Awards
Winner of the Bram Stoker Award
Synopses & Reviews
A woman commits suicide for no apparent reason. A week later, her son- fifteen-year-old Mark Underhill-vanishes. His uncle, novelist Timothy Underhill, searches his hometown of Millhaven for clues that might help unravel this horrible dual mystery. He soon learns that a pedophilic murderer is on the loose in the vicinity, and that shortly before his mothers suicide, Mark had become obsessed with an abandoned house where he imagined the killer might have taken refuge. No mere empty building, the house whispers from attic to basement with the echoes of a long-hidden true-life horror story, and Tim Underhill comes to fear that in investigating its unspeakable history, Mark stumbled across its last and greatest secret: a ghostly lost girl who may have coaxed the needy, suggestible boy into her mysterious domain.
Review
"lost boy lost girl may be the best book of [Peter Straub's] career." Stephen King
Review
"[A] wonderful webwork of a book....It's funny, and heartwarming, and genuinely scary." Neil Gaiman
Review
"[F]reshens shopworn horror elements...with an inventive structure...masterfully fleshed-out characters, and real emotional content. As a result, lost boy lost girl proves much more than just a ghost story: Straub puts the natural back in supernatural. (Grade: A-)" Entertainment Weekly
Review
"There are no false notes, no tired cinematic tricks; Straub entices, then unnerves us....This is a horror story, yes, but one to be shelved with those written by Straub's peers: the likes of Borges, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James." Douglas E. Winter, The Washington Post Book World
Review
"Mr. Straub's latest is an unusually taut, dynamic, spooky display of horror expertise, and its story is deftly told. If Mr. Straub does not quite deliver 'prose as supple as mink,' as Publishers Weekly recently lauded it, he does not overwrite either." Janet Maslin, The New York Times
Review
"The veteran horror writer's circuitous 16th outing....Strikingly imagined indeed, but the zigzag structure blurs the momentum and effect of what might have been one of Straub's best." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Ghost Story tingled our spines and raised goose pimples....lost boy lost girl numbs us to boredom. This is a horror story masquerading as something else or something else masquerading as a horror story. I'm just not exactly sure what." Jon Land, Providence Journal
Review
"It's taut and surprisingly moving, a treat even for those who don't believe in ghosts." Linnea Lannon, Detroit Free Press
Review
"Peter Straub has written a real thinking-person's thriller, a nuanced, layered reworking of the haunted-house story, genuinely creepy in spots, but coolly modulated from time to time with wry reminders that it's all only make-believe." Frank Wilson, Philadelphia Inquirer
Review
"Rather than scream-in-the-night scary, lost boy lost girl is pit-of-the-stomach disturbing....lost boy lost girl is literate without being stuffy a hard-hitting, quick read, but one to ponder." Mark Graham, Rocky Mountain News
Review
"Like much of his recent output, lost boy lost girl is Straub operating at the height of his storytelling powers and it's his spookiest, most unnerving solo effort since Ghost Story." Dorman T. Shindler, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Review
"lost boy lost girl is just as compelling as a sorrowful look at people wrestling with pasts they'd rather forget, or an exploration of the insatiable curiosity of adolescents, as it is a tale of twisted, unfeeling evil." Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald
Review
"[S]trange and lovely." Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
The terrifying New York Times bestseller from the coauthor of Black House is now available in mass market.
About the Author
Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Peter Straub is the author of sixteen novels, which have been translated into more than twenty foreign languages. He has won the British Fantasy Award, two Bram Stoker awards, and two World Fantasy awards. He lives in New York City.