All about him

Willy PATRICK has written an award-winning young-adult story, “In the Night Room” -- the same title that horror-meister Peter Straub uses for his new novel, in which Willy is one of the two main characters. Lately Willy has noticed gaps in her life: Between its more dramatic scenes, she can remember nothing. Something is pushing her to do things she doesn’t want to do, such as marry Mitchell Faber, a financier who looks and acts like Snidely Whiplash. Strangest of all, she hears her daughter’s terrified voice echoing from an abandoned warehouse in New Jersey, though her daughter and husband were both murdered four years ago, after which Willy was treated in a mental hospital.

Can she be losing her sanity again?

Meanwhile, horror-meister Timothy Underhill, a regular Straub character since “Koko” (1988), has written a bestseller called “lost boy lost girl” -- which happens to be the title of Straub’s last novel. It described how Tim’s teen nephew, Mark, disappeared in a haunted house in Millhaven, Wis., owned by serial killer and child molester Joseph Kalendar. In “In the Night Room,” which appears to be the middle volume of a trilogy, Tim is having odd experiences as well. He catches ghostly glimpses of Mark and of Tim’s long-dead 9-year-old sister, April. He receives fragmented e-mails from other dead people. Strangest of all, Tim, a gay man, falls passionately in love with a woman who just may have slipped over the border from literary to literal reality.

It turns out that Tim’s book wrongly accused Kalendar of killing his daughter, Lily. In the eternal realms, where only perfect novels exist, Kalendar, now dead, has raised such a stink that an angel with a surly attitude, sunshades and huge, crackling wings has been dispatched to Earth with orders for Tim: He has to rectify his mistake by returning to the Night Room -- the rape and torture chamber -- in Kalendar’s house and making an unspecified, painful sacrifice.

Straub, whose 17 novels include two collaborations with Stephen King (“The Talisman” and “Black House”), can be an elegant writer. Here he rewards his fans with anagrams, postmodern narrative trickery and amusing speculations on the relationship between creators and their creatures.

But all this comes at a price. Readers unfamiliar with “lost boy lost girl” will find “In the Night Room” hard to follow. Except for a section near the end about Lily’s life in institutions and foster care, the story lacks human feeling. It isn’t even very scary -- atrocities and tragedies sprinkle the characters’ lives too promiscuously for us to take them to heart. The trouble, finally, is that the story is too much about Straub. It’s natural for novelists to believe that writing novels is the most important job on Earth, but to assert that the order of the entire cosmos depends on whether they do that job well or badly is pushing things a bit. *