| Title | : | The Hellfire Club |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0345477278 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780345477279 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Mass Market Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 544 |
| Publication | : | First published January 13, 1996 |
| Awards | : | Bram Stoker Award Best Novel (1996), British Fantasy Award Best Novel (1997) |
Then Davey tells Nora a surreal story about the Hellfire Club, where, years before, he met an obsessed fan of Chancel House’s most successful book, Night Journey —a book that has a strange history of its own. . . .
Suddenly terror engulfs She must defend herself against fantastic accusations even as a madman lies in wait. And when he springs, Nora will embark on a night journey that will put her fears to rest forever, dead or alive. . . .
The Hellfire Club Reviews
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Initial Thoughts
If you've followed my reviews you'll know I've been on a bit of a Peter Straub tear lately. The Hellfire Club is my fourth of his books in four consecutive months and I continue to get more impressed with the quality of the guys work. It's a real shame that ill health has called a halt to his work as I'd most certainly be a constant reader of his. Get well soon Pete and hope you're concentrating on what's important... writing quality fiction for yours truly! I mean family, yes family.
I read this one as part of a Goodreads buddy read with a few guys off the Night Shift group. So that really added to the experience. Cheers Corey and Dan for some epic discussion! Now on with the review...
The Story
The premise in Hellfire Club continues Straub's departure from the supernatural, with a more straightforward crime novel. Set in upscale Westerholm, Connecticut, four women have disappeared leaving blood drenched bedrooms. A woman named Nora Chancel finds herself heavily embroiled and is soon the prime suspect for the latest murder. But is there more than meets the eye and what is the connection between current events and the cult classic horror novel, the Night Journey? The standout novel of her family's publishing company Chancel House.
The Writing
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Straub's writing is fantastic. It can take some getting used to at first. He loves his intricately crafted sentences that can stretch a bit. But once you're into his style you really start to appreciate what's on offer and just how second rate a great number of other thriller writers are. James Patterson, I'm looking at you kid.
Straub has a very distinctive voice that has very classic vibes. He wants to give you all the individual facets of a story from multiple angles that he can bring together at the conclusion. Perfect for these mystery style thrillers. Some people are adverse to the slower pace but I absolutely love it and when the pace picks up and goes bonkers it's like a shock to the system.
The Characters
The Hellfire Club contains some fantastic characters as most Straub novels do with the depth and craft invested into each. But in this one, we get one of the best sociopathic serial killers I've come across in Dick Dart (a killer name for a killer character). The interaction between him and Nora are fantastic, intense and disturbing. Straub use some fantastic monologues to demonstrate the internal thought process of this vile human being, if you can call him that, to brilliant effect.
But Dart may not be the true villain of this piece and there's a host of other brilliant characters. You'll have to read and find out. The only thing I will say is that the pace can slow down in certain points and leave you scratching your head as to where the narrative is going, but then it will pick right back up and take a totally different direction that you didn't see coming.
Final Thoughts
As you can tell I really enjoyed the Hellfire Club. But the funny thing is this is my fifth Straub novel and it ranks at the bottom. The guy writes crazy good novels. So I can't give this one a full five stars and that's mainly due to a few pacing issues with a few threads that didn't really pay off. I mean don't ask why this is called the Hellfire Club as it has very little to do with the story. Apparently it was set to be called the Night Journey and that would have been far more appropriate. When you read it you'll know exactly why.
So a very good and well deserved four star reading experience. And before I go my Straub top five just in case you were wondering:
1 Ghost Story
2 Koko
3 Floating Dragon
4 Mystery
5 Hellfire Club
Merry Christmas!
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I first read this in the late 90s. I remembered it as a fascinating mystery about an imaginary book. However, I reading it again I found both the book within the book and the mystery less interesting than I thought.
This time around it seemed to be about the different ways men abuse women. Some of the scenes of abuse are intensely disturbing.
The main character is Nora Chancel, middle aged, menopausal, everybody's victim. We see her suffer the bullying of her father in law, the carelessly cruelty of her emotionally retarded husband, and her betrayal by the man she thought was her oldest friend. Most of all we see her suffer the grotesque attentions of her kidnapper/rapist. These events are described in painstaking detail. I thought that even the few good men in the book treated her with a casual disregard, and too many of the female characters made excuses for the actions of the men.
20 years ago this bothered me less than it does now. As the book hasn't changed I can only assume it's me.
