Floating Dragon

Zusatztext Praise for Peter Straub and Floating Dragon “Here is a novel guaranteed to double the national nightmare quotient! so watch out.”— Cosmopolitan “Buy it today. Anything by Straub is worth several thousand John Sauls and a million V.C. Andrewses.”— Philadelphia Inquirer “A book that positively bubbles with invention! jammed with characters! color! events! hackle-raising twists of fate! horrific monsters! terrifying nightmares! and a reality that shimmers and shifts as much as the noxious stream from a witch’s cauldron.”— Book World Informationen zum Autor Peter Straub Klappentext The quiet suburban town of Hampstead is threatened by two horrors--one is natural! the unstoppable creation of man's power gone mad. The other is not natural at all--and makes the first look like child's play. Includes a new Introduction by the author. Reissue. 1   1962–1963 For Stony Baxter Friedgood, her infrequent adulteries were adventures—picking up a man who thought he was picking her up gave her life a sense of drama missing since she had been twenty and a student at Scripps-Claremont. Not only adventures, they were the salvation of her marriage. In college she had juggled four boyfriends, and only one of them, a mathematics graduate student named Leo Friedgood, had known of the existence of the others. Leo had seemed amused by her secretiveness, as he was amused by her private school nickname. Only after several months did Stony realize the extent to which amusement masked arousal. She married him just after graduation—no graduate school for Stony, and no more for Leo, who shaved his beard and bought a suit and took a job with Telpro Corporation, which had an office in Santa Monica. 2   1969 Tabby Smithfield grew to the age of five in an enormous stone house in Hampstead, Connecticut, with four acres of well-tended ground and a burglar alarm on the front gates. The neighborhood, consisting of sixteen houses along Long Island Sound, was impressive enough to attract its own tourists; perhaps six cars a day trolled down Mount Avenue, the drivers and passengers leaning to glimpse the mansions behind the gates. Locally, Mount Avenue was “The Golden Mile,” though it was twice longer than that; it was the original road between Hillhaven, the Victorian suburb of Patchin, and Hampstead. Mount Avenue, the site of the original farm settlements of Hampstead and Hillhaven, had once been the principal coaching road north to New Haven, but its hectic days were long past. Manufacturers with plants in Bridgeport or Woodville, a doctor, and the head of Patchin County’s biggest legal practice lived in the impressive houses, along with others like them, older people who wished no excitement in their private lives. Tourists rubbernecking along the Golden Mile rarely saw them—there might be a visiting movie star taking the sea-laden air along the coastal road or a college president pausing for breath before he made his pitch for funds, but the owners of the houses were invisible. Outside the gray stone house, however, those taking a fast peek through the opened gates in 1969 might have seen a tall dark-haired man in tennis whites playing with a small boy. Perhaps a uniformed nanny would have been hovering on the steps before the front door, her posture inexplicably tense. And perhaps the boy’s posture too would have seemed awkward, inhabited by the same tension, as if little Tabby Smithfield were half-aware that he was not supposed to be playing with his father. They make an oddly static and incomplete scene, father and son and nanny. They are badly composed: one figure is missing. 3   1964 Stony Friedgood’s first affair after her marriage was in 1964, with the husband of a friend, a neighbor in their neat row of tract houses: he was unlike Leo, being jovi...

Product details

• Authors: Ian Pears, Peter Straub
• Publisher: Berkley Publishing Group
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 05.08.2003
• EAN: 9780425189641
• ISBN: 978-0-425-18964-1
• No. of pages: 624
• Dimensions: 108 mm x 175 mm x 34 mm
• Series: Jove Paperbacks
• Subject: Fiction > Science fiction, fantasy