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Shadowland

by Peter Straub (Goodreads Author)

3.87 of 5 stars 3.87 · rating details · 4,175 ratings · 145 reviews

You have been there…
if you have ever been afraid.

Come back. To a dark house deep in the Vermont woods, where two friends are spending a season of horror, apprenticed to a Master Magician.

Learning secrets best left unlearned. Entering a world of incalculable evil more ancient than death itself. More terrifying. And more real.

Only one of them will make it through....more

Mass Market Paperback, 480 pages

Published March 4th 2003 by Berkley (first published February 28th 1980)

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Mar 08, 2013 Dirk Grobbelaar rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-i-own, horror

Revisited Review

I really enjoy this kind of horror. Shadowland has an elaborate build up, and the reader invests quite a bit in the story before things start going awry. This means that you actually do care about what happens next…

There’s also a very “real world” feel to the events, however bizarre things eventually turn out. You almost, almost feel that this could actually happen. That being said, I wasn’t using the term bizarre loosely just now. This is one sinister story, and if the body cou...more

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Dec 24, 2010 Maciek rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Fans of fantasy and magic

Shelves: owned-books, own-in-paperback, horror, fantasy, favorites, read-in-2010, reviewed, classic-horror

Peter Straub came to prominence in 1979 with Ghost Story, an old fashioned spooky ghost tale which I wasn't really a fan of (though I appreciate it). A year later, in 1980, he published Shadowland, a coming of age novel which can be classified as dark fantasy with horror elements. This time, I say, he penned a winner.
Shadowland is concerned with the friendship of two boys - Tom Flanagan and Del Nightingale - which began at the private all-male school they both attended. As both try to fight the...more Peter Straub came to prominence in 1979 with Ghost Story, an old fashioned spooky ghost tale which I wasn't really a fan of (though I appreciate it). A year later, in 1980, he published Shadowland, a coming of age novel which can be classified as dark fantasy with horror elements. This time, I say, he penned a winner.
Shadowland is concerned with the friendship of two boys - Tom Flanagan and Del Nightingale - which began at the private all-male school they both attended. As both try to fight the horrors all young boys have to suffer at one stage of their lives or another, Del introduces Tom to his world of magic tricks. When they both decide to spend the summer at Del's Uncle's house in New England, Tom discovers that things can be much more sinister than they seem. At Shadowland, their lives will be changed forever and after that summer nothing will be the same.

Shadowland is a beautiful novel unlike most fantasy or horror works. Straub is a master prose stylist who crafts to perfection (he wrote the novel longhand in multiple journals, and then retyped it on a typewriter - who can imagine a writer doing that nowadays?) and the result is an intricately detailed work, structurally complex and above all, stylish. Opening with a prologue which reads like a feverish dream which makes us see the strangest things, the novel expertly morphs into a coming of age school story, and only after that unleashes its full power. Straub introduces characters, plots and subplots within those, but nothing is without purpose in this story; he draws heavily on various folk tales (and even includes some of his own making) thereby seducing the reader who is surprised with each revelation - and the horror is only starting. From the afterword:

That same year, I had been moved by John Fowles’ novel, The Magus, which suggested a way to unite the powerful strangeness resulting from the oral tradition with more conventional narrative satisfactions. No one familiar with The Magus who reads Shadowland can fail to notice Fowles’ influence on me, which was profound and pervasive: but this influence was above all liberating, not enslaving. Fowles demonstrated how the seductive uncertainty implicit in theatrical illusion and, even more importantly, the emotional effects of this uncertainty, could find expression in a narrative that itself moved through successive layers of surprise, doubt, suspicion, and uncertainty.

Reading Shadowland is much like witnessing a spectacle of illusion and the uncertainity it evokes. The aura that "something is terribly wrong" never leaves, and if an enchantment was cast, it is a dark and haunting one. One of the things that are immediately noticeable is Straub's shift in approach to horror; Ghost Story was largely constrained by the Victorian history of the genre, where the horror needed to be subtle and only hinted at; Though Shadowland is a subtle and suggestive work, it escapes this convenction and Straub plays with the subtle and blalant terror wth marvelous results.

Shadowland is a masterful, unacknowledged work by a writer who has remained in the shadows far, far too long. Peter Straub possesses an imagination without boundaries along with the gift of marvelous storytelling and the ability of bringing things to life with the most amazing imagery and constructing atmosphere that is gothic, unsettling, elusive and hallucinatory all at once. Intriguing and complex, Shadowland will please every reader who enjoys well-crafed fiction that demands full attention and forces to think about what it presents. A truly magical tale.(less)

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Jan 08, 2013 Kirsten rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-pre-12-07, own

This is one of my favorite of Peter Straub's novels. It's a creepy take on the idea of the Sorcerer's Apprentice -- only in this case, the sorcerer may be more dangerous than anything his apprentice can cook up. There are loads of references to fairy tales here, which are fun to try to place, and I love the way that Straub makes it difficult to figure out what's real magic and what's just sleight of hand.

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Sep 06, 2007 Eric rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: wouldreadagain

I read this on a train trip up to Vermont. I didn't realize before the trip that it was partly set in Vermont. So, it was a pleasant and fitting surprise. I'd wanted to read it ever since I was ten, when I saw the ad for it in the back of the "Darkfall" (Dean Koontz) paperback I was reading. It held up to the promise I'd expected, although I think it's better I read it so many years later, as an adult. My child self wouldn't have been patient enough to read this. Straub's style is too sophistica...more

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Mar 30, 2013 Paul Dinger rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I had this book several times in my life. I was spellbound by Straub's earlier effort Ghost Story which is an excellent chiller. However, I later came across a collection of short stories that was so dreadful, and at the time I was in an anti genre novel mood, that I never tried again. I did however enjoy the Floating Dragon and so I searched out this book and decided to give it another go. I am glad that I did. This is a chiller Charles Williams would have loved, it is full of his touches, the...more

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Feb 26, 2013 Christian Bauman rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

I've beeb reading Peter Straub as long as I've been reading Stephen King, which is to say since I was too young to be reading this...and thank god for it. King and Straub were the big two for me. Even as a kid, I knew there was something different about these two...I was always happy to be just scared, but there was far, far more than a scare to be found in their novels. In the case of Straub, it was his magical, colorful writing. When picking just one Straub book to write about for Goodreads it...more

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Sep 12, 2012 Alexander rated it 5 of 5 stars

"The story concerns two young boys, Tom Flanagan and Del Nightingale, who spend a summer with Del's uncle Coleman, who is one of the foremost magicians in the world. As time passes, however, Tom begins to suspect that what Coleman is teaching is not a series of harmless tricks, but is in fact real sorcery."

Is the wiki summary.

Two teenage boys spend the summer within an Uncle's creepy horror mansion and vast estate in the woods of New England. Over the course of the summer, they not only discove...more

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Jun 13, 2012 Jeremy marked it as to-read

You have been there…
if you have ever been afraid.

Come back. To a dark house deep in the Vermont woods, where two friends are spending a season of horror, apprenticed to a Master Magician.

Learning secrets best left unlearned. Entering a world of incalculable evil more ancient than death itself. More terrifying. And more real.

Only one of them will make it through.

Amazon.com Review

First setting: an all-male prep school in Arizona, where two sensitive freshmen form a bond based on their in

...more

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May 18, 2012 Carl Alves rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shadowland was one of the first horror books I read growing up (I think I may have been twelve at the time that I read it). Along with some of the early works of Stephen King, it was one of the big reasons I became addicted to the genre and later became a writer. Shadowland is a richly written, complex books that I quickly became engrossed in. Shadowland follows two friends Del and Tom in boarding school. Both boys are into magic and dabble at it while they are in school. After the school year i...more

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May 30, 2011 Julia Simpson-Urrutia rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shadowland is, as Stephen King says, creepy from page one. I wanted something creepy and magical, but I was getting tired of the Jim Butcher books and needed a break. However, I wanted to stick with creepy stories since I am currently writing a ghost novel.

