Shadowland

by Peter Straub

Paper Book, 1981

Status

Available

Call number

813

Genres

Publication

New York : Berkley Books, 1981

Description

You have been there... if you have ever been afraid.Come back. To a dark house deep in the Vermont woods, where two friends are spending a season of horror, apprenticed to a Master Magician.Learning secrets best left unlearned. Entering a world of incalculable evil more ancient than death itself. More terrifying. And more real.Only one of them will make it through.

User reviews

LibraryThing member tootstorm

2011, Jan.: #2
Another book and another leftover from last year's reading. This time from a month of horror planned and just about ignored completely in October (I hardly got past King and Straub and mostly King's entirely mediocre and disappointing Talisman). As a big fan of Straub's Ghost Story,

as well as his much more 'literary' (and some could say: sexy) aspirations and style of writing (that completely trump Stephen King's slapdash shenanigans; I'll just needlessly toss that in there, o yah!), this bastard was a big bore. A literal bore. Must mean something coming from a person whose use of 'boring' as an insult is so rare as to be nonexistent, partic. if we're dealing with beach reads that are meant to sweep me off my feet and keep me up all night like this here Shadowland. Ungh.

We don't need a drag-ass setup of 150 pages that leads to a zip-zip-zoom along a badly-paced, potential-oozing, completely nonsensical good v. evil plot, one of the most obvious and overblown I've read in a damn long time, which is a bummer, because I understand what Straub was half-heartedly going for here, a sort of riff off of John Barth's riff of of Joseph Campbell's riff off of Carl Jung, ancient mythology and human nature--just...you know, as mainstream 'horror'--and I like that dream; just a shame he couldn't reach it.

60%
[740]

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12 more

LibraryThing member Crowyhead

This is one of my favorite of Peter Straub's novels. It's a creepy take on the idea of the Sorcerer's Apprentice -- only in this case, the sorcerer may be more dangerous than anything his apprentice can cook up. There are loads of references to fairy tales here, which are fun to try to place, and I

love the way that Straub makes it difficult to figure out what's real magic and what's just slight of hand.

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LibraryThing member obscuresoul13

Shadowland is divided into three parts. The first part is set in a third-rate private school where Tom Flanagan meets Del Nightingale and gets exposed to magic. Tom & his classmates are harassed by Skeleton Ridpath, the coach's son. The second part is set in Shadowland (Del's uncle's-Coleman

Collins-mansion) where the boys are the magician's apprentices for the summer. Trouble ensues. The third part is still within the house but is in the space between reality & Collins' illusions. It is the battle between magicians.

I found this book quite interesting. The plot kept me coming back for more. The ending was gripping.

Definitely a must read.

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LibraryThing member Bookmarque

Spoilers abound. You have been warned.

My memories of this book are very strong – stronger perhaps than the actual book is to me now that I’ve read it again. Not that it has no impact for me today, but that my mind is matured and I am more jaded than before. Oh how I wish for the brain of my

late-teens sometimes. I remember this book as being dark, brutal and deeply layered with different realities. I remember thinking that my brain almost hurt with having to keep the different realities straight in my head. Which was real, which was dream, which was hallucination? As a 32-year old reading this book, those things are clearer to me. This time I didn't try to take each incident or feat that the boys performed and fit it into the course schedule that Uncle Cole set for them.

Also clearer to me is the Magician’s motive in wanting Tom and Del at Shadowland. Dr. Charles Nightingale goes to WWI as himself and comes back as Coleman Collins, a magician of awesome ability with the name of a long-dead (and black) stage magician. Collins has no intentions of going on the stage, but somehow does and invents evil characters through which to perform. Herbie Butter never struck me as a funny or amusing role (mostly because Herbie is almost a clown and I hate clowns). Herbie is a mechanical magician who did physically impossible things. The Collector was much more straightforward. He was a receptacle for people who got in Collins’ way. Eventually, Skeleton Ridpath ended up there and could continue to terrorize Del and Tom.

Also terrorizing Tom and Del are The Wandering Boys. Troll-like thugs who used to perform with a rival magician on the same tours that Collins and Speckle John were part of. I am still not sure if these guys (all with weird names like Root, Thorn and Seed) were the original guys, or newly hired thugs a la the Dread Pirate Roberts. They live out by the lake which is part of the Shadowland estate and enjoy badger baiting which not only kills the badger but also the dogs. They end up helping Collins crucify Tom. One or two of them hesitate, but don’t interfere in Collins’ plan and willingly go on to beat the crap out of Del when the Magician tells them to.

The crucifixion scene was more vivid to me in memory than in the present. I think my young and inexperienced mind was more receptive (shocked, sympathetic to?) to human brutality than it is now in my media-hardened adulthood. It generally comes as a shock to a first time reader of Shadowland. I’ve never before or since read a crucifixion scene (except for the Bible).

