amryden's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
donnakaye64's review against another edition
3.0
A very interesting book that takes you on a strange and twisted journey.
marcel's review against another edition
sorry mr straub u fully lost me with cyrax
lfields19's review against another edition
3.0
I enjoyed this book, even though I really don't understand it. I don't understand how the essence, or whatever, of Lily could be with Mark in some alternate universe, if Lily never actually died and is living across town. I get that the author somehow created Willy (also the essence of Lily) with his non-perfect book that pissed off Joseph Kalendar's spirit. But he didn't create the Lily-essence Mark met because he wrote the book after Mark disappeared. So it was entertaining, but perplexing.
jonahbarnes's review against another edition
Took a but for me to be engaged, but overall enjoyable.
crowyhead's review against another edition
4.0
I've seen this panned elsewhere, but I really enjoyed it and got into it. I love the way Straub plays with reality in his books; for example, you've got this character, Tim Underhill, who tends to write books with the same title as Peter Straub books (like lost boy lost girl). But you're never really positive that the book referred to in the text is really exactly like the one you've just read... The only thing I had trouble getting used to with this book was its length; I'm used to Straub writing heftier tomes, so it really threw me off when things started to pick up plot-wise and I realized that I'd already read 3/4 of the book.
hushedworld's review against another edition
3.0
I wanted to enjoy this story. It was an interesting concept... A lot of it felt kind of "flat" to me though. & the ending? Not so much. Moving onto Ghost Story. I remember enjoying Peter Straub so much in the past & these past two didn't do much for me.
lmt01's review
3.0
I have mixed feelings about this book, so I'm going to first mention the things that I didn't like, then delve into what I did. But before I do, I'd like to say that, no matter what I am about to say, IN THE NIGHT ROOM is not a bad book. It is nowhere near as bad as the tedious, borderline-terrible nugget that was LOST BOY LOST GIRL - it's just that it's nowhere near as good as, well, anything else Straub has written.
IN THE NIGHT ROOM, which is a sequel of sorts to LOST BOY LOST GIRL, follows homosexual author Tim Underhill (pay attention to both titles, because I'm going to mention them again later) after the disappearance and death of his nephew, Mark. (Returning to the same metafictional theme used in the Blue Rose Trilogy, though it is nowhere near as good here, it is revealed that LOST BOY LOST GIRL was written by Underhill in order to help him cope with the death of Mark...but while in the Blue Rose Trilogy the metafictional dynamics worked and made sense, the dynamics of IN THE NIGHT ROOM confused me when it came to its relation to LOST BOY LOST GIRL...but enough about that). Underhill's life is thrown out of whack when he not only receives multiple emails from people who are supposed to be dead, but also meets a woman named Willy (that name, am I right?). However, it isn't her less-than-ideal situation that worries him: it's the fact that she is a woman he knows everything about. He should; after all, she's a character from his novel-in-progress...
It sounds cool, right? It should have been, but unfortunately it wasn't.
If you've read a few of my reviews, you'd know that I don't normally have anything against slow books. However, IN THE NIGHT ROOM just took too long to really start; the fact that it takes so long to reveal Willy being a fictional character is stupid, and stupider yet is the surprise you are meant to feel at the revelation since it tells you that detail ON THE BACK OF THE BOOK. That isn't Straub's fault...but the slow pacing is.
There is a concept hidden in the book that every novel that is published has one "real" copy, which is perfect in every way: characters, dialogue, prose - everything is as it should be. However, after this is introduced, it goes absolutely nowhere; at the end of the book, it is mentioned again, but in such a way that you kind of think that Straub went, Oh, shit, I forgot about that! and hammed it in. But if he didn't have any purpose for it, why didn't he just get rid of it? Well, that leads us into another problem I had with the book.
IN THE NIGHT ROOM feels like a draft. The writing is so simple that it is almost impossible to recognise it as Straub's - what happened to the breathtaking, image-invoking, poetic prose that is so amazing that it lulls you into taking no notice of a slow pace? - while chapters end suddenly after fulfilling their purposes, like they would in a draft. The point of a draft is to get everything down so that you can fix it later, and this is the impression that I got while reading IN THE NIGHT ROOM: he would write a chapter, then end it suddenly, figuring that he'd put down everything he needed to.
Also: the characters. I like Underhill, but was shocked when the homosexual author ended up having sex with Willy, one of his creations. I was perplexed, of course, by the whole gay-man-doin-it-with-a-woman thing, but got over it. Whatreally shocked me was the fact that he was doin it with one of his own fictional creations, and was not too bothered about it. As a sometimes-writer, I know what it's like to fall in love with one of my characters, but jeez, isn't that a bit much, Tim? Speaking of Willy: while I found her likeable and compelling for the first half of the book, she soon turned into an annoying brat who blamed Underhill for just about everything. Of course, I can understand some of her anger - he did kind of engineer the murder of her family and put her through hell - but there were a few moments when she acted like a pouting child.