I believe that Nora was meant to be a strong woman, a survivor. But all I could see was her running from one abusive man to another. Again and again she turns to men for help, and again and again they betray her or let her down.
The various threads of the multi layered story are knitted together cleverly and the characters are well observed (often horribly so). Sometimes there was too much exposition and the dialogue seemed a little clunky, but on the whole it is a skillful piece of work. Even on a reread Night Journey the book within the book, exerted a fascination, and it was that which brought me back to this novel after so many years.
However, the descriptions of abuse, mental, emotional, physical and sexual were a bit too much for me. I don't think I'll ever read it again. -
Wow! What a rollercoaster ride of a book this turned out to be! This was only my third Peter Straub read (not including the two he wrote with King). I felt like this was the easiest to read out of the three. It's definitely a thriller and gets the heart racing numerous times throughout!
There are some really great characters in this one! Nora is awesome and by the end is a total badass! The villain, Dick Dart, (amazing name for a villain!) is crazy, evil, vile, and one of the most vicious villains I've read in a while. Alden turns out to be pretty awful as well.
Straub's descriptions and world building are first-rate. He's definitely one of the greats when it comes to telling the story. Overall this was so much fun to read! I loved all the thrills and heart pounding moments! Straub always does good work and I'd definitely recommend this one to anyone looking for a great, action-packed book. -
Don’t go into this expecting traditional “horror”. Thanks to Peter Straub’s professional and personal relationship with Stephen King, the uninitiated assume he writes easily-categorized horror. That isn’t so. Straub is a master of exploration and combination: his works infuse several different genres and ideas. The Hellfire Club is a complex crime mystery with gothic horror and thriller elements infused in when appropriate. But this isn’t Ghost Story.
I’m a Straub fanboy, okay? I’ve given almost everything of his I’ve read five stars. He deals in complicated themes and ideas, but he somehow never gets too bogged down. At least, I don’t think so. I know Straub isn’t everyone’s cup of tea; this isn’t exactly beach reading, after all. Straub wants his readers to think.
What makes this novel stand out amongst the rest of this author’s output is the villain, Dick Dart: a charming womanizer and serial killer. Typically Straub deals with serial killers off-screen; here, the writer is happy to let his villain act out in the middle of the action, hamming it up all the way. And there’s the matter of Nora, our protagonist, a remarkably strong and vividly drawn female character. Typically Straub’s novels feature male leads, so to see that dynamic shaken up is a nice change.
I must also comment on the mystery at the center of this pulsating, obsessive novel: the legend and confusion surrounding a novel, and its writer, and the circumstances in which the novel (and its sequels) were written. Straub was successful at stringing me along, keeping me on the edge of my seat, as the mystery got deeper.
This is an intense, scary winner!
Read for ‘on my TBR for 3+ years’ in Halloween Bingo. -
Althought the title suggest much, there is virtually nothing about the titular club in The Hellfire Club. It's one of many interesting themes which Straub piles one on another, but it is never really developed. The real star of this show is a book called Night Journey and a woman named Nora Chancel.
Almost baroque in in the excess of character, themes and plot threads that run through it, The Hellfire Club attempts to be many things but doesn't really succeed at any of them. A book about books, secret societies, and a mystery thriller, character study and almost gothic setting give it an air of a book to look out for. However, although well executed it is not very memorable; I wished for a hunt which would unweave a detailed history of Night Journey and got detailed descriptions of police procedurals instead; I wished for suspenseful chase and got a villain who is so over the top in his goofballness that he completely ruins the atmosphere which Straub has succesfully developed. Every scene he is in the novel slows down and becomes more or less absurd; the moment he's out it picks up again, until the next entrance.
Straub is a good writer and Stephen King blurbs this as "by far and away the best book Peter Straub has ever done...", but it's not the case. Although the mystery of the novel is compelling and the quest to uncover it could be fascinating, the serial killer part is completely mundane and rather uninteresting. A great start arrives at a lackluster finish, and The Hellfire Club leaves the reader with an impression of unexplored potential. -
First off, let’s address the elephant in the room. Can we talk about the decision to name a main character “Dick Dart”? Lol. Bold move, Straub. Bold move.
