaukee, Peter Straub is the author of sixteen novels, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. He has won the British Fantasy Award, two Bram Stoker awards and two World Fantasy awards. His most recent publications are a collection of short stories, MAGIC TERROR, the acclaimed novel LOST BOY LOST GIRL and BLACK HOUSE, the international bestselling novel that he co-wrote with Stephen King.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Black House, Straub and Stephen King wrote of "slippage," whereby the borders between reality and fantasy blur. This entire brilliant novel is an act of slippage. In this sequel to last year's lost boy lost girl, and further chapter in the ongoing adventures of Straub protagonist Tim Underhill (Koko, etc.), the most intellectually adventurous of dark fantasy authors takes the apparent slippage of the prequel in which Underhill's experience of a slain nephew's survival at the hands of a serial killer was indicated to be compensatory imagining by Underhill several steps into the impressively weird. Underhill, an author, here encounters not the mere survival of a dead relation but the existence of a character he's creating in his journals. Dark fantasy cognescenti will remember that King employed a somewhat similar device in The Dark Half, but Straub's approach is distinctly his own, directed at mining the ambiguous relationship between nature and art, fact and fiction, the real and the ideal. The character Underhill has brought into being is Willy Bryce Patrick, a children's book author soon to be married to coldhearted financier Mitchell Faber, at least until Willy discovers that Faber had her first family murdered. Willy, whom Tim meets during a bookstore reading of his latest novel, lost boy lost girl, believes she is real (as does the reader for the book's first third), and learns otherwise only through Tim's painful, patient revelations. The two fall in deeply in love, but their passion seems doomed not only is Willy's existence tenuous, but the pair are being pursued with murderous intent by Faber and his goons, as the former is in fact one form of the serial killer of lost boy lost girl, Joseph Kalendar; moreover, a terrible angel is insisting that only when Underhill makes an ultimate sacrifice, righting a wrong he did to Kalendar in lost boy lost girl, will matters resolve. Moving briskly while ranging from high humor to the blackest dread, this is an original, astonishingly smart and expertly entertaining meditation on imagination and its powers; one of the very finest works of Straub's long career, it's a sure bet for future award nominations.
