Mr. X

Starred review from June 28, 1999
Since the publication of Koko in 1988, Straub has specialized in macabre mysteries dense with the details of small-town life and cast with ordinary people who find that the extraordinary crimes they investigate raise doubts about their own moral integrity. In this bravura new outing, he returns to his horror roots, lacing an ingenious whodunit with an intoxicating shot of the supernatural. From childhood, Ned Dunstan has experienced precognitive visions, a recurring dream of being tethered to a shadow and "the sense that something crucially significant, something without which I could never be whole, was missing." Summoned home to Edgerton, Ill., by a premonition of his mother's death on the eve of his 35th birthday, Ned finds himself implicated in a tangle of felonies and murders, all of which point to someone strenuously manipulating events to frame him. Digging into local history, he finds reason to believe that the mysterious father he never knew, or possibly a malignant doppelg nger, are pulling the strings. Meanwhile, Mr. X, a homicidal misanthrope who reads H.P. Lovecraft's otherworldly horror fiction as gospel, cuts a swath of supernatural destruction across the country, en route to a showdown with his son, the "shadow-self" whom he must annihilate. Discerning readers will recognize this surprise-filled tale of tortuous family relationships as a modern variation on Lovecraft's classic shocker "The Dunwich Horror." But Straub turns his pulp model inside out, transforming its vast cosmic mystery into an ingrown odyssey of self-discovery and a probing study of human nature. His evocative prose, a seamless splice of clipped hard-boiled banter and poetic reflection, contributes to the thick atmosphere of apprehension that makes this one of the most invigorating horror reads of the year. BOMC main selection. (Aug.) FYI: This spring, Subterranean Press published a chapbook, Peter and PTR: Two Discarded Prefaces and an Introduction, that includes framing material that Straub wrote for, and then cut from, Mr. X.

August 13, 2012
Straub's supernatural thriller chronicles Ned Dunstan's visit to his hometown of Edgerton, Ill. Drawn there by a premonition of his mother's death (which quickly proves accurate), Ned begins to discover his odd family's otherworldly secrets. His discoveries help explain the disquieting visions he's had since childhood, but also set the stage for a showdown with a dream figure called Mr. X, who shows up in Edgerton as a fully dimensional homicidal maniac determined to kill Ned and anyone else who gets in the way. Daniels delivers energetic and well-paced narration in this audio edition. He deftly renders the book's many characters, but his main success is in capturing the voices of the book's duel narrators: the alert, inquisitive, at times perplexed, and humane Ned and the much more dramatic, delusional murderous Mr. X. A Ballantine paperback.