I thought the perspective was very interesting. A lesser novelist could have lost the reader from the shift from boarding school to bizarre haunted house (more due to the magician living inside than ghosts), but Straub didn't Straub also leav...more

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Apr 13, 2010 Tee Jay rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: horror

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. “More than twenty years ago, an underrated Arizona schoolboy named Tom Flanagan was asked by another boy to spend the Christmas vacation with him at the house of his uncle” (Straub 3). With this intriguing introductory sentence, Peter Straub’s Shadowland begins. Okay, it might not be the most intriguing sentence ever, but it fulfils the function of catching a reader’s attention and bringing the reader further into the story; for this reason this sentence is a successful introductory sentence.

Tur...more “More than twenty years ago, an underrated Arizona schoolboy named Tom Flanagan was asked by another boy to spend the Christmas vacation with him at the house of his uncle” (Straub 3). With this intriguing introductory sentence, Peter Straub’s Shadowland begins. Okay, it might not be the most intriguing sentence ever, but it fulfils the function of catching a reader’s attention and bringing the reader further into the story; for this reason this sentence is a successful introductory sentence.

Turning, now, to my reactions of the novel, I do remember thinking upon finishing Shadowland, “Did this novel have to be so long?” It was my impression that a few of the longer stream-of-consciousness passages could have been curbed, some of the extended flights of magic and phantasmagoria could have been shortened, so that I might have stayed more focused on the text as I was reading it. It was, after all, supposed to be a page-turning thriller, and I found that the thrill of the tale was somewhat lost by the continuous distraction these extended bouts of elaboration caused. As it was, I continually found myself drifting away from the page, only to return a few lines/paragraphs later with the question, What is going on? Perhaps Mr. Straub was rushed and had to fulfill contractual obligations after the success of Ghost Story and thought abstract fill would prove advantageous. Perhaps not. In the end, it doesn’t really matter: The book was published and Mr. Straub was paid. What readers think of the novel, twenty-six years later, matters in the least.

Although I write these criticisms above, and as a result I might be coming across as rather harsh, I did actually enjoy reading this novel. Part of this enjoyment was precisely because of the effort required to keep everything in order, mentally. The setting was eerie and fun to read, and at times it was a real challenge to keep track of the characters (there’s like over a dozen!) as they magically shifted in and out of the text at the whim of some super magician (extra-textually Mr. Straub?). I could see the direction Straub was taking, and I saw what effects he wanted to take. This novel hinted at metafiction—Straub was dabbling with it as the boys in his narrative were dabbling with magic—and I’m thinking that as I read more of Mr. Straub’s works, in chronological order, I will see how an author progressively develops this trait in his writing.

I guess I will find out. Shadowlandwon’t be the last of Mr. Straub’s novels that I read.

Works Cited

Straub, Peter. Shadowland. New York: Berkley Publishing Corporation, 1981.(less)

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Jan 09, 2013 Nancy rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 100-book-challenge-2013

I wanted to like this book. It had many elements that appealed to me: a dark and creepy private school, a fatherless boy who wanted to learn real magic, an eccentric uncle with a luxurious private estate, mystery, horror, fairy tales...

But unfortunately, it didn't live up to my hopes. The story plodded along endlessly. It didn't even get to the main premise of the book until about 150 pages in, and then it turned out to be mostly a surreal echo of the events that had gone before. The structure w...more

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Apr 11, 2012 Andres rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: mylibraryatthemansion

This is my favorite Straub book. I think his writing was cleaner and more effective at this point in his career. To be honest, I haven't been able to make it through a whole lot of his later work (except The Black House collaboration). Straub does a plausible take on what the inner politics and power-plays of real magic would look like, if there was a secret society, with its hidden hierarchy, fostering magic.