Also, this was a good book (despite having way too many plotlines unraveling at once). In lesser hands, this story would have fallen flat on its ass. Luckily, Straub knows what he is doing and not only made it work, but crafted a compelling and interesting plot bolstered by an excellent game of cat and mouse between two strong characters. Not a perfect book, but I never lost interest and flew through it rapidly. -
On the heels of the author's really good novella Special Place, I was interested in checking out a full length novel of his. This might not have been the one to start with, but it was available at the library, so I read it. If I didn't know the two were written by the same author, I never would have guessed. Where one is succinct, the other one is verbose (and not just because of the difference in format), it just seemed like completely different writers. Hellfire Club is an exhausting read and not necessarily in a good way. It's jammed with so many unlikable pretentious characters, so many events of past and present...it's tough to wade through. It's well written, but almost impossible to tell what the novel is trying to be. Is it a crime caper, a literary mystery, a family drama? Nora is fairly tolerable and the main heroine, the woman with an impossibly terrible taste in men. Her husband is a spineless repulsive man. His family is a nest of...well, something mean and vicious. And then there is Dirk Dart. The author has pretty much spent himself on one character so wild, co colorful, so entertaining that the rest of the book lags and drags by comparison. Dick Dart is as much fun as a rapist and murderer can be, he's got a sense of humor, impeccable taste and a witty repartee. He is by far and away the best past of this otherwise overdone and overwritten novel. This is not a bad book by any means, but not sure if it's worth the effort. It entertained for the most part, but curiously failing to engage. Something was amiss.
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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 -
Not a horror story.
When I try new novels like this one, it reminds me why half the time I just listen to Salem's Lot over again. But, I've listened to everything Stephen King has on audiobook, so I keep trying new titles by different authors.
This is my second novel by Peter Straub. Ghost Story was the first, which was actually a horror novel. I reread the jacket, and I feel like The Hellfire Club tries to portray itself as horror, so it only gets one star. I had hope in the beginning, but then it drifted from surreal and possibly paranormal back to ho-hum. However, if I wasn't expecting horror, it wasn't actually that bad (except I never would have bought it). Dick Dart's character is very entertaining and interesting. However, I feel like there is too much nonessential dialogue by Nora. I guess I could never get into the whole authorship drama thing around Night Journey. And I'm not crazy about the ending.
So it looks like this is my last Straub novel unless someone recommends a novel of his that will scare the living daylights out of me. ;)
Oh, for anyone who has read Bag of Bones, did you ever notice similarities between the two novels, with the multi-generational plot development? -
Peter Straub's The Hellfire Club features a satisfying finale. But in my opinion it takes entirely too much effort to get to that payoff. If you want to look at this novel from a cost versus benefit perspective: you, Constant Reader, will pay entirely too much in time and effort for that aforementioned payoff. By the time I was nearing the end of The Hellfire Club there was no joy left in me I literally just wanted to get it over with. I am forced to give this book two stars because of the ending but it was a near thing.
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Stephen King says this book moves like an express train. It moves like a snail. Shows what he knows. His son Joe Hill's a better author than he is (no, I don't mean the '73-'83 King, or a few after that, like It). It wasn't talentless, so I'll give the book two stars, but it didn't go anywhere for the longest time, and when it finally did, it wasn't a place I'd want to visit. I love Julia and Ghost Story, but didn't get this one.
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Well where to start? WOW! What a journey this book was!
Very-well written! It was my first book by Peter Straub and really had no clue at all who he was... I only knew he was a close friend and collaborator of Stephen King, and thought to my self "gosh another author who writes a book once a week about anything without any real sense" (p.s.: sorry for all of the King's fans).
The real reason why I wanted to read this book was because of an tv episode of the UK show "Most Haunted". The episode was about The West Wycombe caves, in which allegedly meeting of the infamous club were held.
Anyhow was intrigued at first. It starts kind of in a classical way, he presents the protagonists and the set-up. Nora Chancel is the protagonist, she is the wife of a editor Davey Chancel, son of a succesful publisher. About 50 pages in there's a brutal murder and the connection to the protagonists begins. Typical. Then we see more and more about this book "The Night Journey" and he expose some of the corrolation between it and the murders and the past of Nora's husband.
Straub really exposes the American society through a dark pov, there is something really dark about the book, it deals with modern issues and the antagonist is human. Wich at some time is hard to believe. He's very brutal, gruesome and pityless. A cold hearted antagonist who satisfy the typical "Oh, no! He's not going to do that?!". Well yes he is!
Anyhow my best book yet!
5/5 -
No terror. Sí explicitad: follar y matar.
Cuanta la vida de la parejita ideal que no es lo que aparenta. Ella amargada, él hijo de editor famoso y que escribió la NOVELA, la cual cambia el mundo por su calidad.
