You have been there…if you have ever been afraid.Come back. To a dark house deep in the Vermont woods, where two friends are spending a season of horror, apprenticed to a Master Magician.Learning secrets best left unlearned. Entering a world of incalculable evil more ancient than death itself. More terrifying. And more real.Only one of them will make it through.

Leslie Somerville

Shadowland

but this influence was above all liberating, not enslaving. Fowles demonstrated how the seductive uncertainty implicit in theatrical illusion and, even more importantly, the emotional effects of this uncertainty, could find expression in a narrative that itself moved through successive layers of surprise, doubt, suspicion, and uncertainty.   Reading  Shadowland  is much like witnessing a spectacle of illusion and the uncertainity it evokes. The aura that "something is terribly wrong" never leaves, and if an enchantment was cast, it is a dark and haunting one. One of the things that are immediately noticeable is Straub's shift in approach to horror;  Ghost Story  was largely constrained by the Victorian history of the genre, where the horror needed to be subtle and only hinted at; Though  Shadowland  is a subtle and suggestive work, it escapes this convenction and Straub plays with the subtle and blalant terror wth marvelous results.   Shadowland  is a masterful, unacknowledged work by a writer who has remained in the shadows far, far too long. Peter Straub possesses an imagination without boundaries along with the gift of marvelous storytelling and the ability of bringing things to life with the most amazing imagery and constructing atmosphere that is gothic, unsettling, elusive and hallucinatory all at once. Intriguing and complex,  Shadowland  will please every reader who enjoys well-crafed fiction that demands full attention and forces to think about what it presents. A truly magical tale.

Books like Shadowland

Shadowland

Cross-category suggestions

Liked by