Without spoiling the story for anyone who has not read it, the book involves the confli...more

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Aug 07, 2011 Rick Urban rated it 5 of 5 stars

During the extremely unsatisfying experience of reading Lev Grossman's "The Magicians", I kept thinking of how much better Straub's treatment of similar themes was, so literally the minute I finished "The Magicians" I went to my bookshelf and picked out this book to re-read. With it's nods to everything from Grimm's Fairy Tales to Hans Christian Andersen to John Fowles' The Magus, this is both a literate homage to the art of storytelling and a gripping story in its own right. The tale of two boa...more

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May 14, 2012 Aaron rated it 3 of 5 stars

More fantasy, than horror, this creepy look into a magician's world is an adventure for two kids that find themselves bound to a dark, menacing house called "Shadowland." Del and Tom are two kids interested in the mystery - and truth - behind magic. Del's uncle just so happens to be a real-life magician, who has seen and done it all. But he's not done yet! He says he's looking for a successor, but what does the old scary man really want?
Rose knows the secrets, but she's not telling. Del and Tom...more

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Mar 05, 2012 David rated it 5 of 5 stars

I love this book!
The language is more English than American, despite the setting, and Straub sends this coming of age novel down the path of gothic horror, with all the bells and whistles.

His initial device portrays our main character as a seeming failure, down at heel and down on his luck as well. As he sets this tense and gripping story on its path to explain why the protagonist may - or may not - have inherited the mantle of "King of the Cats", we travel from a prep school to the house of a c...more

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Oct 07, 2010 Tamela Quijas rated it 5 of 5 stars

Peter Straub's Shadowland is a rolling ride into undefinded horror that leaves the reader quaking. Prep schools are a nightmare in themselves (for the attendees) but many fast friendships can be formed among the students. Del and Tom form such a friendship, sharing a childlike curiosity in magic, learning to execute those ever difficult card tricks, dodging a headmaster from hell, and trying to understand why the entire school is suffering from nightmares.

Shadowland is an estate owned by Del's a...more

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Oct 05, 2012 Thomas rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: dark, gothic, horror

Shadowland was the third in the books I enjoyed so much as a kid, but when I read as an adult, I realized that this book wasn't ever really about looking back on the idylls of youth. In fact, there wasn't even much of a pretense of putting anything idyllic in this novel at all. The only redeeming quality about childhood from the book was the wide-eyed innocence of Del (which was destroyed by the climactic scene in the novel), and the friendship between him and Tom (which was barely a friendship...more Shadowland was the third in the books I enjoyed so much as a kid, but when I read as an adult, I realized that this book wasn't ever really about looking back on the idylls of youth. In fact, there wasn't even much of a pretense of putting anything idyllic in this novel at all. The only redeeming quality about childhood from the book was the wide-eyed innocence of Del (which was destroyed by the climactic scene in the novel), and the friendship between him and Tom (which was barely a friendship at all, and more of a dependent relationship on Del's part). But the magic, the imagery, and the overall premise of the novel had a profound effect on me back in high school. Amazingly, it held up well over the past 20-ish years, but I think I appreciate it now for different reasons.

The entire novel is about the two main characters — Del Nightingale and Tom Flanagan — who are both amateur magicians, and who spend one summer with Del's uncle, who is a famous and very eccentric magician. The plot starts at their boarding school, which seems like something straight out of David Copperfield, and the horrible things that happened to both characters. From there, it shifts to Del's uncle’s estate — Shadowland — but what they realize when they get there is that the boarding school had been a part of Shadowland that year, too, and that all of the horrible events were all about Coleman, Del's uncle, wanting to bring them both to his side of magic. Real magic.

In the first half of the novel, set at the boarding school, a lot of attention is paid to an English course where the instructor is fascinated with fairy tales. The fairy tales are actually the core of the theme of the book, as Straub takes a handful of fairy tales and weaves them together to form the backdrop of the plot. It explains a lot about the tone of the novel — it’s very dark and bleak, with an ending that can hardly be classified as "happy" — but it gives the story a nice depth that I hadn't recognized before. I’d like to say that I would have figured this out without having to read about it Straub's new introduction to the latest printing of the book, but who knows? I read it first, and then I started looking for those points.