Ella se aburre y con la ayuda de un asesino al que creen que es ella. Hará que se escape y busque quien escribió realmente ese libro que su marido supuestamente escribió. Y ese viaje lo realizara a veces con un asesino, a veces con un acosador y muchas veces gente rara.
Straub es un pervertido con gran calidad literaria. -
BORING AS THE TITLE
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Could not get into this one.
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Peter Straub really is an awful author....I don't understand how he is so popular. This marks my last Straub book, unless I come across something really interesting.
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Awful. -
We had always avoided reading Peter Straub, assuming he was your typical horror fiction writer. However, we turned out to be very wrong. Recently, we had to spend some time in Hospice, waiting as some of our kin went through their transitional period from life to life and we came upon the Hellfire Club in one of the waiting rooms and were intrigued by the title.
It turned out to be a murder mystery of sorts, but in no way a typical who-done-it, and a quite well written literary work that involved not only murder, but a mystery concerning the authorship of a book. It is a multi-layered story whose main character, Nora Chancel, unravels these mysteries while her marriage disintegrates and her life is endangered and she manages somehow to master demons both psychological from her past, and quite real in the present in the form of a serial killer. It is quite a good book. So good that while we began it in Atlanta and had to leave the book there unfinished, we got it again when we returned home in order to finish it.
The Silver Elves
authors of
Elven Silver: The Irreverent Faery Tales of Zardoa Silverstar -
I actually read this because of The Talisman, which Straub co-wrote with Stephen King. As you can tell by looking over my reading history, I'm a bit of a King junkie, so it seemed natural that I should try out Peter Straub and see how I liked him.
Turns out that he's fucking awesome. I'd been in a little bit of a reading slump before picking up this book, and it has got me thoroughly back into reading. It's hard to describe because so many things happen, and I admit I was expecting something supernatural. Instead, I got a really solid, really fucked up thriller in which all of the plot points were neatly - and believably - tied up.
Besides that, Straub writes a great female lead, and doesn't muck up the story line with unnecessary romance or sex. There was no sweeping love story, the troubled marriage wasn't saved, and the romantic subplot didn't even pop up until the last page of the book, leaving it up to the reader to decide what happens.
Also, you can't go wrong with a serial killer villain that knows his cosmetics. -
The title is a lurid publishers trick, is my guess. The Hellfire Club is really only a minor plot element. The real mystery is what happened to an author in the 1930's and whether or not a manuscript was actually written by the man to whom it is ascribed.
As far as dark suspense novels, this one certainly has a husband's character you won't soon be able to get over how awful he is, and how patient his wife is. It's truly cringe-inducing. -
C'est bien, mais l'intrigue est pas mal alambiquée et met du temps avant d'avancer et surtout, l'héroïne est un peu du genre paillasson et victime à répétition... heureusement elle finit par se secouer à la fin.
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Straub writes like a dream, but sometimes the subject is just too vile. I didn't like (or care about) anyone in this book, but it was exceedingly well written.
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eponymous sentence:
p86: "...I told her to meet me at six-thirty at Hannigan's, a bar a couple of blocks away, and she said no, we should go to the Hellfire Club down on Second Avenue, great place, and let's meet at seven-thirty so she could take care of some things she had to do...."
spaces:
p7: On her way to Rapunzel and its two terrible occupants, onea penniless ferret, the other a pitted bull toad with wandering hands, Agnes ignored a Shorelands commandment and left Gingerbread's door unlocked.
p116: "...After I got out of RISD, I went to Europe and traveled here and there, but mainly lived in London, painting and taking art courses, and after a couple of years I came back and lived in L.A. and did some design work for a couple of small pressesand read everything I could about Hugo Driver, which is when I learned about Shorelands, and after a while I came to New York so I could get a job at Chancel...."
p183: "Where is that blasted manu script, anyhow?"
le mot juste:
p163: Daisy was talking about a cement-slab discount department store which had occupied two blocks of the Post Road for about a decade.
p197: "This way," the policeman said, moving past her to walk briskly down the cement-block corridor.
p272: The headlights of a dark green sedan on the side of the lot shone on a cement planter in which geraniums wilted in a carpet of cigarette butts.
p273: He tossed them into the cement planter.
p390: She looked away, and her handsome face hardened like cement.
p452: A man in khaki work clothes pushed himself out of a lawn chair next to a trailer on a cement apron and came forward, admiring the car.
