Mystery

Mystery by Peter Straub

I’ll bet there are tons of readers out there like me.  Readers who probably never would have heard of Peter Straub had he not co-authored a couple of novels with Stephen King.  For decades, I’ve always wanted to read one of Straub’s novels.  I mean, if Stephen King respects him enough to write two books with the man, he must be good.  Right?  Fortunately, I felt very satisfied with my first Peter Straub novel.  Not only do I see what Stephen King likes about the guy, but I also see a lot of similarities in their styles of writing. Peter Straub has the ability to hook you in and make you pay attention to whatever it is that he writing about - regardless of whether or not he’s telling you anything relevant to moving the plot forward.  This takes skill, and as I get older, I realize how few authors can pull this off well.

Our story takes place around the late 1950s on one of those fictitious Caribbean islands.  Sure there are a ton of indigenous people that live on the island, but there are also a lot of rich Americans that reside there in one of their many “vacation” homes or whatever.  Our protagonist is a ten year old boy named Tom Pasmore.  As the story begins, Peter Straub seems to blend a bit of the supernatural around Tom.  We’re shown and told a lot of images and descriptions of “weird” things that surround the boy.  It’s almost as if some supernatural being or entity has a plan for young Tom.  This belief solidifies when Tom is hit by a car and has one of those “near death experiences”.  You know, the kind where you float towards a bright light, feel an incredible sense of peace, and are able to see what is going on down on earth surrounding your accident.  Well, as many of these experiences end up, Tom is reluctantly revived, and is now back in the hospital on a very long journey (at least a year, I think) back to recovery.

During his recovery, Tom meets a peculiar older man on the island named Lamont Von Helitz who seems to have a bizarre second sight when it comes to solving crime.  These two are united because it seems that Tom has a similar unique ability after his accident, and we quickly fast forward about seven years to where Tom is still, theoretically, a child, but old enough for our story to progress in a manner that it needs to. It seems that this island where they live on as had quite a few murder mysteries that have occurred recently, and not so recently.  With Lamont’s help, Tom is sort of sucked into the mysteries past and present to not only try to solve the crimes, but to discover some hidden truths that need to be revealed.

It seemed to me that as the book progressed, we didn’t really read about Tom’s “gift” anymore, and the story seemed to detour into a much more straightforward tale of Tom trying to solve these particular crimes.  This is not, however, a strict murder mystery tale.  No, Peter Straub goes much deeper than this, and we’re allowed to learn much more about Tom, his family, and his life in general.  It seems Tom is one of the many privileged on the island, and he’s surrounded by very wealthy friends and family that have more money than they know what to do with, but everyone is hopelessly miserable.  It’s ok to be miserable as long as you have gobs of money.  Right?

So much of this story looks at the very wealthy with a very unkind lens, and you can sense that Tom definitely doesn’t want anything to do with this farce of a life.  It doesn’t help when your grandfather is basically the richest, most powerful man on the island and considers it his duty to “plan” young Tom’s future.  So in addition to trying to solve a particular crime that happened many years before he was born, Tom is thrust into a life that he basically wants no part of, but is forced into because of his standing.

After reading this book, I realized that there were a lot of parts within this book that didn’t really connect as I thought they should have.  I never felt “lost” but felt “misguided” as in “why is the author taking this bizarre detour with the characters?”  Still, though, I loved the author’s style of writing, and I was never bored.  I breezed through this book rather quickly since I found it very engulfing.  Everything made sense in the end, but it just seemed as though there were quite a lot of events that didn’t really connect with me as I thought they should have.  I still must say that I would highly recommend this book - especially if you like Stephen King and have maybe only read the couple of books that the two of them did together.