Access Today Shadow Land Compiled And Edited By Peter Straub Made Available In Hardcover

this book again, someyears plus, after I first stole it out of my school library, Same edition, yellowed by time, I've always said this was one of my favourite horror novels, and this reread, all these years later did nothing to dissuade me from this opinion, It's a classic horror tale, which upon second reading I see similarities in minor ways to Stephen King's The Shining,
In this book two boys spend a summer at a magician's house, the magician being the uncle of one of the boy's, Del, Del thinks his uncle is grooming him to become the next great magician, but in reality the uncle is grooming Del's friend, Tom, And it's more than just "the next great magician" but the next King of the Cats, the next master of the dark arts, Except Tom wants nothing to do with it, and with the help of the mysterious girl, Rose, he plots his escape,
Ultimately, and inevitably, a great betrayal takes place, This book also has some of my favourite characters, including Rose and Skeleton Ridpath, arguably one the most tragic villains in horror,
A great magical ride, This book was sooooo close to being a five star read but the climactic final scenes were very rushed and generally all over the place, If Straub wasnt under the influence of some heavy drugs when he wrote some of the scenes in this book I would be surprised, . . Not sure what happened here, although I suspect it was the case of success bloat, Straub's first ventures into supernatural If You Could See Me Now and Julia were lean, mean thriller thrillingmachines, Shadowland must be where he veered off into the prolixity of later years, I had such high expectations for this book based not only on how much I liked the Straub's aforementioned works, but also on the love I have for the subject.
Magic, how can you go wrong with magic, It's innately fun. And yet Shadowland has the genre stereotypical coming of age trip back in time structure, although it is framed in a present day for the day narrative, which might have been unnecessary and at the very least proves quite distracting on several occasions throughout the book.
It's sort of an epic story in sheer ambition and size, it has a lot going on, too much going on really, and Straub seems willing and eager to explore every tangential plot line that comes up, as if paid by word.
As a result, it often feels like reading a somewhat disjointed and overwhelming sum of lovely individual parts, Not to imply it doesn't have a cohesive coherent plot, it does, It has to do with two teenage boys who spend a very, . . interesting summer at a palatial, literally magical estate of an uncle, who just happens to be looking for an apprentice, There are plenty of fantasy elements, there are plenty of horror elements, It is undeniably well written, It should have wowed. And yet Shadowland is mostly good, occasionally very good, but more often than not if felt like a chore to read, not quite plodding, but something of a slog, It overwhelmed with its grandiosity, And yet, admittedly, this is very much an acquired taste and seems like the sort of thing that would be positively adored by the right reader, I forgot about this one until now, Read it a gajillion years ago and I remember not liking it, Might be worth a reread, . . maybe. I can't even review this, I hated it, Finishing it was like Chinese water torture, I just. . Hated it. I have no idea what the point was, . . It was just Ridiculous and bad and ridiculously bad,

I don't want to waste another moment thinking about it, so that's my review,

Not recommended. Oftentimes, the less fashionable is subjugated to the lower shelves of desirability, than the inthing, In this way Peter Straub's tourdeforce “Shadowland”, has been relegated to the untalkedabout, the lesserknown realms of fantasy and magic, Making it a work that, sadly, few of the younger generation have read,

If the now people, readers of Erin Morgenstern, Casandra Clare and Suzanne Collins, opened their minds, they would discover MAGIC comparable to any flights of fantasy the aforementioned writers have created.
This is a wondrous tale, dark and beautifully plotted, It is also exquisitely written, I challenge anyone to let the book fall open on any one page, quite by accident, and not discover writing as memorable and exciting as any well constructed poem.
Peter Strub I SALUTE YOU! A magical coming of age,
The shadows start early in the story, Carson school is a strange and brooding place and the characters really came to life, especially Skeleton who is particularly unpleasant,
None of what comes before the boys actually go to Shadowland can prepare you though, The book takes on a really strong sense of illusion after that, Collins is always dark and menacing, an old fashioned sinister uncle who I loved,
The only down side for me was the ending, I actually struggled to follow it and all the magic that was being thrown about, Maybe that's just me but nevertheless I did enjoy it! This tale of supernatural horror from the author of "Koko", "The Talisman" and "Mr X, " concerns two boys at a New England boarding school, Del introduces Tom to his world of magic tricks, But at Shadowland Del's uncle's lakeside estate their hobby suddenly takes on much more sinister tones, God, in the orthodox view, causes famine, plague, and flood, Was God evil Evil is a convenient fiction,

Scions of privilege ride the rails after Hogwarts becomes Columbine,
Master wizard is defeated by Harry Potter after the latter is crucified,

