*Partial spoilers ahead*

"Fragment" truly is the operative word here. Unlike the handful of other novellas/shortish pieces that Peter Straub produced as his career drew to a close, Perdido is neither a self-contained story (like The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine) nor a companion to a major work (like A Special Place and The Process (is a Process All Its Own)). It's a roughly sixty-page fragment of an incomplete novel, and as such is difficult to review. Because the publisher's synopsis already exists at the top of this page, I'll refrain from offering a detailed blow-by-blow here. The premise, while somewhat interesting, is marred by Straub's late-period weakness for repellent female characters who nonetheless are supposed by his narrators to be "good" in some obscure sense. Jay Silsbee, with his slovenly apartment full of watches (and the sinister allusion to his "obsessive, lifelong interest in magic and the occult"), might have become a fascinating character had the novel ever been finished.

My rating doesn't reflect the quality of Straub's writing (which was consistently high), but rather the unsatisfactory nature of the whole package. I must stress that this is not a nearly complete or even half-completed story; there is no resolution. It's just the unfertilized germ of a novel, and is strictly for completists. ( )