I remember being fascinated with the character of Rose Armstrong, a live-in helper at Shadowland who is about the same age as Tom and Del, when I was younger, and I still found her to be a fascinating character, though for different reasons. She becomes involved with Tom, all while Del thinks she's still agog over him, and their three-way relationship takes on a life of its own once all three of them meet. But this time I noticed more how much of a tortured character she was, and understood more the mystery of her origins. Her foolishness and naivete grew a little tiresome, but understanding what her origins were, and what drove her motivations, explained away a lot of her strange behavior. But she still had an odd attraction that went further than her relationship with Tom and Del, and she’s a character that lingers long after you finish the book.

I don’t think the book is perfect — there was at least one major plot point that I felt needed to be explained away to really buy the entire story — but it’s still a damn fine book by a damn fine writer. I find it very curious that, during this period of reminiscence, Simmons' book improved, King's slid back a bit, and Straub's stayed about the same, but for different reasons. I hesitate to call it maturity that’s affected how I view the novels, but it has been about 20 years since I read some of these books, and I suppose I did have to grow up some in that span of time. I highly recommend this novel to any fans of horror, dark fantasy, or even urban fantasy.(less)

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Nov 08, 2011 Brad Harkins rated it 4 of 5 stars

Yes. This was a good Halloween read. Creepy, imaginative. It took me about 100 pages to really get into it, but once it got rolling...it kept rolling. Apprenticed to an evil magician and held against his will our hero has no choice in the end but to fight. So, it's a showdown. Well paced once you get to the meat of the book. One line I remember about the magician that I liked (I'll paraphrase) is that he could shuffle time like a deck of cards. His magic is the stuff of hallucinations and as a r...more

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Jan 20, 2013 Alice rated it 4 of 5 stars

Beautiful writing, excellent characters. Today this would be a young adult or a young adult crossover book. It was published in 1980. The pacing is slower than horror books written today, but is still an excellent story. It begins with freshmen boys at a private prep school in Phoenix who become friends based on their love of magic card tricks and their desire to avoid being bullied by a particularly nasty upperclassman nicked named Skeleton. The creepiness builds inexorably as it does in all gr...more

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Sep 16, 2012 Susan Nicol rated it 4 of 5 stars

I loved this book from start to finish. I read it a while ago and am just due to meet someone who's actually modelling their house around this book and its rooms, so I thought I'd better refresh my memory. I'm a real fan of this sort of maniacal magic story telling, where nothing is it as seems. The story of Tom and Del and Rose is so interwoven with treachery and teenage angst. I found the one sexy scene in the book, where Rosa reaches into Tom's trousers and gives him relief from the sexual ur...more

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Mar 06, 2012 Susan Hern rated it 5 of 5 stars

Often-times, the less fashionable is subjugated to the lower shelves of desirability, than the in-thing. In this way Peter Straub's tour-de-force- “Shadowland”, has been relegated to the untalked-about, the lesser-known realms of fantasy and magic. Making it a work that, sadly, few of the younger generation have read.

If the now people, readers of Erin Morgenstern, Casandra Clare and Suzanne Collins, opened their minds, they would discover MAGIC comparable to any flights of fantasy the aforement...more

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May 10, 2010 Yayoi storey rated it 4 of 5 stars

Wow! I really enjoyed reading this novel!
It's full of wizards, magicians, owls, private school pubescent boys, an evil headmaster, bullies, an enchanted compound over prohibition era tunnels in Vermont, blood, gore, death, WOW!

Young Tom Flanagan enters high school and befriends Del Nightingale, the new boy in town who's parents were recently killed in a plane crash. They are hazed and harassed by the upperclassmen, specifically a gangly bully everyone calls "skeleton" Ridpath, the son of the P....more

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Jun 02, 2008 Chris Meger rated it 2 of 5 stars

This book is essentially a rehash of pretty much every other horror coming of age book. It's competent, but that's about it.

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Oct 10, 2011 Kaethe rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: adventure, creepy, fantasy, fiction, friendship, magic, orphans

Thirty years ago I loved this book. It still has redeeming qualities, but it isn't pure awesome. It has some flaws. For one thing, the form is a muddle. the narrarator is a reporter who is putting together bits of this story he's heard from Tom Flanagan about events that took place twenty years earlier, much of which consists of stories told by his friend's uncle and/or fairy tales that Tom read for school. At the end of the book we have some notes by the reporter who did a little digging to try...more Thirty years ago I loved this book. It still has redeeming qualities, but it isn't pure awesome. It has some flaws. For one thing, the form is a muddle. the narrarator is a reporter who is putting together bits of this story he's heard from Tom Flanagan about events that took place twenty years earlier, much of which consists of stories told by his friend's uncle and/or fairy tales that Tom read for school. At the end of the book we have some notes by the reporter who did a little digging to try to verify the story. that's a whole lot of effort for a very thin veneer of realism.

And really, why try? The book starts out with a conventional situation: boys being bullied. Only their bully isn't just unassailable, he's also suffering from some serious mental health issues making him unusually dangerous. But that doesn't really matter, because the main story is that these two boys share an interest in stage magic, and then Del tells Tom that there is real magic, and his uncle can do it, and would Tom like to come and spend the summer 2000 miles away at the uncle's home? You betcha.

And then the wheels really come off. Tom falls instantly in love with Rose, the most beautiful girl ever, who happens to be Del's girlfriend, and is also a sort of employee of the uncle. And the uncle is an old man drinking heavily, living all by himself in the middle of nowhere and obsessed with real magic, and his own position as the top magician of the world, but not in a way that makes him happy. It just turns out to be a way to steal vast sums of money, which, if he was going to go that route, why didn't he stay in the family banking business?

There are some truly creepy elements (The Collector still creeps me right the hell out, and no, I don't mean the Fowles's book, although that does, too), but the story is so over-the-top that it was hard to engage. And seriously, half of it never made sense to me. About the only thing that every felt real to me was that Tom fell in love with Smurfette on sight, because that was the only purpose she held in the story.

Maybe it was just clear to me that Straub was trying too hard. The devil actually shows up to tempt the Chosen one kind of trying too hard. There are nails and a cross kind of trying to hard. Devoted black servant looking after the orphaned white kid kind of trying too hard. Without the warmth of nostalgia I'm really not sure I could have gotten through it this time.

Library copy(less)

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Dec 31, 2012 Rick Soper rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is one of my favorite books. There are just so many layers to it, some which are explained, and some that aren't, but in the end you just don't care because there so many visual images that get buried into your head that the entire experience of the book is just overwhelming. Uncle Coleman's tales just get under your skin. And whatever that thing is in Skeleton's room makes me shudder. And what the Grimm brothers are doing just popping up in the middle of thing, I'll never understand. But i...more

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Apr 09, 2013 P. Aaron Potter rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: horror

While Ghost Story is likely better known, not least due to the (excellent, if flawed) movie adaptation of the same name, it is Shadowland which convinced me of Straub's particular ability to access secret chinks in the human soul.

This tale of adolescent best friends, spending a vacation in a set-piece of a haunted house with a possibly-real magician in the market for apprentices, fits neatly on the same shelf as Barker's The Thief of Always and Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. There'...more While Ghost Story is likely better known, not least due to the (excellent, if flawed) movie adaptation of the same name, it is Shadowland which convinced me of Straub's particular ability to access secret chinks in the human soul.

This tale of adolescent best friends, spending a vacation in a set-piece of a haunted house with a possibly-real magician in the market for apprentices, fits neatly on the same shelf as Barker's The Thief of Always and Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. There's plenty of Straub's somewhat psychedelic descriptive passages, in which we can't tell whether or not the events are taking place in the real world of the crumbling manor, or the internal world of the boys' crumbling psyches. Think The Turn of the Screw, with even more hormonal angst. Adjectives are spare, sentence fragments frequent. Certainly some of Uncle Magician's "tricks" are nothing but smoke and mirros (particularly in one uncomfortably hilarious scene in which our heroes sneak out to discover literal smoke-grenades have been used to lend weight to a 'conjuration'). At other times, the effects of the magic seem very real indeed, much more real than the barely-remembered "real" world which presumably stll exists outside the manor grounds.

But the real kicker here, the element which pushes this book over from "intriguingly clever" to "heartbreakingly poignant" are Straub's evocations of the boys' emotions. Their intellects and senses may be suspect, but the emotions are so real that they stretch out of the page and punch the reader straight in the chest.

Or, I should ammend, some readers. Perhaps you had to once be a slightly lost, hopeless teenaged boy in order to recognize how absolutely Straub *nails* those feelings. The rivalry between the boys as they compete for the Uncle's affections is made painfully bitter by their obvious real love for one another. Here are two nerdy, outcast boys with almost everything in common, tearing each other to pieces even as they're aware that they'll likely never know a better friend in their entire lives. Sharper still is the burgeoning romantic triangle between them and the Uncle's hireling/ward/concubine/familiar. Nobody feels as intensely, as shamelessly and shamefully, as a boy just on the cusp of puberty, intensely aware of every word, every breath of the object of desire while simultaneously paralyzed with the half-formed terror of nascent sxuality. In these scenes, I felt like Straub was no longer writing but simply chanelling the Ur-scrub which dwells in the sickly heart of every teenaged frog-prince there ever was.

So, maybe not for every reader. But if that frog was you, then there are moments here as familiar as your youthful loneliness, as painfully beautiful as your first crush.(less)

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Aug 29, 2011 Barry rated it 5 of 5 stars

Some of the more surreal moments, as well as the occasional switches in narratives, made this book a little hard to follow at times, but there IS a reason I gave this book five stars: it was terrific. It's not the all-out horror fest that the cover (of the 1980's paperback) promised, but there were some truly gruesome scenes towards the climax, as well as a general tone of mounting tension throughout.

Tom Flanagan is a very memorably three-dimensional young protagonist, and all the conflicts of c...more

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Jun 06, 2011 Will Waller rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, horror, sci-fi, thriller

The final words of the book are "I turned back to walk across the ruins of Shadowland to my car." Thus ends one of the worst books I've read thus far. Is it bad because at times the plot settles into some fantastic journey into the mind of the sorcerer that the reader loses track of reality in the midst of fantasy? Is it bad because the symbolism of eerie houses, birds, songs, audiences, hearing voices (all of which could be simple and clear thematic elements to a horror book) become a boring an...more

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Apr 29, 2009 Henrik rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: those wanting to read intricate yet classic stories of the weird

Shelves: horror

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. To me this story is a grand experiment that doesn't quite accomplish what it sets out to do.

Peter Straub proved to me in his excellent Ghost Story that he can take a clasic theme and warp it into something unique, something that is uniquely his. He does the same in this novel, and I am in awe of this talent. But where I can find no flaw whatsoever in Ghost Story there were some oddities (the wrong kind of oddities, heh) in this book that grated on me, for various reasons.

The basic plot is simple...more To me this story is a grand experiment that doesn't quite accomplish what it sets out to do.

Peter Straub proved to me in his excellent Ghost Story that he can take a clasic theme and warp it into something unique, something that is uniquely his. He does the same in this novel, and I am in awe of this talent. But where I can find no flaw whatsoever in Ghost Story there were some oddities (the wrong kind of oddities, heh) in this book that grated on me, for various reasons.

The basic plot is simple enough, since it revolves around the "magician's apprentice" idea. Likewise it's a sort of boys-growing-up story (there were times I had flashbacks to Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, which is probably the coming-of-age book in weird fiction) as well as a nice insight into the life on a boys' school.

All characters were vividly created and they were actually living on the page (whether they were illusions or real persons in the story, hehe), which was wonderful. The place, Shadowland itself, also came alive and was a marvelous world all in itself.

I also enjoyed the conscious use of elements from fairy tales, legends, lore and other fun stuff blended into the dark labyrinthine tale that Shadowland is. However, too much of a good thing can be, well, too much. And the whole tale-within-the-tale-within-a-tale also was overdone, in my opinion.

The main problem I had, I must admit, was the use of spells from the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game. I just never recovered from the disbelief when I saw that spell list on p. 148, with levels and all. I am sure it wouldn't be a problem for a reader having no knowledge of the roleplaying game, but I do--and when it wasn't even a point in the story it was simply too odd for me.