I honestly wish I was making this shit up, I don't understand the allure of this book, Is it about aging and the vanishing magic of life
Perhaps, it is also bloated and ridiculous, It is likely for best to step away from the portrayal of women, yet I want to consider such, Before anyone asks there are “Magic negroes” but the treatment is evenhanded, Yet again we have an all powerful entity fallen by a pesky kid, We understand this from the opening pages and yet we inveigh against the inertia of hundreds of pages before the conflagration, The trip east appears to be connective tissue linking two distinct narratives despite that ubiquitous haunting owla pandimensional predator drone, During the extremely unsatisfying experience of reading Lev Grossman's "The Magicians", I kept thinking of how much better Straub's treatment of similar themes was, so literally the minute I finished "The Magicians" I went to my bookshelf and picked out this book to reread.
With it's nods to everything from Grimm's Fairy Tales to Hans Christian Andersen to John Fowles' The Magus, this is both a literate homage to the art of storytelling and a gripping story in its own right.
The tale of two boarding school best friends, one of whom is destined to be the greatest magician in the world, and the malevolent wizard who seeks to keep the mantle for himself, this is a mournful story filled with melancholy, violence and tragedy.
The journey from innocence through temptation to selfawareness provides the backbone for these characters, and the layered narratives and "realities" are skillfully wrought, A perfectly crafted gem. Peter Straub can do no wrong apparently,stars, all the way! This was really a good book except for one scene involving Bugs Bunny, Bugs Bunny Come on, someone should have told Mr, Straub to cut this scene, It added nothing and detracted from the overall mood of the book, Nothing remarkable or exceptional, failed to excite me, read like a simple generic story, Could have pulled a lot better because the setting was huge, The most infuriating thing was the absence of any suspense like common how banal the story was!for the ambitious setup and good character development, Peter Straub came to prominence inwith Ghost Story, an old fashioned spooky ghost tale which I wasn't really a fan of though I appreciate it, A year later, in, he published Shadowland, a coming of age novel which can be classified as dark fantasy with horror elements, This time, I say, he penned a winner,
Shadowland is concerned with the friendship of two boys Tom Flanagan and Del Nightingale which began at the private allmale school they both attended, As both try to fight the horrors all young boys have to suffer at one stage of their lives or another, Del introduces Tom to his world of magic tricks.
When they both decide to spend the summer at Del's Uncle's house in New England, Tom discovers that things can be much more sinister than they seem, At Shadowland, their lives will be changed forever and after that summer nothing will be the same,

Shadowland is a beautiful novel unlike most fantasy or horror works, Straub is a master prose stylist who crafts to perfection he wrote the novel longhand in multiple journals, and then retyped it on a typewriter who can imagine a writer doing that nowadays and the result is an intricately detailed work, structurally complex and above all, stylish.
Opening with a prologue which reads like a feverish dream which makes us see the strangest things, the novel expertly morphs into a coming of age school story, and only after that unleashes its full power.
Straub introduces characters, plots and subplots within those, but nothing is without purpose in this story he draws heavily on various folk tales and even includes some of his own making thereby seducing the reader who is surprised with each revelation and the horror is only starting.
From the afterword:

That same year, I had been moved by John Fowles novel, The Magus, which suggested a way to unite the powerful strangeness resulting from the oral tradition with more conventional narrative satisfactions.
No one familiar with The Magus who reads Shadowland can fail to notice Fowles influence on me, which was profound and pervasive: but this influence was above all liberating, not enslaving.
Fowles demonstrated how the seductive uncertainty implicit in theatrical illusion and, even more importantly, the emotional effects of this uncertainty, could find expression in a narrative that itself moved through successive layers of surprise, doubt, suspicion, and uncertainty.


Reading Shadowland is much like witnessing a spectacle of illusion and the uncertainity it evokes, The aura that "something is terribly wrong" never leaves, and if an enchantment was cast, it is a dark and haunting one, One of the things that are immediately noticeable is Straub's shift in approach to horror Ghost Story was largely constrained by the Victorian history of the genre, where the horror needed to be subtle and only hinted at Though Shadowland is a subtle and suggestive work, it escapes this convenction and Straub plays with the subtle and blalant terror wth marvelous results.


Shadowland is a masterful, unacknowledged work by a writer who has remained in the shadows far, far too long, Peter Straub possesses an imagination without boundaries along with the gift of marvelous storytelling and the ability of bringing things to life with the most amazing imagery and constructing atmosphere that is gothic, unsettling, elusive and hallucinatory all at once.
Intriguing and complex, Shadowland will please every reader who enjoys wellcrafed fiction that demands full attention and forces to think about what it presents, A truly magical tale. Some of the more surreal moments, as well as the occasional switches in narratives, made this book a little hard to follow at times, but there IS a reason I gave this book five: it was terrific.
It's not the allout horror fest that the cover of the's paperback promised, but there were some truly gruesome scenes towards the climax, as well as a general tone of mounting tension throughout.


Tom Flanagan is a very memorably threedimensional young protagonist, and all the conflicts of childhood innocence and naivete being challenged by oncoming adulthood and in this case, some more unusual challenges! make him all the more believable.


The twisting narratives, like multiple concentric circles overlapping each other at times! are also highly engrossing, and never boring not even the miniature "stories" which have everything to do with the plot, and cannot be skipped!.
The only thing that I fear may turn a lot of readers off is the slow buildup of the firstpages or so, describing the boys in school: I cannot begin to tell you how important it all is to the story later on it's not just filler!

'Shadowland' was an enchanting read, and all the more welcome for its subject matter in the wake of the Harry Potter phenomenon.
Seriously read it, and enjoy it thoroughly, As you can see, it took me forever to read this book, Some parts were beautifully written, but it really felt likebooks in one, The latter being a struggle that literally took me years to finish, I just hated the ending, It was weird and strange and took too much imagination to even make sense, I can't say how much I didn't enjoy this book, It wasn't for me. I'm struggling to finish Koko as well which is making me apprehensive to start Ghost Story, I really want to like Straub, but his writing style is too much, He just drones on for pages at a time, Well, I tried and I'll continue to try, for now anyway, Sorry.for me. .