The Hellfire Club by Peter Straub is CLASSIC publishing house misdirection. On the back of the book the reviews, "Goriest, sickest, most twisted and horrific" are there to stare the reader in the face. There is literally none of the above in this book. It is well written, but in the end it is nothing more than a story about rich literary snobs with lots of skeletons in their closet and there just happens to be a serial killer on the loose who is in love with himself and likes to shake his weenkie in people's face. If you are on a flight, a beach or a lobby somewhere then you might kill a few hours. This book is nothing like the press says....NOTHING. It could be a companion to Kostova's The Swan Thieves. It is boring, and contrived. ( )

"http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2005-03.html#hellfire ( )

Peter Straub's novel The Hellfire Club begins with a nightmare, and the opening chapters are filled with emerging conflicts and ominous portents. Then it abruptly turns a corner into headlong action, seasoned with garrulous psychopathy. There is one more major lift and drop to the roller coaster of the plot, but throughout it all the book combines features of the suspense thriller, literary fiction, and mystery genres. It's more than a whodunnit, since it's even a mystery as to what was done. Meanwhile, there's plenty of current "doing," with multiple murders, kidnapping, rape, arson, etc.

The protagonist Nora shares a name with the lead character of Ibsen's A Doll's House, and there is more than a little concern with gender roles in this book. Her husband Davey is a milktoast product of the decline of the Chancel line from his rapacious tycoon grandfather Lincoln through his domineering father Alden. As Nora enters a childless menopause, the domestic situation is fraught and freighted with secrets. The extra-familial monster who becomes her abuser and foe is redolent of an elaborately-repressed gender dysphoria.

When an intricate, twisted work of fiction like this one concerns itself with several novels in which different authors were deliberately communicating secrets, and when the chapter structure of The Hellfire Club itself mirrors one of these imagined texts, i.e. the "wildly successful" fantasy Night Journey by Hugo Driver, a reader can be forgiven for wondering whether The Hellfire Club itself contains a secret message of some kind. I'd like to reflect further on this possibility, but that means the remaining bulk of this review will need to fall under "spoiler" masking, so that I can freely discuss the details.

The first novel-within-the-novel to carry secrets is the work-in-progress manuscript by Nora's dipsomaniac mother-in-law Daisy Chancel. It is a roman à clef about the Chancel family, seeming to spare no sordid detail. Later, when it is revealed that Daisy was the true author of the two "posthumous Hugo Driver" novels, it becomes apparent that they were her vehicle to express the truth that she was forbidden to voice about Davey's parentage. In addition, Night Journey itself was the means for Hugo Driver to indicate the evidence of Lincoln Chancel's guilt in the death of the poet Katherine Mansfield, even while Chancel documented Driver's plagiarisms of Mansfield's work in Night Journey in order to keep Driver silent and cooperative.

In Daisy Chancel's books, the key to their message is built into the characters, and The Hellfire Club certainly has an abundance of interesting characters with intense, changing relationships among them. Although Daisy wrote her Night Journey sequels to put Davey in the role of the protagonist Pippin Little, The Hellfire Club shows that Nora, by dint of solving the puzzle in the original Night Journey, becomes the "real" Pippin Little. Other characters are correlated throughout: The Hellfire Club's Dick Dart to Night Journey's Lord Night, "Paddi Mann" to Paddy, Helen Day to the Cup Bearer, etc. But clearly Driver/Mansfield could not have been writing about some of these people some forty years earlier, and we lack in any case the full intricacies of Night Journey itself. Did Straub deploy these Hellfire Club characters in order to make statements about actual historical people? Nora must be a cipher for the "successful" reader, as Pippin Little was. But who are the Chancels? Dick Dart? Helen and the Deodatos? Perhaps these are not literary ciphers for actual people, but genuinely literary characters, as they appear to be.

