Finally have read some proper Peter Straub! And tonight this Tuesday night I have completed reading his 1983 novel “Floating Dragon”.
In Hampstead, Connecticut, two evils are about to threaten this quiet suburban town.
The first one is quite natural. An experiment of a toxic gas goes horribly wrong that is capable of warping the mind of anyone it comes into contact with, causing them to go violent and insane.
The second is anything but natural, not by a longshot. It is a being that, every thirty years, it awakens and brings with it death and destruction, making the first look nothing more than childsplay.
The novel begins at a slow crawl at first but as it begins to pick up steam, that’s when things start to get very interesting. The way Straub wrote the novel the way he did was inspired by, as he mentions in the introduction in the 2021 edition I have, a novel by an english author by the name of Paul Scott called the “Raj Quartet”.
I can really believe that this is the inspiration to Stephen King’s “It” as this novel has similar themes in it. And of course both Straub and King were friends and had collaborated together on two novels, “The Talisman”, which would be published a year after “Floating Dragon”, and it’s sequel “Black House”.
by i-the-muso-1968