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Title details for In the Night Room by Peter Straub - Available

In the Night Room

A Novel

by Peter Straub
Scott Brick
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
1 of 1 copy available
WINNER OF THE BRAM STOKER AWARD • After a grotesque accident, a famous author discovers that her reality is not what it seems in this “imaginative, intricate, and electrifying” (Associated Press) horror novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Ghost Story.

“A powerful and arresting foray into the dark fantastic.”—The Washington Post Book World

Willy Patrick, respected author of the award-winning young adult 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 emails 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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    July 8, 2004

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781415947678
      • File size: 311650 KB
      • Duration: 10:49:16

  • Languages

    • English

  • Levels

    • Text Difficulty: 9-12

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Dead people send emails, and, with the help of his own fictional character, writer Timothy Underhill must decipher their meaning and vindicate a long-dead child molester he has castigated in fiction. Using his trademark vocal signature, Scott Brick makes everyone in Straub's novel sound Brooklyn born, at least when they ask questions. As it happens, many of the living (and the dead) hail from Illinois. But Brick's youthful enthusiasm keeps up with the plot, even when it makes no sense. In the performance highlight of the work, his portrayal of the bedroom scenes between the two protagonists conveys a delicious sense of confused eroticism when the gay writer is swept away by his beautiful female companion. R.L.L. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from October 4, 2004
      In Black House
      , Straub and Stephen King wrote of "slippage," whereby the borders between reality and fantasy blur. This entire brilliant novel is an act of slippage. In this sequel to last year's lost boy lost girl
      , and further chapter in the ongoing adventures of Straub protagonist Tim Underhill (Koko
      , etc.), the most intellectually adventurous of dark fantasy authors takes the apparent slippage of the prequel—in which Underhill's experience of a slain nephew's survival at the hands of a serial killer was indicated to be compensatory imagining by Underhill—several steps into the impressively weird. Underhill, an author, here encounters not the mere survival of a dead relation but the existence of a character he's creating in his journals. Dark fantasy cognescenti will remember that King employed a somewhat similar device in The Dark Half
      , but Straub's approach is distinctly his own, directed at mining the ambiguous relationship between nature and art, fact and fiction, the real and the ideal. The character Underhill has brought into being is Willy Bryce Patrick, a children's book author soon to be married to coldhearted financier Mitchell Faber, at least until Willy discovers that Faber had her first family murdered. Willy, whom Tim meets during a bookstore reading of his latest novel, lost boy lost girl
      , believes she is real (as does the reader for the book's first third), and learns otherwise only through Tim's painful, patient revelations. The two fall in deeply in love, but their passion seems doomed—not only is Willy's existence tenuous, but the pair are being pursued with murderous intent by Faber and his goons, as the former is in fact one form of the serial killer of lost boy lost girl
      , Joseph Kalendar; moreover, a terrible angel is insisting that only when Underhill makes an ultimate sacrifice, righting a wrong he did to Kalendar in lost boy lost girl
      , will matters resolve. Moving briskly while ranging from high humor to the blackest dread, this is an original, astonishingly smart and expertly entertaining meditation on imagination and its powers; one of the very finest works of Straub's long career, it's a sure bet for future award nominations. Agent, David Gernert.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Peter Straub makes his listeners work very hard to follow his novels; this one is no exception. Reader Jason Culp does his best to keep the confusing novel going, with its flights into fantasy and hodge-podge mixture of fiction within fiction. In fact, Culp's work is the saving grace of the book and its plot about a novelist named Timothy Underhill whose characters come to life and involve him in their stories. The author weaves the story within the story until no one, especially the listener, is quite clear about what is going on. I had to start over from the beginning to get things straight; that should not have to happen. M.S. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

Levels

  • Text Difficulty:9-12

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