One of my favourite epic small-town horror novels. A wealthy Connecticut enclave is besieged by a supernatural menace that grows to full strength every hundred years. Whether the man-made cloud of chemicals that drifts over the town causing madness and melting is part of that or just a lucky coincidence is left ambiguous. As the situation deteriorates with murders and suicides gradually escalating to the decimation of foremen and policemen and the complete isolation of the town from the rest of the world and dead people wandering around making more dead people, four brave not-dead-yet people with connections to the town's past struggle to understand what's going on and try to find a way to fight it.

It's big and sweeping, with lots of characters and lots of horrible things happening. I've never been quite sure it comes together properly by the end, inasmuch as there's the evil entity and the people who fight it, but despite lots of historical stuff there's never any actual rationale, however mythic and made-up, for why it's happening, what it actually is and why these four have the power to stand up to it. 

It might seem like an odd criticism, but the rest of the book is quite meticulous in its depiction of people and places and dramatic scenes. Like in It, a succesor small-town horror novel that ten-ups Floating Dragon, we eventually had a vision of where, exactly, the monster came from and what it was, sort of, and that was enough to be satisfying, here it just ends up being literalised as a dragon. That's it. Okay, before we get there there's more than enough to enjoy and this doesn't spoil any of it, it does leave things noticeably woolly, though. Straub is quite good at ambiguities (like with the cloud of chemicals) and not necessarily spelling everything out for the reader, but it definitely works better in his non-supernatural books. Nonetheless, a beloved classic of the genre.