Don’t go into this expecting traditional “horror”. Thanks to Peter Straub’s professional and personal relationship with Stephen King, the uninitiated assume he writes easily-categorized horror. That isn’t so. Straub is a master of exploration and combination: his works infuse several different genres and ideas. The Hellfire Club is a complex crime mystery with gothic horror and thriller elements infused in when appropriate. But this isn’t Ghost Story.I’m a Straub fanboy, okay? I’ve given almost

First off, let’s address the elephant in the room. Can we talk about the decision to name a main character “Dick Dart”? Lol. Bold move, Straub. Bold move.Also, this was a good book (despite having way too many plotlines unraveling at once). In lesser hands, this story would have fallen flat on its ass. Luckily, Straub knows what he is doing and not only made it work, but crafted a compelling and interesting plot bolstered by an excellent game of cat and mouse between two strong characters. Not a...

Straub's novel is technically written superbly. His prose is clean and never calls attention to or gets in the way of his intricate plotting and sensory details. He really shows he can develop scenes that seamlessly compliment each other as a congruent whole. The writing never stacks up, but flows, which builds the suspense of this mystery story. The villain of the story is sketched to full evil. Hellfire Club proves that Peter Straub knows the craft of writing.

Stephen King says this book moves like an express train. It moves like a snail. Shows what he knows. His son Joe Hill's a better author than he is (no, I don't mean the '73-'83 King, or a few after that, like It). It wasn't talentless, so I'll give the book two stars, but it didn't go anywhere for the longest time, and when it finally did, it wasn't a place I'd want to visit. I love Julia and Ghost Story, but didn't get this one.

The bad guy wasn't that terrifying, just a posh rapist--which is awful, but not so sinister. It wasn't such a mystery.

I first read this in the late 90s. I remembered it as a fascinating mystery about an imaginary book. However, I reading it again I found both the book within the book and the mystery less interesting than I thought. This time around it seemed to be about the different ways men abuse women. Some of the scenes of abuse are intensely disturbing.The main character is Nora Chancel, middle aged, menopausal, everybody's victim. We see her suffer the bullying of her father in law, the carelessly cruelty...

Straub writes like a dream, but sometimes the subject is just too vile. I didn't like (or care about) anyone in this book, but it was exceedingly well written.

Althought the title suggest much, there is virtually nothing about the titular club in The Hellfire Club. It's one of many interesting themes which Straub piles one on another, but it is never really developed. The real star of this show is a book called Night Journey and a woman named Nora Chancel.Almost baroque in in the excess of character, themes and plot threads that run through it, The Hellfire Club attempts to be many things but doesn't really succeed at any of them. A book about books, s...

On the heels of the author's really good novella Special Place, I was interested in checking out a full length novel of his. This might not have been the one to start with, but it was available at the library, so I read it. If I didn't know the two were written by the same author, I never would have guessed. Where one is succinct, the other one is verbose (and not just because of the difference in format), it just seemed like completely different writers. Hellfire Club is an exhausting read and

While the saying goes “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” sometimes you can. For instance when I bought Peter Straub’s novel THE HELLFIRE CLUB in 1996. I knew as soon as I saw it this book was going to be a chore to read. And the 463 pages inside it weren’t helping. I bought the novel on the strength of KOKO, another Straub novel I’d just read a few years earlier. But no matter what I did, I just couldn’t bring myself to read it. I couldn’t say why that was, what it was specifically that seemed s...

🌟🌟🌟🌟 Initial Thoughts If you've followed my reviews you'll know I've been on a bit of a Peter Straub tear lately.  The Hellfire Club is my fourth of his books in four consecutive months and I continue to get more impressed with the quality of the guys work.  It's a real shame that ill health has called a halt to his work as I'd most certainly be a constant reader of his.  Get well soon Pete and hope you're concentrating on what's important... writing quality fiction for yours truly!  I mean fa...

I actually read this because of The Talisman, which Straub co-wrote with Stephen King. As you can tell by looking over my reading history, I'm a bit of a King junkie, so it seemed natural that I should try out Peter Straub and see how I liked him.Turns out that he's fucking awesome. I'd been in a little bit of a reading slump before picking up this book, and it has got me thoroughly back into reading. It's hard to describe because so many things happen, and I admit I was expecting something supe...

An engaging read but the overall story was anticlimactic.

Well where to start? WOW! What a journey this book was!Very-well written! It was my first book by Peter Straub and really had no clue at all who he was... I only knew he was a close friend and collaborator of Stephen King, and thought to my self "gosh another author who writes a book once a week about anything without any real sense" (p.s.: sorry for all of the King's fans). The real reason why I wanted to read this book was because of an tv episode of the UK show "Most Haunted". The episode was...

Read on vacation and....it just wasn't very good. For what's supposed to be a horror thriller, there were few thrills and not much horror. The story mostly revolved around an old book, the actual authorship of the book and it's sequels, the publishing house behind that book and the family dynamics of the ownership of that house. It's as boring as it sounds. The bad guy/serial killer was portrayed in an interesting way but between the plot just not really going anywhere, the continual back and fo...

The BasicsNora lives in an upscale suburb where it just so happens a serial killer is on the loose. The latest disappearance of a woman who leaves a blood-drenched bedroom behind has Nora more embroiled in these killings than she ever wanted to be. And it makes her a new target.My ThoughtsThat’s a really bad attempt at “The Basics" up there. Because all that was definitely true. The book is about a woman named Nora who comes face-to-face with a serial killer who makes her life hell. It’s also a

As the Joker torments Gotham City and Stephen King's It feeds on the misery of Derry, Maine, Dick Dart seems to embody all the hypocrisy and pretensions of the upscale suburb of Westerholm, Connecticut. He stays submerged through the first half of the novel, as the heroine Nora wades into a double mystery. Someone is killing prominent women in Westerholm, and it's somehow tied in with the cult novel that her husband's publishing house owns. Evidence mounts that Nora herself is the killer. Just a...

The title is a lurid publishers trick, is my guess. The Hellfire Club is really only a minor plot element. The real mystery is what happened to an author in the 1930's and whether or not a manuscript was actually written by the man to whom it is ascribed.As far as dark suspense novels, this one certainly has a husband's character you won't soon be able to get over how awful he is, and how patient his wife is. It's truly cringe-inducing.

Peter Straub's The Hellfire Club features a satisfying finale. But in my opinion it takes entirely too much effort to get to that payoff. If you want to look at this novel from a cost versus benefit perspective: you, Constant Reader, will pay entirely too much in time and effort for that aforementioned payoff. By the time I was nearing the end of The Hellfire Club there was no joy left in me I literally just wanted to get it over with. I am forced to give this book two stars because of the endin...

I read this back when it came out in my early 20s and enjoyed it a lot at the time, the re-read was interesting. The structure is solid and it moves quickly and is entertaining in its own right- but 25 years doesn't age this book well. In the 90s lots of white male writers were trying to respond to feminism's critique of fictional female characters and instead of opening up a path for female writers to come in and explore female characters, male writers created a lot of kooky female protagonists...