Search - In the Night Room

"SO IMAGINATIVE, INTRICATE, AND ELECTRIFYING that readers will be tempted to race through the novel."
-Associated Press

Willy Patrick, respected author of the award-winning novel In the Night Room, thinks she is losing her mind. She is drawn helplessly into the parking lot of a warehouse, knowing somehow that her daughter, Holly, is being held in the building. But this is impossible-Willy's daughter is dead.

On that 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 from people he knew in his youth-people now dead. Like his sister, they want urgently to tell him something. When Willy and Tim 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.

A real page-turner, with surprises that kept me on the edge! You will enjoy this one if you like riddles, anagrams, and the space between reality and fantasy.

A good story with some creepy undertones in the plot. Authors creating living characters and such. Kinda sad, but a good read.

I greatly enjoyed some of Straub's earlier work, and listened to the book which precedes this one, Lost Boy/Lost Girl with enjoyment. However, although some of the interesting ideas from Lost Boy continue into this book, I felt that Straub was writing this book more for himself, or to prove something to himself about his abilities and his artistry. I had great difficulty getting into the book, and when I did, I found the constant references to Lost Boy irritating.

I think Straub bit off more than he could chew in this book. I have the feeling that he was trying to express his relationship to writing as an author, and how much of himself goes into his characters, and whether his writing shapes his reality, or does his reality shape his writing, or are they co-influential, but it seems to all go wrong and end up in a muddle.

If you're looking for good horror where the symbolism of author/audience/characters is fully thought out while at the same time scaring the pants off you, I'd suggest you read Stephen Kings Bag of Bones.