 Boo. Hello everybody, Ian here. Welcome back to another book review. Today we are talking about Floating Dragon by Peter Straub. This one, whoo-la. All right, so the issues I had right up in the forward section of this review is the first 200 pages seem superfluous. There seems to be no point whatsoever to them because not even the character development really gets ramped up until after the 200 page mark. You don't really start caring. I didn't start caring about anyone until about the 500 page mark. Um, it, well no, probably 400 page mark. For some other reason I have it in my head. This book is 700 pages and that's not true. This, this copy of the book is 596 pages. But, um, I didn't really start to connect with everyone until people started dying off. And then I started to see what people meant to the characters, which is an odd way to go about a story like this, a book this long. It seemed, seemed backward to me honestly, especially when those first 200 pages are so utterly boring. That's my feelings on it, of course. Uh, the whole reason I read this one at this time in my life is because numerous people brought up, um, the fact even though I mentioned in the video that, uh, that floating dragon is supposedly a inspiration for Stephen King's it, I had several people in that video saying, hey, floating dragon was an inspiration. I, I know I said it in the video. But that the whole reason I did it was to compare the two. And if I'm honest, I saw some themes here and there, but it was nowhere near as glaringly obvious as it was with phantoms. We'll go over all that in a separate video. Um, but of course you have the the hibernating monster or whatever the creature, the the evil in the town, that kind of thing. That's pretty much where the similarities come in, the history of the town and whatnot. Other than that, if you were going to go into this book reading it solely because you want to find the inspiration for it, I suggest you go read Phantoms by Dean Coons instead. Um, oddly enough, um, and where I'm going with this is oddly enough with all the people saying that this book had to have inspired it, there is a lot of stuff in this book inspired by Stephen King. There are notes of Carrie. There are notes of the shining. There are notes of the stand, especially the stand. Um, there's whole sections that they're not carbon copies. Don't get me wrong. This isn't a theft of services or anything like that, not theft of services, but this isn't plagiarism or anything like that. But there are notes in there that harken back to King's work before that. Um, and I guess you could point to other authors as well. So, but, but there were very strong similarities between these. And if we're talking about, uh, uh, comparing the two authors together, I guess because, you know, they work together. So everybody always compares these two. Um, Straub is the more literary version of Stephen King, and Stephen King is the more genre version of Peter Straub, which brings me to another point of mine, which is this is Peter Straub's most genre book. Um, this, it's a horror novel from the get go. Whereas Ghost Story is more of a character piece. And so is Shadowland to an extent in Julia. And if you could see me now, we're definitely more character driven pieces. Um, it's, by the way, I've written, I've read all the way from Julia all the way up to this one so far. If you want retro reviews of those other ones, let me know down there in the doobly-doo. But this one feels like an absurd horror novel. Like he was writing for fun from most of the book. There is some, some seriousness there toward the end, but most of it is just straight up horror shenanigans. Um, like there's, there's one scene, and this is maybe a slight spoiler. Um, but there's one scene where, you know, criminals go to rob a house and the usual horror, uh, movie tropes happen, that kind of thing. Um, so if you're looking for a more easily accessible Peter Straub, I know there's gonna be tons of people who disagree with me here, but if you're looking for a more genre accessible Peter Straub, maybe this one, because there is a, after the first 200 pages, there is a lot that happens, and there's a lot of extended horror tropes that you're probably gonna have a lot of fun with. The problem for me is that never really, this book never really gelled. It was not coherent to me. There was no, no cogent, uh, glue that held everything together that made it feel like a complete story. Uh, unlike, uh, his books like Ghost Story seem to come full circle, Shadowland seemed to come full circle. Julia was a little off on its rocker, and so was, if you could see me now, but I would rather talk about those in those individual videos. With this one, it literally felt like he was trying to take everything that he had thought of in the horror genre to get it out, because after this, from what I understand, he did mostly thrillers, or supernatural thrillers, and got far away from that stuff. I even saw one time on, uh, Twitter, because he's very active on Twitter. If you tweet at him, he's likely going to respond to you. And he responded to one person who was talking about Floating Dragon, and he said exactly this. He said, I wrote the book to get that out of my system. So I'm thinking that's exactly what happened here, um, is that he wrote this horror novel to try and kind of put a period at the end of his horror novel writing base. Now I, I read Coco a long time ago. Coco is the book after this one. I don't remember a thing about it, uh, but there are several other books, and if you read the, the descriptions of them, they, they do seem a little more literary on that side. So I'd love to hear what you guys, uh, think about where Peter Straub went from this. If his style changed after this, or whatever. I plan to read Coco eventually, but, uh, with this one, it's kind of put me off Straub for a while. Uh, kind of like, if you can see me now, if you could only see me now, something, something like that. That one put me off of Straub for a while too, um, because I didn't understand the ending. The funny, funny thing about that one is nobody understood the ending until we asked him on Twitter, and then everybody popped up on Twitter going, oh, I thought so. Sure you did, sure you did. But have you read Floating Dragon? Uh, let me know down there in the comments below. Over, I'm going to give it three stars. Uh, I'm not hugely impressed by it, but, uh, it's some people's favorite Straub book. So definitely rage at me if you want to down there in the doobly-doo. But until next time, I have any, you have any, this has been another book review. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye! Oh, and one more note. You can expect the breakdown of all the stuff back here that I wrote down that might have been, uh, it related. You can expect that video next Thursday. Sorry there was no Thursday theorist today, but I wanted to get, I'm so far behind in my reviews. I gotta get these things out. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye.