Uncle Stevie lists this one in [Danse Macabre] as one of his favorites from the hey-day of horror. It' not very well-reviewed here on LibraryThing, which is somewhat understandable. The narrative alternates between deep character-driven storytelling and super-trippy, mind-warping stream of consciousness passages. These latter passages relate to the effects of magic committed by the evil doers in the story. On balance, the storytelling here wins out to keep the book readable. Would those mind-warping passages been just the tiniest bit more accessible, the book would have been perfect. But Staub is sometimes glamoured himself in the writing, diving too far into the possibilities to keep the reader on track. Ultimately, though, the story of one boy's introduction to deep magic and his friend's demise to the same dark arts makes for fascinating writing - a wonderful good vs. evil story, the lower case letters on those terms intentional to signal how individual choices and nobility make a difference in the world.

4 1/2 bones !!!!!
Highly recommended. ( )

I finally finished this train wreck of a novel. Another one that I read when it first came out, but I definitely had better memories of this than what I just experienced. I kept waiting for it to get good. I kept waiting for something to happen. I kept waiting for old men to stop pontificating about their life histories...because, didn't I just read that in Ghost Story?

I must say, the first, non-Shadowland third wasn't horrible. Mostly pointless, and could have been done in more like fifty pages, but it wasn't horrible. But as soon as that blowhard Collins shows up? Yeah, the pace slows to a torturous crawl.

I think this was supposed to be Straub's The Shining but damn it fell flat. The biggest difference between King and Straub is that King gives you people you know. Your neighbour. The guy that works at the McDonalds, that kind of thing. Straub seems to try and do that, but his characters are rich and unrelateable. Where King will give you enough of the horror to make you want to run, Straub likes to have most of it occur off stage and have some boring old bastard tell you a story about it.

Anyway, like I said, the first third was okay. And in the following two thirds, there was the odd flash of brilliance (and it's the only reason for that second star)--because Straub actually can write when he's not so self-conscious of the words he's writing--and I found myself enjoying a scene or two. But then he just goes back to the boring crap and the old men and the stories and he just fills the back two-thirds with a heaping helping of I don't give a shit.

I'd had full intentions of reading Floating Dragon after this, but there's no way. Two books of his are enough. Thanks, Pete, I'd like to say it's been fun, but I can't.

I'm out. ( )

After a harrowing freshman year at a mediocre private school where supernatural forces appear to be on the verge of assuming total control, Tom Flanagan and Del Nightingale--two fifteen-year-old boys with a passion for stage magic--take a cross-country train trip to Shadowland, the home of Del's uncle Coleman Collins. Once a famous stage magician himself, the sinister Collins has plans for Tom. In true Straubian fashion, nothing is as it initially seems.

This was a tough book to read and it's a tough book to review; as the follow-up to Ghost Story, Peter Straub's masterpiece, it's bafflingly anemic. My least favorite Straub novel is A Dark Matter, which is peopled by insubstantial characters and ends with a whimper, but--paradoxically--it's a much easier read than this one. Though getting off to an eerily promising start, Shadowland loses focus when the setting shifts from the Arizona private school to Uncle Cole's house of horrors in Vermont. (And Collins is never quite fully realized as a character despite his obvious importance to the story; some of the school's faculty members, like football coach Chester Ridpath and unhinged headmaster Laker Broome, are much more vividly drawn.) The magical imagery feels labored, and unfortunately there's a glut of it. I enjoyed the first 140 pages, but struggled to finish Shadowland the first time and found it equally daunting when I revisited it in preparation for this review. I doubt that I'll ever read it again.

Two and a half stars. ( )

I didn’t love this as much as I did the first time around, but it was still pretty damn good. ( )

Ok ( )