Books like Floating Dragon

I keep on being drawn back to Peter Straub for my Horror fix. With this author it isn’t just about the nasty stuff: it’s about the presentation. Floating Dragon is a case in point: not only does Straub expose our fears; he toys with them.The plot in a nutshellWhat you’ve got here is essentially a town that is periodically plagued by a sequence of terrible events: serial killings; disappearances; children dying under mysterious circumstances. This only happens once every generation and only the individuals who know the town’s history exceedingly well are even aware of the pattern (they can be counted on one hand), the rest are blissfully ignorant. It’s time for the horror to start again, only this time it coincides with an industrial accident that releases a bio-weapon that is still in a very unstable phase into the atmosphere. The net result is gobsmacklingly macabre. The gas has a hallucinatory and psychotic effect (think military grade LSD) and in extreme cases causes an extremely grotesque disease. From the author’s introductionAnything like restraint or good taste was verboten, the aesthetic was grounded in a single principle, that of excess.ThoughtsKudos to Straub. He never quite lets his horror become splatterpunk overly gory. This is good, because once you start gore-shocking your audience into submission, all other considerations (like, for example, good characters) go flying out the window. Like other reviewers, I would have to agree that this is quite a bit like It, in terms of the general feel and presentation of the story, although Dragon was published before King’s novel.Floating Dragon is better paced than the other Straub novels I’ve read. It consists of three set pieces, each one building on the previous, which helps maintain momentum. The characters are, as always, extremely well developed. It is a disturbing novel and probably one of the scariest I’ve read. Yes, there is a lot of weird imagery, but it is because the line between reality and illusion becomes increasingly blurred as the story progresses. It is often up to the reader to decide “what the heck just happened?”It’s as complete a horror novel as you’re likely to lay your hands on, and quite clever, really. However, a word of warning, things get really, really weird towards the end. Total insanity and randomness might not be to everyone’s taste. If you only ever read one Straub novel it should probably be Ghost Story, but if you read another, perhaps it should be this one.