Product Description

In his latest soul-chilling novel, bestselling author Peter Straub tells of a famous children’s book author who, in the wake of a grotesque accident, realizes that the most basic facts of her existence, including her existence itself, have come into question.
Willy Patrick, the respected author of the award-winning young-adult novel In the Night Room, thinks she is losing her mind–again. One day, she is drawn helplessly into the parking lot of a warehouse. She knows somehow that her daughter, Holly, is being held in the building, and she has an overwhelming need to rescue her. But what Willy knows is impossible, for her daughter is dead.
On the same day, author Timothy Underhill, who has been struggling with a new book about a troubled young woman, is confronted with the ghost of his nine-year-old sister, April. Soon after, he begins to receive eerie, fragmented e-mails that he finally realizes are from people he knew in his youth–people now dead. Like his sister, they want urgently to tell him something. When Willy and Timothy meet, the frightening parallels between Willy’s tragic loss and the story in Tim’s manuscript suggest that they must join forces to confront the evils surrounding them.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #383438 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-28
• Released on: 2006-03-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 384 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. 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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Though most famous for his collaborations with Stephen King, Straub transcends the conventions of horror fiction. In the Night Room provides more than a good scare; it deals with themes like the nature of reality and the consequences of artistic creation. Despite his cerebral bent, Straub never sacrifices the entertainment value of his story—though one reviewer found its twists hard to follow. The novel, a sequel to his acclaimed lost boy lost girl (**** Jan/Feb 2004), offers a combination of gripping plot, well-drawn characters, and philosophical depth. Critics hail In the Night Room as a rewarding read for horror junkies and deep thinkers alike.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
Straub's just-previous book, lost boy lost girl [BKL S 1 03], is his best novel. But it isn't perfect, as horror novelist Tim Underhill, who for the purposes of fiction actually wrote lost boy lost girl, learns from an e-mail sent to him by the spirit of an ancient Byzantine, who explains that the daughter of one of the serial killers in lost boy lost girl wasn't murdered by her father, as Tim supposed; that the exceedingly strange fan who cornered Tim in his local breakfast hangout is an embodiment of the wronged murderer's spirit; and that, yes, that was an angel Tim saw fly away over Manhattan while he walked home. Meanwhile, over in New Jersey, YA novelist Willy Patrick is about to marry mysterious Mitchell Faber when she comes upon evidence that he is responsible for her husband's violent, gangland-like killing. She flees Faber's estate, pursued by his minions, to New York and into a reading-signing appearance by Tim. There is a catch to this, for Willy's plot is that of the new novel Tim has been writing; that is, a character Tim created has emerged in his reality. As Tim and Willy repair to their hometown, Millhaven, Illinois, to slake the murderer's spirit, his real and her fictive worlds converge toward an ending that promises, like that of lost boy lost girl, the transcendent redemption of violated souls. Inventive and moving, though not as dazzling as its predecessor. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Fiction vs Reality
We have become to expect the unusual from Peter Straub. His horror never attacks you at the jugular. It never goes for cheap thrills of cheap scares. Instead, his novels brings you through journeys of despair and oddity, through madness and back. You never quite know what to expect when beginnin a Straub book, and In The Night Room is genuine Straub.

In The Night Room isn't a sequel to last year's amazing lost boy, lost girl. Instead, it somehow works as a continuation of that story. Here, Tim Underhill, a famous writer, is working on his latest invention. He's still haunted by his nephew's disappearence and he still has trouble dealing with the events surrounding his disappearence. He's also receiving strange e-mails from what seems to be an angel, weird cryptic messages that are telling him that his last book angered the other world, something he must now remedy.

Meanwhile, Willy is still haunted by the death of her husband and daughter. But when she realizes that the man she is now supposed to marry might have murdered her ex-husband, her whole world tumbles down into oblivion.

How these two stories mix, I cannot tell because it would ruin quite a great surprise. But the shock of the twist Straub offers halfway through the story quite delivers the punch. Unfortunately, after that point, the book loses some of its steam and mysteriousness and the ending just seems to evaporate. Because the story never really ends, it just slowly goes one way and then suddenly stops.

Too many questions are left unanswered in In The Night Room, as if Straub was deliberately trying to confuse his readers at times. Then again, reading a Straub book is always a treat. His writing is very poetic, his sentences always hiding many surprises for the reader. Straub is an amazing writer. Even when his stories faulter, his writing style is enough to keep you turning the pages.

