The Hellfire Club

I first read this in the late 90s. I remembered it as a fascinating mystery about an imaginary book. However, I reading it again I found both the book within the book and the mystery less interesting than I thought. This time around it seemed to be about the different ways men abuse women. Some of t......more

Wow! What a rollercoaster ride of a book this turned out to be! This was only my third Peter Straub read (not including the two he wrote with King). I felt like this was the easiest to read out of the three. It's definitely a thriller and gets the heart racing numerous times throughout! There are so......more

Don’t go into this expecting traditional “horror”. Thanks to Peter Straub’s professional and personal relationship with Stephen King, the uninitiated assume he writes easily-categorized horror. That isn’t so. Straub is a master of exploration and combination: his works infuse several different genre......more

Althought the title suggest much, there is virtually nothing about the titular club in The Hellfire Club. It's one of many interesting themes which Straub piles one on another, but it is never really developed. The real star of this show is a book called Night Journey and a woman named Nora Chancel.......more

First off, let’s address the elephant in the room. Can we talk about the decision to name a main character “Dick Dart”? Lol. Bold move, Straub. Bold move. Also, this was a good book (despite having way too many plotlines unraveling at once). In lesser hands, this story would have fallen flat on its a......more