Peter Straub has been one of my favorite authors for a very long time. I like the horror genre, within certain limits, but Straub goes beyond mere horror, into the rarely achieved realm of mortal dread, which is so much more effective than a good scare. Beyond that, he's a damned good writer in the best literary sense, with a real sense of poetry that manages to convey impressions of the eternal and the sacred, instead of just plot and character. As such, his novels sometimes be very difficult to review, because their true value is so ethereal.
