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De Nachtkamer (2004)

door Peter Straub

LedenBesprekingenPopulariteitGemiddelde beoordelingAanhalingen
7741628,530 (3.21)38
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.… (meer)
Onlangs toegevoegd doorjbrownleo, cathymariebown, besloten bibliotheek, Apotheous, wmccormick, sgalgano, umbreeon
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1-5 van 16 worden getoond (volgende | toon alle)
This novel is a sequel to 'lost boy, lost girl' which I had some problems with - I wroten about those in my review of that book - but sadly the present volume really went off the rails. As it opens, Tim Underhill, best-selling author, is writing a novel about a woman who is mentally fragile, imagining that her daughter - seemingly murdered along with her husband - is calling to her for rescue from a warehouse. Willy, whose name eventually turns out to be significant, is only able to tear herself away from breaking in by fixating on the Bluebeard-type character she is planning to sleepwalk into marriage with in the near future.

In the real world, Tim is having problems following the disappearance and probable murder of his 15-year-old nephew, Mark. Strange things start to happen, commencing with emails sent without subject lines from addresses with no domain name attached and featuring random disconnected words. Then a 'fan' who accosts him in a restaurant turns more and more creepy and aggressive, introducing the idea that there is a 'real' version of every novel - the perfect one that the author meant to write but lacked the ability to produce - and that this novel occasionally slips through from a higher plane. Certain collectors buy up loads of copies of books in the hope of finding the one copy that is perfect. This 'fan' objects strongly to 'lost boy, lost girl' which he views as lies - and that book does indeed turn out to be Tim's consolation to himself that his nephew was transported to a spiritual plane to live with ghost girl Lily Kalendar instead of his likely fate as yet another victim of a serial killer.

The basic premise of the current story is that Tim has erred against the universe by writing the book which assumed that Joseph Kalendar (an earlier serial killer) had murdered his daughter. Kalendar's ghost, given powers in the real world by Tim's portrayal, is now gunning for Tim and becomes merged with his Bluebeard character. Tim is informed of all this by a sequence of text-speak emails by someone styling themselves as Cyrax. This self-appointed guide, or 'gide', sends misspelled missives full of gems such as "rede y boke, rede the 1 with-in", which the unfortunate reader has to plough through and decipher. Under this 'guidance' Tim eventually takes Willy on a roadtrip back to his home town to "CO-RECK THE ERROR".

The idea about the one perfect copy of each book was interesting, but was buried under a pile of dross. I can't begin to enumerate the things that for me were wrong with this book. One of the worst was the development of Willy, who eventually makes her way into the real world, as a woman so fascinating that men are completely spellbound by her (apart, conveniently, from the Bluebeard character and his henchmen). She is frequently described as 'gamine' and her boyish figure is stressed, which became quite nauseating when it transpired that she 'converts' Tim, a lifelong gay man, who can't keep his hands off her. In turn, she finds him godlike in bed. I understood that this is a literary joke as she is his creation and in a way he is having sex with himself, but it was offensive on so many levels. (Willy, as a child's mispronounciation of Lily - since she is Tim's version of the supposedly dead Lily Kalendar - is really a sort of woman-as-penis given the slang meaning of her name.) Far from fascinating, I found her irritating, and her increasing gluttony for anything sweet was also a cause for queasiness. For me, there was no tension in the idea that Tim had to make amends and 'sacrifice' her as I couldn't wait for that moment to arrive.

Similarly, Tim's curmudgeonly brother is - very improbably - transformed in this book into a kindly, friendly, cheerful man purely by virtue of having met a nice woman who joined his school as a junior teacher and through her, 'finding religion'. This lacked any credibility given his previous portrayal in 'lost boy, lost girl'.

The supernatural elements that were once subtle in stories about Tim here take over with multiple appearances of his dead sister, another guide along the way, and an angry angel, plus the explanation of what happens to humans after death. Given the angel's powers , why was Tim's assistance required in any case? Altogether, this was such a mess that I couldn't envisage it ever having been published if submitted by an unknown author. It has put me off reading Straub at present, though I have a few books that pre-date this and which will hopefully be a return to form. So for me, the current volume scrapes a one-star rating. ( )
  kitsune_reader | Nov 23, 2023 |
*Partial spoilers ahead*

In all but the most literal sense, In the Night Room may be regarded as Peter Straub's final statement. He wrote one more novel after this, but A Dark Matter was a misfire: a lukewarm rehash of previously explored themes that never got off the ground. Night Room, for all its flaws, allows the reader to take one last, bittersweet journey back to Millhaven (Milwaukee) with Tim Underhill, the character that Straub described as his alter ego. Sixteen years earlier, Underhill had made his debut in the novel Koko along with Maggie Lah (a feisty character based on the late New York punk scenester Anya Phillips), and Maggie puts in a final appearance before Tim leaves NYC to give an author reading in Millhaven. But Underhill isn't just promoting his new book; he has a much more urgent task to perform. The line between fiction and reality has been blurring to an extent that even Tim, usually comfortable with such ambiguities, finds alarming. He has been informed--perhaps literally from beyond the grave--that his latest novel contains an egregious error, and that he must return to Millhaven to correct it. Underhill takes on a unique traveling companion who will play a central role in the rectification of that error.

