Book Review: MR. X by Peter Straub

MR. X by Peter Straub (Ballantine Books, July 2000) Mass market paperback, 544 pages.  ISBN # 0449149900 / 9780449149904 Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel 1999, British Fantasy Award Nominee for Best Novel 2001.  

Summary on the Goodreads website . . . . .

Every year on his birthday, Ned Dunstan is cursed with visions of horror committed by a savage figure he calls "Mr. X." This year, Ned's visions will become flesh and blood. 

A dreadful premonition brings Ned home to find his mother on her deathbed. She reveals the never-before-disclosed name of his father and warns him of grave danger. 

Driven by a desperate sense of need, Ned explores his dark past and the astonishing legacy of his kin. Accused of violent crimes he has not committed and pursued by a shadowy twin, Ned enters a hidden world of ominous mysteries, where he must confront his deepest nightmares. . . .  

My four-star review on the Goodreads website . . . . .

     Mr. X is an ambitious and often maddening work that straddles several sub-genres within the horror category, perhaps disappointing several readers who were expecting this to be more frightening. It certainly starts out that way. 

     The back-cover description and the beginning chapters of this book seem to set-up the reader for a thrill-ride with lots of grisly murders and scary occurrences. Mr. X is told in first person and each chapter rotates between two characters, one seemingly grounded in reality (Ned) and the other (X) operating on a different ethereal plane.

     Chapter One takes only five pages to introduce us to main character Ned Dunstan and get to the beginning conflict. With a modicum of words and references author Straub takes the first-person narration and makes Ned likable, also causing us to emphasize within a few pages. 

     Ned's a hard-luck case - - abandoned by his mother at an early age, not able to be cared for by other family members, and rotating from one foster family to another. The problem is his troubling annual premonitions that result in epileptic fits. Now a recent college grad or still a senior (Straub only hints at his actual age, perhaps on purpose), Ned is hitch-hiking home to visit his mother Star on her deathbed. 

     Rather than exhibit feelings of bitterness regarding her abandonment of him, he seems to take it in stride in admirable fashion as revealed in his description of the situation: "Boiled down to essentials, it comes out this way: even though Star loved me, she could not care for me as well as the Grants could. On those days when Star came to Naperville, we put our arms around each other and we cried, but we both knew the deal. She usually showed up just after Christmas and almost always right at the start of summer, after I got out of school. But she never came on my birthdays, and she never sent me anything more than a card. Birthdays were when my problem came down on me, and my problem made her feel so rotten she didn't want to think about it.”

     The next chapter introduces us to Mr. X, a mysterious and impulsive murderer who relates his doings while beseeching the elder gods (a la H. P. Lovecraft) to recognize him. He's immediately unlikable and evil, and it only takes four pages to despise him. 

     Contrast Ned's feelings towards his mother with Mr. X's final words in the chapter: "A most marvelous event has taken place. Star Dunstan has come home to die. Can you hear me, slug-spittle? My dearest hope is that your flesh should blister, that you should have to labor for the smallest gulps of air and feel individual organs explode within you, so on and so forth, your eyes to burst, that kind of thing, but though I shall not be able to manage these matters on your behalf, my old sweetheart, I shall do my best to arrange them for our son."

     That's quite a set-up and more than enough incentive to keep turning pages. However, as the novel progresses it evolves into an equally intriguing saga of re-establishing family relationships and probing town history and documentation for answers to Ned's ancestry and background.          

     The short description of Mr. X is gothic mystery and murder splashed with paranormal entities, doppelgängers, and Lovecraftian cosmic horror. 

     That eventual meeting between Ned and Mr. X doesn't play out the way I anticipated it. Ned's journey of discovery includes many plot twists and turns which held my interest through a very long (and sometimes dragging) novel. I prefer not to reveal more in order to avoid spoiling it for any readers who decide to give this a trial reading. 

     Straub throws in a zinger of an ending - - two final paragraphs that make you re-think the entirety of what you've just finished reading. It almost made me want to start over with a different mindset. I'd attempt that now if Mr. X wasn't so long of a read (500+ pages). More wonders await me in other books. Perhaps I'll return some day.