I liked the private school theme also. It wasn’t a boarding school for Tom or Del but it had that same kind of intimacy. Masters and Prefects who were petty tyrants and under-classmen that were forced to wear beanies and to endure other humiliations. Learning the school song and facts under threat of punishment. Secret friendships, rivalries, passageways and legends. A world I’ll never know.

Skeleton Ridpath seemed more evil to me when I was younger. The 32-year old me sees him now as a pathetic kid who became twisted and dangerous after his mother died and his father’s only contribution to his upbringing was to humiliate and degrade him. His evil consumed him so much that he was the perfect instrument. Not just for the Collector, but for Del who wanted him gone from the school so much that he controlled him into stealing a valuable object from a rival school while they were all there for a football game.

Collins seems more evil to me now than when I was younger. He wanted to take the power from Del when he thought Del could be his successor, just as he took his mentor Speckle John’s power from him when he found he surpassed his teacher.In time he became aware of Tom and knew that this boy could possibly take his place as the King of the Cats. To prevent that, he brought him to Shadowland. There he created a world expressly to make Tom rebel. When he did, Collins found justification to kill him. But, he didn’t count on Tom’s ability to make even his untried talent work for him. Collins was forced into the Collector and then the mechanism from which it sprang to life, destroyed. A neat trick.

Del dies in the personification of the sparrow that his Uncle Cole forced him to. Rose Armstrong returns to the watery world that she belongs to, free from the pain of razor blades and nails when she walked (a mermaid in a lake?). Tom ends up a two-bit stage magician forcing himself to play in dives and live hand to mouth. He gave up the Owl chair forever it seems. And Skeleton – once freed from The Collector, goes back to school and then on to theological college and then to a monastery.

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LibraryThing member kalafudra

Shadowland is a horror novel by Peter Straub.

[Just to be perfectly clear: I did not finish this book. So this is not going to be a review, just a summary of the impressions I had of about the first third of the book and why I did not finish it.]

Plot:
Tom Flanagan and Del Nightingale become friends

when they go to boarding school together. One summer, Del invites Tom to his uncle’s house. This uncle, Coleman, is a magician and promises to teach Del and Tom the trade. But it seems that Coleman is not only an illusionist but practices actual sorcery.

Shadowland starts out as a normal boarding school story, if rather dark and with a lot of foreshadowing. This is not generally something bad but as the book is touted as a horror novel, I expect differently. And when I choose a horror novel to read, I want differently. Now, I read a good third of the book (maybe closer to half of it) and the book just didn’t pick up pace.

It’s not badly written but it just wasn’t what I wanted to read. And it didn’t deliver what it promised, or at least not quickly enough. I kept going for as long as I did because I actually quite liked the writing style, but in the end, it wasn’t enough to keep me interested.

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LibraryThing member avhacker

wow this book was so hard to follow and the charcters were crap! seriously i don;t even know how i finished this! its really bad.

LibraryThing member SevsOnlyGirl

Read as a teen, this book was horrifying and had many layers to the story. I was glad to see that when reading it as an adult, the story held up.

The story begins at a fancy prep school. Del and Tom become friends quickly because they are both fascinated with magic. There are all kinds of things

going on at the school - the students are having nightmares and other odd things are happening. Once school is over for the year, Tom accepts an invitation from Del to spend the summer holiday at Del's Uncle Collins' estate.

It turns out that Uncle Collins is a retired magician and plans on teaching them a lot over the holiday. Some of it is fun and some of it is terrifying. The problem is deciding which is real and which is not. Uncle Collins is also an alcoholic and half-crazy.

Some of the scenes are still disturbing to me, but nothing that shouldn't be read. There is a crucifixion scene that is very realistic and disturbing, but without it the book wouldn't be the same.

This is a great book as an introduction to what Peter Straub does. He is right up there with Stephen King - just as scary, using everyday objects and people, for the most part. Excellent Spring Break or Summer Break reading!!

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LibraryThing member Carl_Alves

Shadowland was one of the first horror books I read growing up (I think I may have been twelve at the time that I read it). Along with some of the early works of Stephen King, it was one of the big reasons I became addicted to the genre and later became a writer. Shadowland is a richly written,

complex books that I quickly became engrossed in. Shadowland follows two friends Del and Tom in boarding school. Both boys are into magic and dabble at it while they are in school. After the school year is over, they spend the summer at Del's uncle's house. Uncle Collins is a crazed, retired magician who gives the boy's a tutorial in real magic. As the book evolves, it starts to become clear that Uncle Collins isn't all in the up and up, something that Tom begins to pick up on. He comes to the conclusion that if he and Del are to survive the summer at Shadowland, they are going to have to escape. The only problem is that Uncle Collins has taken a keen interest in Tom and isn't about to let him go.

