Lost Boy Lost Girl

As with the other Peter Straub books I've read, you have to work a little harder, concentrate a little more than you do with some other authors. Everything is backside up and left side down, one minute you are in the kitchen baking cookies with auntie Jean, next you have the history of the Sasquatch followed by skateboarding with Eminem and then some journal entries from mysterious uncle Tim. Overall this book was 95% satisfying but man I wanted the baddie to suffer and he didn't and where the hell did Mark end up?

An entertaining but not great read. It was very creepy and atmospheric at times but at other times meandered. I really liked the writing so keen to read more of Straub's work.

Peter Straub is generally a classy writer. I thought so with the other books I've read. There are some good elements, some lovely sentences, and he's obviously intelligent. That said, I usually find that the endings of his novels (that I've read) fall a bit flat. Anti-climactic and all that. As for this book, I also found the dialogue of the two teenage boys to be a bit difficult to believe. It didn't quite ring true in that it almost tried to hard to sound like two modern teenage boys. I didn't believe they'd be interested in 69 Love Songs as much as hip hop. And the Midwestern town didn't quite ring true to me either, but I live in the Midwest in a CITY, so what do I really know. And the bloody romance in the end. That killed me. It was almost out of left field. Not totally, but there wasn't enough lead-in. And it was limp. The girl was lame, and Mark should have gone for his bestie. But that's usually the case in real life, anyway.

This book was a good mix of mystery and horror. I liked how the point of view switched from Mark while he was obsessed with the house and his uncle Tim trying to figure out what happened to his nephew.