This book feels like a scratchpad for a more developed book. I kept going, "I can't even," while reading this. None of it makes sense, none of it hangs together, it feels like a desperate not-knowing of what one is writing about. It is, in many places, something I wanted to toss across the room, it feels so clueless.And then I finished it. The ending makes no logical sense but is one of the more moving things I've read lately. A state change. It reminded me of A Season of Mists, Sandman, when th...

This book was really good. I thought it had some pretty dark and twisted parts. I felt like it took a while before anything really started to happen. I suppose this was necessary in order for the readers to get a true sense of who these characters really are. I did start to care quite a bit about a few of them. Some parts of the story where a little complex and confusing. More than once I started seriously considering the fact that I may not be smart enough to read Peter Straub. This was only my...

I don't know how this book isn't over a 4 star average on here. I read Ghost Story by Straub and the talisman series Peter Straub co-wrote with the King, but this is my favorite of his books by far.It's a long novel but it's well paced. Lots of horrific and gory images and scenes throughout this book. Vicious killings done by serial killers, gross human decomposition and body horror done by a nerve gas, mass killings, suicide drowning, zombie and supernatural apparitions...I mean , the list coul...

If Peter Straub should ever happen to write another book with Stephen King, then I'm sure to read something else by him. If not, this is where we part ways.Grindingly Slow Moving Dragon was an ordeal and one of the few books in later years that I did finish despite feeling the way I did about the last 200 or so extremely dense pages. But let's start at the beginning - the beginning was good, actually! This was suggested to me by my pro reading buddy Edward Lorn (and there should be no shadow ove...

EDIT: 4.5/5 rounded up. I read this book back in January and it still hasn’t totally left my mind. I was nuts to not give this a 5 star. This is the craziest, most balls to the wall, everything but the kitchen sink, completely batshit crazy horror novel Straub has ever written, and it deserves to be rounded up to 5.In the spirit of trying to save 5 stars for nothing but the absolute best of the best, this one just barely squeaking below 5 with a 4.4. But to be clear-this is an amazing horror boo...

A government experiment goes awry and a deadly gas is released over the affluent suburb of Hampstead, Connecticut. Meanwhile, the decendants of the town's original founders return to Hampstead for the first time in over 100 years, igniting a firestorm of events that are the continuation of an ongoing curse. After I read (and was completely scared shitless) by Ghost Story in high school, I was afraid to read anything else by Straub. I remember passing up Shadowland and this book; by then I was i

Oh gentle child, beautiful as thou wert,Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of menToo soon, and with weak hands though mighty heartDare the unpastured dragon in his den?-ShelleySuperb storytelling, five-star character development and flawless writing; no wonder I didn’t want a book of almost 600 pages to end. You were dreaming for a long time and then you were not. You were asleep in a place you did not know and when you awakened you were someone else.The Floating Dragon is a frightening, at

This book was AMAZING. It's the kind of novel I was expecting to read when I've accepted Bob Pastorella's challenge of making a retrospective of Peter Straub's career in 2017 (I had never read Straub before). FLOATING DRAGON is a sweeping supernatural horror novel inspired by the military paranoia of the 1980s. There are governmental secrets, transcendent grudges, transcendent horror and batshit crazy visions that plague an unsuspecting Connecticut town. What I ike about Peter Straub is that he

🌟🌟🌟🌟 1/2[image error] Rich men, trust not in wealth,Gold cannot buy you health,Physic himself must fade,All things to end are made,The plague full swift goes by,I am sick, I must die -Lord have mercy on us! First Impressions 2021 is the year I've been really getting into Peter Straub.  After reading the fantastic Koko and absolutely magnificent Ghost Story, I quickly discovered that this author is prime time in terms of literary talent. The guy's prose are straight of the top shelf of the h...

I'm sure there are those who will disagree strenuously with me on what I think about this book.I reviewed this book "back a'ways" and someone brought my attention back to it. I originally put most of the review under the "spoiler line" below. I will say...in the clear...that I was disappointed in this book. I'd just read Ghost Story and found it great. This one not so much...didn't really care for it. It seemed to start with promise but I thought it sort of crashed and burned.My taste of course,...