p453: He grabbed the clipboard, stamped across the cement, climbed into his trailer, and slammed the door.
p454: They came out of the trees and moved toward a gravel court surrounded by a low stone wall topped with cement slabs. The wall opened onto a white path between two narrow lawns, and the path led up four wide stone steps to the centerpiece of this landscape, a long stone building with three rows of windows in cement embrasures, some dripping water stains like beards.
ocr:
p452: Monty's Glen &" The Song Pillars.
p454: Dart could not watch her every minute" by now, he didn't even feel that he had to.
p530: The first time she had escaped this knot, Dart had tied a single hand in front of her" with both hands tied behind her back, she would have to find the end of the rope with her fingers.
It's beginning to grow on me. But then again, Dart is one mean sumbitch. -
I read this back when it came out in my early 20s and enjoyed it a lot at the time, the re-read was interesting. The structure is solid and it moves quickly and is entertaining in its own right- but 25 years doesn't age this book well.
In the 90s lots of white male writers were trying to respond to feminism's critique of fictional female characters and instead of opening up a path for female writers to come in and explore female characters, male writers created a lot of kooky female protagonists that don't work well.
Nora is untenable. Smart, savvy, and incisive to see to the heart of everyone's motivations in the book, like an emotional IQ of 200+ but meek and servile to her husband and his family who use and abuse her. There is no Davey and Nora couples in the world, they don't match up or meet, they have almost no connection. It just doesn't add up.
Dick Dart is a copy and paste serial killer villain who hates women, gay men, and his father. In his final scene Nora accuses him of wearing women's clothing in private - trope driven gay/trans motivations were easy pickings in the 90s, seems like weak writing and hollyweird stereotyping now.
Jeffery is your stock wunderkind karate expert/chaste male friend
Nora's virtue is largely tied to her martyrdom and how much abuse can she suffer - she's a very asexual tomboy force feminized and raped by Dart.
It's just all so odd, and then you mix in the story within the story with it's loose resemblance to Lord of the Rings and the supposed mystery of the literary party in the 1930s.
Parts of the writing are very good, Straub's insights into the abuse of women and how society treats them have deep and nuanced moments, and then sometimes it just tanks and the dialog is stiff and awkward. I haven't read a book this disjointed in a long time. A good editor was sorely lacking.
I dunno, I'm very non plussed. Overall it was a total "meh." -
While the saying goes “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” sometimes you can. For instance when I bought Peter Straub’s novel THE HELLFIRE CLUB in 1996. I knew as soon as I saw it this book was going to be a chore to read. And the 463 pages inside it weren’t helping. I bought the novel on the strength of KOKO, another Straub novel I’d just read a few years earlier. But no matter what I did, I just couldn’t bring myself to read it. I couldn’t say why that was, what it was specifically that seemed so daunting about the book, but I just couldn’t sit down, open it, and start reading.
And then one day, a few weeks ago, 15 years after I bought it, I sat down, opened it, and started reading. And of course the result was exactly what I knew it would be. See, there’s no one better in the world at what he does than Peter Straub. Based on a few early novels, and a close association with Stephen King, Straub has, I believe, been unfairly lumped into the “horror” category--and believe me, I’m not dumping on horror, it’s my lifeblood, but what Straub does is not your garden variety straight up horror.
This is literary horror at its finest. And of course, having made my way finally through THE HELLFIRE CLUB, I chastised myself for not reading this sooner.
Story: Nora Chancel and her husband, publishing heir Davey, have been paying close attention to the news lately, waiting patiently to see if the serial killer in their neck of the woods is going to strike again. But on the day the police make an arrest, the latest victim, the Chancels’ own realtor, Natalie Weil, turns up, alive, but a mental wreck, and she’s pointing the finger at Nora. The FBI takes their cue from Davey’s own admission of his affair with Natalie that Nora is indeed the one responsible for Natalie’s plight. But before anything more can be done, the serial killer, local big time lawyer Dick Dark, grabs Nora in the police station and together they make their escape.
With his cover blown, Dick Dart is now beyond societal constraints and allowed, finally, to let loose and be who he really is. But who he really is is a raving lunatic on a mission. That mission is to prove the authorship of a particular book.