This is a sequel to Lost Boy, Lost Girl, of course, but the tone is considerably different; the previous book unfolded largely from the viewpoint of Tim's teenage nephew Mark, and this amounted to a stylistic straitjacket for Straub. Here he returns to the adult point of view, making In the Night Room an almost infinitely smoother read. Underhill's companion is, on the whole, a charmingly written character, and their tense, melancholy journey back to Tim's hometown is the strongest section of the book. The narrative begins to fall apart once they reach Millhaven, however, and Phillip--Underhill's stolidly middle class brother--once again serves as a moral punching bag for limousine liberal Tim (i.e., Straub himself), who mistakes his own self-righteousness for enlightenment. (This intellectual and class snobbery is the single most unfortunate aspect of Straub's writing. If you're familiar with his work, you know that it's just part of the overall package, but at times it really grates. Certainly, it killed whatever feeble chance A Dark Matter may have had for redemption.) Underhill knows that he and his companion must enter the terrible old house where Mark disappeared, but concedes that he has no idea what to do once they've crossed the threshold. Sadly, the reader isn't given much of an idea, either. Something finally happens, but its full significance is unclear. The saga ends prematurely; Straub never wrote, or at least never finished, its third installment. We leave Tim Underhill in 2003, still promoting his new novel as he heads further west. (Behind him, two fictional hotels--the Pforzheimer and the St. Alwyn--continue to loom sinisterly against the Millhaven skyline, gauntlets that have never been picked up. Like the name "Underhill" itself, they are references not to the Midwest but to New York...and certain profoundly unpleasant real-life events that occurred there. Straub had been sprinkling these references throughout his work ever since Ghost Story, with that book being an especially abundant source of such clues.) Fans can only guess what future plans Straub may have had for Tim.

Ultimately, this uneasy ambiguity is what makes In the Night Room an interesting book. Underhill can be a pain in the ass, but we've become attached to him; he feels like an old friend, and there's a very real twinge of emotion that comes with bidding him such an uncertain farewell. Straub appears to have been saying a conscious goodbye of his own: to Tim and Maggie and the other characters from Koko, to the days when he was capable of writing grand, complex adventures of the kind they had in that novel, and perhaps even to novel-writing itself. "He gets out of bed to look through his window, and it's true: everything in his neighborhood seems slightly drained of color and energy. (...) Nothing new is ever going to happen to him again. From now on, he can only go backward, through older worlds, solving mysteries that have already been solved, and as if for the first time." ( )
  Jonathan_M | Sep 29, 2023 |
Another book I waited to damn long to review, and any thing I did now wouldn't do it justice, so...if anyone actually reads these things, sorry. ( )
  MrMet | Apr 28, 2023 |
Peter Straub makes my head hurt. But in a good way. All through the contortionist metafiction that is this novel, I was amazed by his imagination. About ⅓ of the way through I figured out that this book is related to lost boy, lost girl, but I was hooked so continued. It features Tim Underhill, who also appeared in Koko and I think, The Throat, both of which are part of the Blue Rose trilogy. Haven’t read those yet, but I will. Not only is it his sheer imagination, but way to set the hook, Pete - “As soon as he had done so, he remembered dumping a couple of similar emails two days earlier. For a moment, what he had seen from the sidewalk outside the Fireside Diner flared again before him, wrapped in every bit of its old urgency and dread.” p1

More great little nuggets -
“...with the blank subject lines that indicated a kind of indifference to protocol he wished he did not find mildly annoying.” p6

“You with the funny name. Are we interested in another journey back to the antiseptic corridors of western Massachusetts? An hour or two in the Institute’s game room?” p11 (so between this sentence and pages 1-10 we now have madness, dead kids, vanished kids, creepy emails and a mental institution!! Way to pile it on!

“Nor was he {Faber} the product of the East coast privilege hatcheries responsible for {another character}. P 22 Privilege hatcheries!!

“After she seemed to have recovered sufficiently from the shock of her great loss, she returned to New York feeling like an unpeeled egg.” p 36

This is a really difficult book to talk about without major spoilers. It’s better to go in blind, especially if you like metafictional stories. Like many other of his novels, there’s a supernatural element to this one that you just have to go with. Like Jasper Fforde’s concepts, but darker. Much darker. Some things are easy to spot, like one of the major villains, but other things will blind side you and it’s fun. I’m going to have to get the other Tim Underhill books really soon before the details of this one fade. ( )
1 stem Bookmarque | Sep 25, 2019 |
1-5 van 16 worden getoond (volgende | toon alle)
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About 9:45 on a Wednesday morning early in a rain-drenched September, a novelist named Timothy Underhill gave up, in more distress than he cared to acknowledge, on his ruined breakfast and the New York Times crossword puzzle and returned, far behind schedule, to his third-floor loft at 55 Grand Street.
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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.

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