I always had a bit of a preference for Peter Straub over Stephen King. Both superb writers, Straub did not have King's tendency to clown around with his writing, to splurge words all over the page. I realised, rereading this, that the difference beteween Straub and King is like the difference between classic ghost stories and pulp horror. It's clear from this that Straub reveres the old-school styilings of Hawthorne, James and James. It's centred around a group of old men who sit around in formal evening wer telling each other ghost stories for God's sake, and the example we get is an homage to The Turn Of The Screw. Straub is conservative, intellectual, formal, and it shows through in his writing and his structure, but at the end of the day it's still a massive town-besieged-by-evil story that became the mainstay of eighties doorstop horror.

It opens, of course, with that eerie, unsettling image - a man driving somewhere with a child he has just taken. The air of mystery and dread surrounding this is unmatched in anything else I've ever read. The rest of the book delivers on the promise of this opening, but I will say there's one part set on a college campus that made me want to punch the character when he started interrogating a young woman he had only just met about her love life - we may have dodged a bullet in not losing Straub to what I think they call The College Novel, or maybe he just exorcised that literary inclination here. Yuk. Maybe it was the Evil Influence Of Evil (because she turns out to be Evil), or maybe men talked to women like that in the 70s?

Anyway, classic, brilliant horror novel, full of heart and atmosphere and occasional splatters of blood.