Peter Straub is a talented horror writer. Or so I have been told by others. Even Stephen King sang praises for Straub’s A Dark Matter in a lovely little blurb on the back cover.

I’m here, denizens, at great personal risk of retribution from the master of horror himself, to inform you that Stephen King lied. This book is not great. It’s not scary. It’s not even awful. It’s worse, denizens. It’s the worst thing that a scary book can possibly be.

It’s boring.

This is one of the most boring books I have ever read. It’s so boring that I don’t even want to write about it. Don’t want to talk about the plot, don’t want to describe the characters, don’t want to even bash it. It’s just that boring. None of the characters is interesting. In fact, most of them are so pathetically boilerplate that even thinking about them bores me. What’s worse is the fact that it’s nearly 400 pages of boring. Which is why it took me this long between my last entry and this one to finally finish.

Truth is, I should have given up after 100 pages. I knew even before that milestone that this book was going to disappoint me. But I’ve heard so many great things about Straub that I thought maybe this particular book just had a slow start but things would improve.

Nope. Not at all. Boring at the beginning, middle, and end.

Boring. Not a word you want associated with a horror novel.

Straub might have been a good horror novelist at some point, but that point isn’t this book. Don’t waste your time, denizens. Just don’t.

Final Verdict: Back to the library. Never added to my collection. Never.

Not that long ago, I wrote about my introduction to Muriel Spark, she who told of the coming and going of Miss Jean Brodie

I first fell in love with Jeanette Winterson