The story does seep with a poetic flavor that I relished, and on the whole I enjoyed it very much. But too many-legged without having to be--and with too many important things left unexplained (even vaguely so)--forces me to give it 4 stars instead of 5.(less)

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About Peter Straub

Peter Straub was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on 2 March, 1943, the first of three sons of a salesman and a nurse. The salesman wanted him to become an athlete, the nurse thought he would do well as either a doctor or a Lutheran minister, but all he wanted to do was to learn to read.

When kindergarten turned out to be a stupefyingly banal disappointment devoted to cutting animal shapes out of heavy...more Peter Straub was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on 2 March, 1943, the first of three sons of a salesman and a nurse. The salesman wanted him to become an athlete, the nurse thought he would do well as either a doctor or a Lutheran minister, but all he wanted to do was to learn to read.

When kindergarten turned out to be a stupefyingly banal disappointment devoted to cutting animal shapes out of heavy colored paper, he took matters into his own hands and taught himself to read by memorizing his comic books and reciting them over and over to other neighborhood children on the front steps until he could recognize the words. Therefore, when he finally got to first grade to find everyone else laboring over the imbecile adventures of Dick, Jane and Spot (“See Spot run. See, see, see,”), he ransacked the library in search of pirates, soldiers, detectives, spies, criminals, and other colorful souls, Soon he had earned a reputation as an ace storyteller, in demand around campfires and in back yards on summer evenings.

This career as the John Buchan to the first grade was interrupted by a collision between himself and an automobile which resulted in a classic near-death experience, many broken bones, surgical operations, a year out of school, a lengthy tenure in a wheelchair, and certain emotional quirks. Once back on his feet, he quickly acquired a severe stutter which plagued him into his twenties and now and then still puts in a nostalgic appearance, usually to the amusement of telephone operators and shop clerks. Because he had learned prematurely that the world was dangerous, he was jumpy, restless, hugely garrulous in spite of his stutter, physically uncomfortable and, at least until he began writing horror three decades later, prone to nightmares. Books took him out of himself, so he read even more than earlier, a youthful habit immeasurably valuable to any writer. And his storytelling, for in spite of everything he was still a sociable child with a lot of friends, took a turn toward the dark and the garish, toward the ghoulish and the violent. He found his first “effect” when he discovered that he could make this kind of thing funny.

As if scripted, the rest of life followed. He went on scholarship to Milwaukee Country Day School and was the darling of his English teachers. He discovered Thomas Wolfe and Jack Kerouac, patron saints of wounded and self-conscious adolescence, and also, blessedly, jazz music, which spoke of utterance beyond any constraint: passion and liberation in the form of speech on the far side of the verbal border. The alto saxophone player Paul Desmond, speaking in the voice of a witty and inspired angel, epitomized ideal expressiveness, Our boy still had no idea why inspired speech spoke best when it spoke in code, the simultaneous terror and ecstasy of his ancient trauma, as well as its lifelong (so far, anyhow) legacy of anger, being so deeply embedded in the self as to be imperceptible, Did he behave badly, now and then? Did he wish to shock, annoy, disturb, and provoke? Are you kidding? Did he also wish to excel, to keep panic and uncertainty at arm's length by good old main force effort? Make a guess. So here we have a pure but unsteady case of denial happily able to maintain itself through merciless effort. Booted along by invisible fears and horrors, this fellow was rewarded by wonderful grades and a vague sense of a mysterious but transcendent wholeness available through expression. He went to the University of Wisconsin and, after opening his eyes to the various joys of Henry James, William Carlos Williams, and the Texas blues-rocker Steve Miller, a great & joyous character who lived across the street, passed through essentially unchanged to emerge in 1965 with an honors degree in English, then an MA at Columbia a year later. He thought actual writing was probably beyond him even though actual writing was probably what he was best at - down crammed he many and many a book, stirred by(less)

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“You'll never get anything done if you walk around with an unchipped heart.” — 5 people liked it

“Wolves and those who see them are shot on sight.” — 3 people liked it

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