Shadowland is one of those books that perfectly fits the description of "hard to put down". Straub does a brilliant job of making the characters come alive. I've read many of Peter Straub's novels and this is my favorite. He did an excellent job of weaving in sub-plots and creating a story world that was both highly entertaining and very rewarding to read through. A definite horror classic, I would strongly advise to pick up a copy if you haven't already read this one.
Carl Alves - author of Two For Eternity

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LibraryThing member datrappert

Occasionally interesting, but fails to sustain the energy and horror of "Ghost Story". Way too long.

LibraryThing member jessicariddoch

It is surprising how hard it can be to review a book whn you have been asked to do it. The problem is that someone is going to read it. so my appologies in advance if you don't like what I have written.
The books is based arround a central "library" arround which a numer of other lands are

acessable. The main caracters are drawn from earth and one other world, The majority of these are young people though there are a couple of "adults", all charachers are humans.
this book is third in a series and it does show. the first couple of chapters are hard going as you have to catch up with the backstory, after this however i was able to get into the flow of the story. While I was aware that there was part of the past that I was missing it did not interfear with the enjoyment of the tale. The book cover does say that the books are best read in order but I was impressed by the ability of this book to manage to be a stand alone, much of this is due to the ability of the author to merge some of the back story into the current episode while managing not to retell the backstory. I still have a number of questions left as to what happened before but they did not interfear with the story line of this book, I will just have to get the previous books and read them to find out. However this episode although it started apparently from a good central point did not seem to have a satisfying ending. there was a feeling that the book had got too long so they had shunted chapters into the next book.
The style of writing was easy to read and the text was of a good size. This did not feel like a book written for children, more a book for a very easy read.
One of the sceen that will stay in my head from this book is where they are traveling through the library and seeing different areas and how they are treating the library. In my head I am trying to fit those that i know into the various cults. Am i a book worshiper or a woodcarver, perhaps someone else can tell me. The comment of the character can to taken at face value if you like.
I would reccomed this book for good reads in p3 to very poor readers in secondaries.

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LibraryThing member Charrlygirl

I didn’t love this as much as I did the first time around, but it was still pretty damn good.

LibraryThing member TobinElliott

I finally finished this train wreck of a novel. Another one that I read when it first came out, but I definitely had better memories of this than what I just experienced. I kept waiting for it to get good. I kept waiting for something to happen. I kept waiting for old men to stop pontificating

about their life histories...because, didn't I just read that in Ghost Story?

I must say, the first, non-Shadowland third wasn't horrible. Mostly pointless, and could have been done in more like fifty pages, but it wasn't horrible. But as soon as that blowhard Collins shows up? Yeah, the pace slows to a torturous crawl.

I think this was supposed to be Straub's The Shining but damn it fell flat. The biggest difference between King and Straub is that King gives you people you know. Your neighbour. The guy that works at the McDonalds, that kind of thing. Straub seems to try and do that, but his characters are rich and unrelateable. Where King will give you enough of the horror to make you want to run, Straub likes to have most of it occur off stage and have some boring old bastard tell you a story about it.

Anyway, like I said, the first third was okay. And in the following two thirds, there was the odd flash of brilliance (and it's the only reason for that second star)--because Straub actually can write when he's not so self-conscious of the words he's writing--and I found myself enjoying a scene or two. But then he just goes back to the boring crap and the old men and the stories and he just fills the back two-thirds with a heaping helping of I don't give a shit.

I'd had full intentions of reading Floating Dragon after this, but there's no way. Two books of his are enough. Thanks, Pete, I'd like to say it's been fun, but I can't.

I'm out.

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LibraryThing member Jonathan_M

After a harrowing freshman year at a mediocre private school where supernatural forces appear to be on the verge of assuming total control, Tom Flanagan and Del Nightingale--two fifteen-year-old boys with a passion for stage magic--take a cross-country train trip to Shadowland, the home of Del's

uncle Coleman Collins. Once a famous stage magician himself, the sinister Collins has plans for Tom. In true Straubian fashion, nothing is as it initially seems.

This was a tough book to read and it's a tough book to review; as the follow-up to Ghost Story, Peter Straub's masterpiece, it's bafflingly anemic. My least favorite Straub novel is A Dark Matter, which is peopled by insubstantial characters and ends with a whimper, but--paradoxically--it's a much easier read than this one. Though getting off to an eerily promising start, Shadowland loses focus when the setting shifts from the Arizona private school to Uncle Cole's house of horrors in Vermont. (And Collins is never quite fully realized as a character despite his obvious importance to the story; some of the school's faculty members, like football coach Chester Ridpath and unhinged headmaster Laker Broome, are much more vividly drawn.) The magical imagery feels labored, and unfortunately there's a glut of it. I enjoyed the first 140 pages, but struggled to finish Shadowland the first time and found it equally daunting when I revisited it in preparation for this review; I doubt that I'll ever read it again.

Two and a half stars.

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