In The Night Room is just weird enough to be called entertaining. This is the story of a writer and of the writer's world, of the blurry line between reality and fiction. Following lost boy, lost girl, In The Night Room seems to fall short in the end. But as it is, the novel is quite an entertaining ride you'll want to take right up until the end.

The haunting of Tim Underhill
Like the jazz musicians he favors, Peter Straub has always displayed a penchant for digging deep into his art, examining the tales he tells from several angles, experimenting with their basic components and rhythm. This literary improvisation plays a large role in his classic THE THROAT, which revisited characters, events, settings and themes previously treated in KOKO and MYSTERY, all in an attempt to uncover the "real" story of the Blue Rose Murders, killings which occurred in Millhaven, WI, the author's fictional recreation of his hometown of Milwaukee. It also plays a large part in Straub's latest, IN THE NIGHT ROOM.

Straub sent his alter ego (and sometimes collaborator) Tim Underhill back to Millhaven in 2003's LOST BOY LOST GIRL, a haunted house/serial killer/ghost story which netted the author both a Bram Stoker and an International Horror Guild Award for best novel. In that book, readers saw a melancholy Underhill struggling to cope with his beloved nephew's apparent death; attempting to assuage his profound grief, he pieces together a supernatural explanation to account for the boy's disappearance. In IN THE NIGHT ROOM, we discover that the events of LOST BOY LOST GIRL still haunt Underhill, but not in the way one might expect. LOST BOY LOST GIRL, it now appears, was the novel Underhill wrote to cope with the experience, featuring a character named Tim Underhill. Underhill's fictional vision is so powerful, however, that it resonates in another dimension, where Joseph Kalendar, the deceased serial killer who figured so prominently in LOST BOY LOST GIRL, reads the "perfect" version of the novel, becoming maddened and enraged over Underhill's portrayal of his daughter Lily.

Kalendar is so affronted by this perceived injustice that he reaches out from beyond the grave to strike at his tormentor; Underhill thus finds himself desperately trying to set things right in order to stave off the killer's increasingly devastating attacks. Complicating his already complex existence, another rent in the fabric of reality produces a truly fantastic traveling companion for Underhill, young adult author Willy Bryce Patrick, whose true origins won't be revealed here for fear of reducing the impact of the surprises Straub has in store for his audience. Thrown together, the duo comes to realize that some debts are so steep they require the ultimate sacrifice.

IN THE NIGHT ROOM is beautifully written, boasting Straub's characteristic inventiveness and humor. A deep affection for his varied cast is also evident. Tim Underhill and Willy Patrick are especially captivating, as is book collector Jasper Dan Kohle, Straub's most menacing villain since GHOST STORY's Gregory Bate (yes, even more loathsome than Dick Dart!). Straub toys with several compelling notions in this novel, among them the "Borgesian" idea of the "real book" ("The one you were supposed to write, only you screwed it up."), a creator's love for his creations, and the power of fiction to make sense of reality. As Straub writes of Underhill, "Tim Underhill was like a kind of Scheherazade, telling stories to save his life. Fiction gave him entry into the worst and darkest places of his life, and that entry put the pain and fear and anger right in his own hands, where he could transform them into pleasure." One suspects this is much the way Straub feels about writing himself.

The novel also adds to the list of fictional novels that you wish you had a chance to read, Straub being responsible for more than a few of these over the years. Now, in addition to books like Underhill's THE DIVIDED MAN (first mentioned in KOKO), Don Wanderley's THE NIGHTWATCHER (from GHOST STORY), and Hugo Driver's NIGHT JOURNEY (the fantasy novel at the heart of THE HELLFIRE CLUB), you'll find yourself longing to read Willy Bryce's third YA novel, the Newberry Award winning IN THE NIGHT ROOM. Unfortunately, that's a possibility that's not likely to materialize in this reality. Perhaps, though, in another?

KIND OF SLOW AND CONFUSING
I loved lost boy lost girl. I hoped this would be as good. I had a horrible time just getting past the first 100 pages. There were scenes that just didn't go anywhere, and I felt the story was just mish mashed together in any old order. The characters Willy and Tim were great although she wasn't given opportunity to shine until at least the middle of the book. The premise that Willy was Lilly was a bit confusing and I never found out what the anagram for the angel WCHWHLLDN (vowels omitted) was. Lillys story from Mrs. Huntress was engaging.

I think it is worth reading but not a hit.