Still, though, I can't say that IN THE NIGHT ROOM is a bad book. It has one of Straub's most fantastical premises to date, including lore you'd expect to find in a Clive Barker novel, and is never unreadable.
If you want to read Straub, I wouldn't recommend starting here; not just because it's a sequel (and I wouldn't recommend starting with LOST BOY LOST GIRL, either), for even if it was a standalone I wouldn't point it out. However, if you've found Straub's storytelling to be to your liking, you should give this book a go. Hell, you might even enjoy it - just don't get your hopes up.
IN THE NIGHT ROOM, which is a sequel of sorts to LOST BOY LOST GIRL, follows homosexual author Tim Underhill (pay attention to both titles, because I'm going to mention them again later) after the disappearance and death of his nephew, Mark. (Returning to the same metafictional theme used in the Blue Rose Trilogy, though it is nowhere near as good here, it is revealed that LOST BOY LOST GIRL was written by Underhill in order to help him cope with the death of Mark...but while in the Blue Rose Trilogy the metafictional dynamics worked and made sense, the dynamics of IN THE NIGHT ROOM confused me when it came to its relation to LOST BOY LOST GIRL...but enough about that). Underhill's life is thrown out of whack when he not only receives multiple emails from people who are supposed to be dead, but also meets a woman named Willy (that name, am I right?). However, it isn't her less-than-ideal situation that worries him: it's the fact that she is a woman he knows everything about. He should; after all, she's a character from his novel-in-progress...
It sounds cool, right? It should have been, but unfortunately it wasn't.
If you've read a few of my reviews, you'd know that I don't normally have anything against slow books. However, IN THE NIGHT ROOM just took too long to really start; the fact that it takes so long to reveal Willy being a fictional character is stupid, and stupider yet is the surprise you are meant to feel at the revelation since it tells you that detail ON THE BACK OF THE BOOK. That isn't Straub's fault...but the slow pacing is.
There is a concept hidden in the book that every novel that is published has one "real" copy, which is perfect in every way: characters, dialogue, prose - everything is as it should be. However, after this is introduced, it goes absolutely nowhere; at the end of the book, it is mentioned again, but in such a way that you kind of think that Straub went, Oh, shit, I forgot about that! and hammed it in. But if he didn't have any purpose for it, why didn't he just get rid of it? Well, that leads us into another problem I had with the book.
IN THE NIGHT ROOM feels like a draft. The writing is so simple that it is almost impossible to recognise it as Straub's - what happened to the breathtaking, image-invoking, poetic prose that is so amazing that it lulls you into taking no notice of a slow pace? - while chapters end suddenly after fulfilling their purposes, like they would in a draft. The point of a draft is to get everything down so that you can fix it later, and this is the impression that I got while reading IN THE NIGHT ROOM: he would write a chapter, then end it suddenly, figuring that he'd put down everything he needed to.
Also: the characters. I like Underhill, but was shocked when the homosexual author ended up having sex with Willy, one of his creations. I was perplexed, of course, by the whole gay-man-doin-it-with-a-woman thing, but got over it. Whatreally shocked me was the fact that he was doin it with one of his own fictional creations, and was not too bothered about it. As a sometimes-writer, I know what it's like to fall in love with one of my characters, but jeez, isn't that a bit much, Tim? Speaking of Willy: while I found her likeable and compelling for the first half of the book, she soon turned into an annoying brat who blamed Underhill for just about everything. Of course, I can understand some of her anger - he did kind of engineer the murder of her family and put her through hell - but there were a few moments when she acted like a pouting child.
Still, though, I can't say that IN THE NIGHT ROOM is a bad book. It has one of Straub's most fantastical premises to date, including lore you'd expect to find in a Clive Barker novel, and is never unreadable.
If you want to read Straub, I wouldn't recommend starting here; not just because it's a sequel (and I wouldn't recommend starting with LOST BOY LOST GIRL, either), for even if it was a standalone I wouldn't point it out. However, if you've found Straub's storytelling to be to your liking, you should give this book a go. Hell, you might even enjoy it - just don't get your hopes up.
mattisnotscary's review against another edition
4.0
Story within a story within a story. When I began the book, I thought, I prefer lost boy, lost girl. Toward the middle, I thought, how could I ever prefer lost boy, lost girl over this? At the end, I thought, thank you for Cyrax.