Background: The Chancels own Chancel House Publishers, which, while doing okay, owes the majority of its success to one book: NIGHT JOURNEY. The book, an epic fantasy, has had the kind of influence on its readers that most writers only dream about. I’m talking about Neil Gaiman’s SANDMAN kind of influence. There are entire sub-cultures devoted to this book and its world. Its author, Hugo Driver, long-since dead, has made a fortune for the Chancels. But now someone’s making waves and claiming Driver stole the novel.
Background to the background: It all started in 1938 at a writer’s colony called Shorelands. In attendance that summer were Hugo Driver, Davey’s grandfather (and founder of Chancel House) Lincoln, and, among others, Katherine Mannheim. That summer, Mannheim turned up missing, was presumed to have left Shorelands just as she was about to be asked to leave anyway, and, with her weak heart, was believed to have died while crossing through the woods that surrounded the property. But her body was never found. Now, decades later, Mannheim’s family is declaring Hugo Driver stole his novel, and Dick Dart is on a mission to silence anyone with even a hint of proof this might be the case.
And he’s brining Nora along with him.
Dart takes Nora on quite a journey and Nora, to her credit, hangs in there and, instead of getting sucked into Dart’s madness, outsmarts him while maintaining her hold on reality AND unraveling the mystery that surrounds NIGHT JOURNEY.
Hey, I never said THE HELLFIRE CLUB was a straightforward ABC novel. This thing is complicated, its dense, it demands your attention. But it also rewards that attention and focus with one of the tightest, most well-constructed plots you’re likely to find. But like I said earlier, there’s no one who can do what Peter Straub does quite like Peter Straub. I mean he’s simply an A+ writer.
Straub writes with such care and detail, you can’t help but be drawn completely into his world, all the sights and sounds vibrant, the story truly alive.
That’s not to say THE HELLFIRE CLUB earns a 5-star review, there are flaws. Namely in its villain.
Dick Dart is a handsome, brilliant, very capable man. He could do and have anything he wanted in life. He’s charming, and his luck is incredible. But he’s also completely psychotic. And this is where THE HELLFIRE CLUB begins to cave in for me. Dart is such a perfect villain. He’s the one person in this novel I had a hard time imagining was a real, breathing person. He can do no wrong. I can’t stand villains like that, they don’t ring true for me. I hate perfect villains, I need my villains to be flawed in ways other than being the villain, you know? But not Dick Dart. He’s got money, charm, looks, brains, and other than Nora, nothing ever goes wrong for him. I can’t buy into that kind of character. He doesn’t read like a person, to me; he reads like a plot device.
But even so, as much as my distaste for the villain should have brought the book down even further, Straub managed to write around it in such a way that the novel is never about Dick Dart vs. Nora Chancel, it’s about Nora herself and her growth, her journey. Dart and his antics are really only a PART of what Nora goes through, and Straub never loses sight of the goal.
Minus a few gratuitous and unnecessarily graphic scenes, THE HELLFIRE CLUB is the kind of novel I wish I had written. Hell, it’s the kind of novel I wish I COULD have written. But this is far beyond my skill level, even after 20 years of writing fiction myself. It’s not the perfect novel, but it’s really close. -
As the Joker torments Gotham City and Stephen King's It feeds on the misery of Derry, Maine, Dick Dart seems to embody all the hypocrisy and pretensions of the upscale suburb of Westerholm, Connecticut. He stays submerged through the first half of the novel, as the heroine Nora wades into a double mystery. Someone is killing prominent women in Westerholm, and it's somehow tied in with the cult novel that her husband's publishing house owns. Evidence mounts that Nora herself is the killer. Just as she's about to be arrested, Dart rises up like a sea monster and drags her down to the sordid depths.
On the book jacket, Dart is compared to Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter. Like Lecter, he's a ghastly mixture of effete snobbishness and brutal appetite, all bound up in a bubble of self-worship. Unlike Thomas, Straub doesn't turn him a hero. Dart never softens, never gains a bit of warmth. Straub sees through him: Dart is nowhere near as witty or Don Juan-sexy as he supposes. For all his aristocratic airs, he has a vulgar little mind that appreciates nothing but himself.
Nora is more than his match, even when physically overpowered. As written by Straub, she exposes most 'strong' female characters for the strutting cardboard blanks they often are. She isn't a saint, just naturally good, with her decency becoming ever more radical and resourceful with each fresh horror she's thrown into.
Warning: please don't read this book if you're having man-trouble. Besides Dart, nearly every male in Hellfire Club is an absolute scuzzwang. You will be gnawing the pages in fury.