Hugo Driver's code in Night Journey is not one of person, but place. He has incorporated the features of the Shorelands literary colony into Pippin Little's itinerary, which eventuates at the vault that is the office safe at Shorelands, containing Driver's signed testimony regarding the death of Katherine Mansfield. Nora's story starts in the imaginary town of Westerholm, Connecticut. While horror readers might at first fancy a new Arkham country here, it seems that the place is simply Westport, Connecticut, which has been Straub's home since 1979. Still, the reality of the place seems to be a first toehold to climb towards an actual secret.

Just as we first find Nora in Westerholm, her odyssey culminates at Shorelands, the primitive resort that had been a literary colony in the 1920s and 1930s. There is in fact a Shorelands resort with rustic cottages in New England. It is in southern Maine (indicated by a feint in the novel: Dick Dart plans to go to Maine, Nora persuades him to go to Shorelands "instead"). The closest town to the real Shorelands is Kennebunkport, the retreat of the accomplished and notorious Bush family. Could a Nazi-abetting Prescott Bush be Lincoln Chancel, and George H.W. Bush be Alden? The "Hellfire Club" so conspicuous in the title, but so puzzlingly marginal to the actual novel, would then be the Yale Skull and Bones Society, to which it clearly tips its hat in any case. The Hellfire Club was first published in 1995, shortly after the first Bush Presidency. Is Chancel House the White House? Er, I don't know that I even want to know, if so. It would probably make the Dart, Morris law firm into the CIA.

So, I can't imagine that Straub's genuine code, if there is one, would be susceptible of cracking on a single read anyhow. I'm not about to go in for an immediate re-read to emulate the "Driver fanatics" in the book. But I trust that if and when I get around to a second reading of this book, which has certainly earned one, my notes in this review will serve as breadcrumbs in the selva oscura, allowing my decryption to be picked up where I left it.

The Basics

Nora lives in an upscale suburb where it just so happens a serial killer is on the loose. The latest disappearance of a woman who leaves a blood-drenched bedroom behind has Nora more embroiled in these killings than she ever wanted to be. And it makes her a new target.

My Thoughts

That’s a really bad attempt at “The Basics" up there. Because all that was definitely true. The book is about a woman named Nora who comes face-to-face with a serial killer who makes her life hell. It’s also a book about a book, a fantasy classic Straub invented purely for this tale called Night Journey. In the midst of everything that’s happening to her, Nora takes it upon herself to solve the mysteries behind Night Journey, which proves to be a really satisfying arc. It’s also about Nora and Davey’s failing marriage, the fault of which lies mostly upon Davey’s father. Are you seeing how long “The Basics" could’ve gotten?

Normally this would be the part where I say the book was too busy and didn’t focus enough. This all sounds like a lot for a novel to carry, and it is, but it does all of it so incredibly well. It’s dense and packed with so much information and character development and twists and turns to the point of being epic, but it never felt like the novel was losing itself. It’s a long story well worth investing time in.

It has a strong lead in Nora, who carries this story while surrounded and hounded by a plethora of men who don’t understand her and yet imagine they have her figured out. I love reading a male writer who can find it within himself to connect with a female the way Straub did with Nora. He was with her every step of the way, therefore the reader is, as well.

This was my second attempt at Straub, and I’m glad I didn’t write him off. The first book I’d tried to read by him left me feeling confused and unsatisfied, to the point that I didn’t finish it. I wonder now if I was too young and easily distracted to appreciate what Straub does. He creates an atmosphere, and he doesn’t worry about whether what you’re seeing entirely makes sense. He concerns himself with what he’s making you feel. In the case of The Hellfire Club, it’s dread. Dread permeates this book, rises from it like a vapor, so that you can’t ignore it. It gets in the back of your mind and stays there. I feel like I had a full experience here because I decided to trust him even when things got surreal, and after worrying I was going to have to wash my hands of Straub, I’m ready to tackle another.

Final Rating

5/5 ( )

Really awesome book. I couldn't put it down. ( )