Cover photograph by Marni Horwitz -- totally makes me wonder who the hell eats like this and leaves this sort of mess? hahaha! ooohhhh, it was the cat. Nice design and different.

The book itself is so many things, but it is mainly Straub's Guide to Self Analysis.

It starts out rough, head first into academic writing. Stuffy and overworked. And while I very much enjoy nonfiction books, this took the pleasure of reading and dumped us in the middle of a text book. We've all read those in college. We're all capable of comprehending what is being told to us. But, our reading pace is slowed to sloth levels to take in the information being given. I felt doomed to a tedious trek that was going to take time.

Straub dispatches his brainiac thoughts quickly and we move onto the juicier stuff and the pace picked up. He starts out with two authors, Caitlin R. Kiernan and Poppy Z. Brite. While I'm not all that familiar with Ms. Kiernan, she did give me one of my favorite short stories in an early book here in the Year of Cemetery Dance thread. I think the information would have been more interesting if I had read more of her work.

Poppy Z. Brite (who has now transitioned to Billy Martin and I will refer to as a he out of respect for this transition. ) is the next author he speaks about? I don't know, the chapter on him was just as weird as Poppy's writing. I have tried very hard to like Brite's work and I just can't. I think it is crude and going for the shock just for the sake of shocking. That's not saying that I don't think he has talent because obviously he does. And I do appreciate the creative pushing of the envelope, but I just can't like any of the stories unfortunately.

The section on Stephen King was lots of fun to read and I enjoyed that very much.

EDITED TO ADD IN: I did also enjoy his thoughts on The Stepford Wives and Dracula. It's imperative to give credit where credit is due, I'm so myopic when it comes to poor Petuh.

We get to Straub's alter ego who spends more time talking about himself than the Straub books he is supposedly evaluating. But, I did enjoy Put's input.

It was an odd jumble of coherent/incoherent writings. I think Straub fans may be more apt to champion this than someone who thinks Straub needs to be in a strait jacket. ( )

While it had not been that long since I read a Peter Straub book, I was still looking forward to reading SIDES. Straub is always a huge treat to read. Even though I knew that SIDES was a collection of Straub's non-fiction over the last twenty years and not a new fiction story, I figured that I would be amazed as I always him with his quality of writing. In that regards, I was not disappointed. His writing was lyrical and poetic and beautiful as it always is. However, the content of what he was writing about was a hit and miss with me.

Straub primarily broke the collection down into three sections: Encounters where he provided Introductions or Afterwords to other author's books, "Two Essays and a Frivolity" or as I thought of it "Miscellaneous" and then Observations by Putney Tyson Ridge, Straub's alter ego and a fictional critic. The Encounters section was fabulous! As Straub would discuss the different books, I would yearn to read or reread the book in question. THE STEPFORD WIVES. DRACULA. THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU. And to seek out more books by some of the authors mentioned: Richard Laymon, Graham Joyce, Caitlin R. Kiernan. (Granted I read most of Laymon's and Joyce's book already but it made me want to reread them.) Straub was a little too complete in his discussion because he would discuss the entire book and I would realize that I no longer need to read them anymore. At least not for the story. The middle section though is where Straub started to lose me. His piece entitled "Mom" was fabulous and will make most people appreciate their own mother. The other two pieces were fine but not as interesting. It was the last section with which I became bored. The writings of Straub's alter ego were boring and very uninteresting. There was not enough insight to offer anything new nor enough humor to make them funny. I'm sure that Straub was poking fun at himself but it was a poking that did nothing for me. Overall I would recommend stopping halfway through but at the same time, I know that I would not be able to do so myself. ( )

Sides is a collection of Peter Straub's nonfiction - introductions and speeches mostly, along with the collected works of Putney Tyson Ridge, his alter-ego and number one critic.

The collection itself can drag in portions. As introductions go, they're best read with the work in question and rarely on their own. Of course, there are exceptions and his entries on Dracula and The Stepford Wives in particular are very good. A stand-alone entry simply entitled, Mom is sentimental, but lovely.

The highlight comes from the writings of Putney Tyson Ridge. Straub uses his alter ego (who is rather egotistical in his life as the multiple Atwood-Award Winning Popular Culture Studies Chairman of Popham College) to tear through all of his written fiction. Demonstrating that we are always our own worst critics, Ridge tears through each of Straub's novels leaving pithy compliments like Peter's effort to do the undoable contains at least a poignant tone which readers several passages of this muddled but oddly effective tome very nearly...what shall I say? Moving? No, but "affecting" will do well enough. for Koko. In this, I think everyone in a creative pursuit needs a Ridge moment - a brief essay in which you shred the work in the worst review imaginable and then file it away so you can release it to a world which will be far more forgiving.

A great book for fans. ( )