![]() ![]() Straub ( In the Night Room, 2004, etc.), who, this collection ably reveals, has affinities with both Stephen King and H.P. Readers of horror know, even if characters in movies and books do not, that it’s never a good idea to go up to the attic, even when it’s euphemized as “the upstairs junk room.” Bad things happen in such dark interior spaces, as the characters in Straub’s long opening story learn in a narrative marked by a tenuous hold on time and an even more tenuous one on reality, an unfortunate young man finds that hypnosis is maybe not such a good idea after all, leading to an event that, the protagonist tells us, “virtually destroyed my family.” And not just virtually. “Did I say he was dead? What I said was, he is… gone.” Welcome to an odd world in which the dead never quite go away, and the living are-well, not quite there. ![]()
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