When I read Peter Straub's Shadowland, I was powerfully reminded of The Magus by John Fowles, and I found out afterwards that Fowles' novel was indeed an admitted conscious influence for Straub. The setting is very different, and the protagonist is younger: Tom Flanagan is a fifteen-year-old prep school student from Arizona who enters the demesne of his friend Del's magician uncle at an estate called Shadowland in Vermont. Also, Straub offers his own voice anonymously as the novelist narrator who went to school with Tom and Del and has kept tabs on various former classmates.

The story mixes stage magic and psychic thaumaturgy with fairy tale tropes and structures, within a narrative that ultimately stretches for nearly the full length of the twentieth century. It was Straub's first novel after Ghost Story, and it has a chronological scale similar to the book that came before: told about the past and excavating the deeper past, with framing elements of the present.

Also, like Ghost Story's original edition, it has a glancing contact with Thelemic magick to supply an aura of menace. Aleister Crowley has a walk-on role as a humbug who is cruelly bested by the tale's presiding magician (321). The encounter is supposedly in England at the start of the 1920s when Crowley was actually in Italy.

The book is nearly devoid of women characters. There are the bare presences of a secretary at the school, Tom's mother, and a furtive housekeeper Elena. There is also the teenage love interest Rose Armstrong and her precursor Rosa Forte, but Rose is ultimately revealed to be a sort of juno loci of Shadowland. The novel also suffers from an exceedingly unalloyed manifestation of the "magical negro" trope. All of which is perhaps forgivable in the context of a story chiefly about the imagination of a boy going to a white boys-only private school in the fifties.

Straub's prose is powerful and evocative throughout. His representations of illusion, memory, and supernatural effects keep them suitably ambivalent. The metafictional elements are handled well, if not quite as spectacularly as in Robert Irwin's Arabian Nightmare, another novel published three years later that like Shadowland used the folk tale "The King of the Cats" as a key referent.

Uncle Stevie lists this one in [Danse Macabre] as one of his favorites from the hey-day of horror. It' not very well-reviewed here on LibraryThing, which is somewhat understandable. The narrative alternates between deep character-driven storytelling and super-trippy, mind-warping stream of consciousness passages. These latter passages relate to the effects of magic committed by the evil doers in the story. On balance, the storytelling here wins out to keep the book readable. Would those mind-warping passages been just the tiniest bit more accessible, the book would have been perfect. But Staub is sometimes glamoured himself in the writing, diving too far into the possibilities to keep the reader on track. Ultimately, though, the story of one boy's introduction to deep magic and his friend's demise to the same dark arts makes for fascinating writing - a wonderful good vs. evil story, the lower case letters on those terms intentional to signal how individual choices and nobility make a difference in the world.

4 1/2 bones !!!!!
Highly recommended. ( )

I finally finished this train wreck of a novel. Another one that I read when it first came out, but I definitely had better memories of this than what I just experienced. I kept waiting for it to get good. I kept waiting for something to happen. I kept waiting for old men to stop pontificating about their life histories...because, didn't I just read that in Ghost Story?

I must say, the first, non-Shadowland third wasn't horrible. Mostly pointless, and could have been done in more like fifty pages, but it wasn't horrible. But as soon as that blowhard Collins shows up? Yeah, the pace slows to a torturous crawl.

I think this was supposed to be Straub's The Shining but damn it fell flat. The biggest difference between King and Straub is that King gives you people you know. Your neighbour. The guy that works at the McDonalds, that kind of thing. Straub seems to try and do that, but his characters are rich and unrelateable. Where King will give you enough of the horror to make you want to run, Straub likes to have most of it occur off stage and have some boring old bastard tell you a story about it.

Anyway, like I said, the first third was okay. And in the following two thirds, there was the odd flash of brilliance (and it's the only reason for that second star)--because Straub actually can write when he's not so self-conscious of the words he's writing--and I found myself enjoying a scene or two. But then he just goes back to the boring crap and the old men and the stories and he just fills the back two-thirds with a heaping helping of I don't give a shit.

I'd had full intentions of reading Floating Dragon after this, but there's no way. Two books of his are enough. Thanks, Pete, I'd like to say it's been fun, but I can't.

I'm out. ( )

After a harrowing freshman year at a mediocre private school where supernatural forces appear to be on the verge of assuming total control, Tom Flanagan and Del Nightingale--two fifteen-year-old boys with a passion for stage magic--take a cross-country train trip to Shadowland, the home of Del's uncle Coleman Collins. Once a famous stage magician himself, the sinister Collins has plans for Tom. In true Straubian fashion, nothing is as it initially seems.

This was a tough book to read and it's a tough book to review; as the follow-up to Ghost Story, Peter Straub's masterpiece, it's bafflingly anemic. My least favorite Straub novel is A Dark Matter, which is peopled by insubstantial characters and ends with a whimper, but--paradoxically--it's a much easier read than this one. Though getting off to an eerily promising start, Shadowland loses focus when the setting shifts from the Arizona private school to Uncle Cole's house of horrors in Vermont. (And Collins is never quite fully realized as a character despite his obvious importance to the story; some of the school's faculty members, like football coach Chester Ridpath and unhinged headmaster Laker Broome, are much more vividly drawn.) The magical imagery feels labored, and unfortunately there's a glut of it. I enjoyed the first 140 pages, but struggled to finish Shadowland the first time and found it equally daunting when I revisited it in preparation for this review. I doubt that I'll ever read it again.

Two and a half stars. ( )

I didn’t love this as much as I did the first time around, but it was still pretty damn good. ( )