(Peter Straub)First off, an admission: I did not finish this book. I got halfway through it and realize that if nothing was going to happen by the time I was half done with it, nothing is probably going to happen in the second half either.
It's a shame, too, because if you just read the back of the book, it sounds like a good premise: You have a group of high school and college students who unleashed some kind of eldrich horror 30 years ago (don't worry, it apparently just popped in for tea and it's long gone). The protagonist is trying to get to the bottom of these mysterious events by interviewing the survivors. Unfortunately, once you start reading the book, the inherent weakness of the premise becomes apparent: Since these events all happened 30 years ago, there's no imminent danger, no looming threat, and the only thing driving the narrative forward is that the protagonist is curious what happened. (Really, I found myself asking, he didn't wonder what happened until just now? Considering that his wife was one of the students involved in this?)
This is exacerbated with the fact that the book just isn't very interesting. Our hero wasn't at the event, but he goes around interviewing all the people who were, and hearing the same boring events re-told five times is just as exciting as it sounds. The hero's wife is nicknamed "the Eel", and my mind kept wandering to how I'd like to read this guy's adventures where his wife is a 6-foot tall talking eel and maybe then something, you know, interesting might happen. I admit I'm mildly curious about the ending, but since we already know that one person was killed and everyone else lived to tell about it boringly 30 years later, perhaps even mild is an overstatement.
Grade: D
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