In my video review (which you can find here: https://youtu.be/V1CH90k5cgo) I give this book three stars. After much rumination, I've decided to drop it another star. Many thanks to my buddy Brandon for reading this one with me. I likely never would have finished it otherwise. I saw Straub tell someone on Twitter that he wrote this book to get it out of his system. Whether that's a good or bad thing, I'll let each individual decide for themselves. Me? I barely enjoyed myself. There's some fantast...

Too much backstory and exposition but not enough actual suspense and action to keep me reading past the half way point. I tried...

I keep on being drawn back to Peter Straub for my Horror fix. With this author it isn’t just about the nasty stuff: it’s about the presentation. Floating Dragon is a case in point: not only does Straub expose our fears; he toys with them.The plot in a nutshellWhat you’ve got here is essentially a town that is periodically plagued by a sequence of terrible events: serial killings; disappearances; children dying under mysterious circumstances. This only happens once every generation and only the i...

As an exercise in excess (which is what Straub admits to in his spoiler-ish introduction), Floating Dragon is a triumphant fireworks display that bombards the gluttonous reader with hundreds of pages of feverish horror set pieces. So infatuated with its own crackling prose and sense of narrative flair (the former more akin to the mannerisms of John Updike, the latter the self-referential glee of Martin Amis) the novel takes over 200 pages for its central storyline to emerge from a deluge of hall...

"Floating Dragon" feels like what you'd get if Robert McCammon and Nick Cutter decided to ghostwrite a Stephen King novel together, switching back and forth between sections without anyone going back to revise. It's dense and absurdly overwritten, the individual scenes are often fantastic, but trying to pick up the bread crumbs from start to finish leads you on a winding road that not once gets you anywhere close to grandmother's house. The story follows a band of characters who discover their a...

As a pretty regular reader of the horror genre, Floating Dragon was one of the most original takes on the "haunted town" story I've ever read, and I'm somewhat surprised by the mixed reviews here. There's not much that's totally new here (as far as 1980's horror), but Straub puts a fresh spin on some of the genre's most cliched tropes: ghosts, zombies, ancient curses, chemical outbreaks, psychos, psychics, etc. His "everything and the kitchen sink" approach may be what rubs some horror fanatics

Floating Dragon could have knocked my socks off, but unfortunately the novel’s middle part got bogged down by too many abstractions, too much 80′s horror imagery – the pulsing red light, blood everywhere, visions in various stages of decomposition. Granted that it was written in the mid-80′s, but I’m reading this now in 2011, and it was just too much. Many times the horror becomes ridiculous, even cheesy, even laughable, far from the subtlety of his short story collection, Houses without Doors,

After the success of Ghost Story and Shadowland, Peter Straub wanted to try his strenght in tales that do not involve anything supernatural. Floating Dragon, published in 1983, was to be his final horror novel for a long time - till the 1999 return to the genre with Mr X.As a novel, Floating Dragon operates on the ever familiar canvas of "horror in a small town", popularized in the 70's by Salem's Lot. While Salem's Lot was lean, swift and fast-paced, Straub's novel is much longer, much more com...

It took me over two weeks to finish reading this novel, Peter Straub's Floating Dragon (1983), which is a total rarity for me. I'm serious, guys. I start getting really friggin antsy if a book reading rocks on for more than four or five days. Why? I dunno; it doesn't help that Floating Dragon is only the second book I've read in 2016, so if I'm wanting to reach the number of book I read last year I had better get a move on! Reading in January is always hard for me, though. Starting back to schoo...

First published in 1982, FD is one big, sprawling doorstop of a novel, but getting to the end was more of a labor than a labor of love. Straub must have felt a desire to incorporate every horror trope known into one book and while FD has it moments, a good editor would have pared this down substantially. The story centers on a small 'gold coast' town of Connecticut (Hampstead) that is being subjected to some serious trauma in the summer of 1980. The 'Floating Dragon' refers actually to two (ulti...