[books] Peter Straub, The Hellfire Club (1996)

I have a habit of finding new entertainment purely by association with something that I already know and like. Sometimes, the new discovery will even eclipse the original artist or writer that got me interested in it in the first place. Peter Straub co-wrote a novel called The Talisman with Stephen King many years ago, and that introduced me to some very well-written thrillers from Straub, including Koko, Mystery, and The Throat. Straub's latest is The Hellfire Club, which is primarily the story of an aging woman kidnapped by a serial killer, although this story mingles with several others, including that of a decades-old disappearance from an artist's retreat, a corrupt book publisher, and the secret club from which the book gets its title. The net result of this web of subplots is a fairly schizophrenic jumble of a story that seems too obliged by its own complexity to tell a compelling story about the troubled marriage of Nora Chancel and how her life turns upside down when she is kidnapped by a serial killer.

While Nora is clearly the main character, the story seems centered on a fictional novel called Night Journey, a fantasy that seems in the vein of J.R.R. Tolkein about a young boy confronting his fears. Nora has married into the Chancel family, who are the publishers of this novel. She and her husband David live in the small town of Westerholm, Connecticut, which has currently seen several women on the younger side of middle age abducted and killed. These killings, along with painful memories of her tour of duty as a nurse in Vietnam and the onset of menopause, gnaw at Nora and threaten to destroy her marriage. When she is accused of kidnapping a local woman (another subplot that I won't get into), she winds up being at Westerholm's police station when the accused killer escapes, and is taken as a hostage.

The short description of what happens is that Nora and Dick Dart, the serial killer of Westerholm, run around the Northeast for a little while. But brief episodes fly by that hint at something bigger and possibly more sinister. Dart gives Nora a makeover that makes her look twenty years younger. Nora notices that he knows a lot about women, and he gets defensive when confronted about it. At some point, probably before Nora was kidnapped, her husband tells her about this strange club somehow linked to Night Journey. There's an ongoing thread about who wrote the book and its sequels. Dart's agenda for his jaunt has something to do with the book. The nephew of the sister of a poet who disappeared at a retreat for artists with Hugo Driver, the author of Night Journey, helps Nora when she temporarily gets free of Dart. David Chancel becomes a spineless little wretch, as does the doctor Nora fell in love with in Vietnam. While all of these could conceivably have something to do with Nora's plight, they ultimately don't matter very much. We don't get much insight into Nora's mind, or Dart's, or even Hugo Driver's, as his actions fifty-some-odd years ago have taken on a cosmic significance for Nora, not for any apparent reason.

The Hellfire Club isn't as bad as that sounds. Nora is an intriguing enough character from the bits of insight that Straub does deliver, and the pace, while not entirely consistent, is certainly not without momentum. Dick Dart is also not without his charms, and the bizarre Hellfire Club showed promise as an important key to the story had it been developed. Ultimately, when you step back to think about what just happened, there's just too much going on that is almost entirely extraneous. Straub has worked wonders in the past with sharp turns and plot twists, but his efforts here are a bit heavy-handed, and the web he tries to weave manages to trap the story instead of the reader.