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Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780449149911
ISBN number: 0449149919
Label: Ballantine Books
Manufacturer: Ballantine Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 368
Printing Date: September 28, 2004
Publishing house: Ballantine Books
Release Date: September 28, 2004
Sale Popularity Level: 199645
Studio: Ballantine Books
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Product Description:
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 mother's 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.
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Rated by buyers -
Anything written by Peter Straub is bound to be excellent! I haven't yet read this story...but as I am very familiar with Straub's writing style..I'm looking quite forward to it!!!!
Rated by buyers -
Later period Peter Straub (say post The Throat) novels seem to share a similar trajectory: excellent opening, interesting development, meandering middle, topped with a 'just what was the point of all that' conclusion. lost boy lost girl is inarguably a better book than The Hellfire Club or Mr. X -- it carries an emotional charge for much of its length and its thematic ambition is clear -- but by the final pages it still feels like much ado about little.
Key to the book's purpose is the delineation between the "actual" events it covers and how those events are embellished and fictionalized by protagonist/horror writer Tim Underhill. Underhill (who of his journal remarks, "who says its not fiction?") invents a reassuring ghost story as a way of dealing with the horror of his nephew's murder.
This is an interesting and resonant idea, but the metafiction runs aground on 1) the lack of resonance in the ghost story - it feels random and unconvincing, and 2) the book's "reality," with its multiple grotesque serial killers and genius detective, seems scarely less fabulous than the "fictional" world of the ghosts.
So though much of the book is well-written and engaging, at the end it feels something like a failed stunt, more interesting in theory than execution.
Rated by buyers -
........Stephen King, this may be Straub's best novel so far. Really? I found it 70% boring, 30% enjoyable. Enjoyable because the sentence structure is nice.
Rated by buyers 
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I have read many of Peter Straub's other books,Ghost Story, Mr. X, The Hellfire Club to name a few. I am used to his convoluted and complex plots. On many occassins I have to go back and re-read passages to recognize what is going on in the story. Usually this focus is rewarded with an OMIGOSH ending. This one was more of a HUH?. I ordered this used one from Amazon while on a cruise ship. I bought it very first @ Borders to read on the boat, I left it on my deck chair and someone took it. I was desparate to find out how the story ended so i got online while on the ship and ordered it so that it would be waiting for me when i got home from my trip. Had I known how it ended the person who stole it from me could have just asked me for it.
Rated by buyers 
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The very first question we have to ask is this: Is Peter Straub an acquired taste? I think the answer is yes. I've been reading Straub on and off for the past few decades, my very first taste being The Talisman which he co-wrote with buddy Stephen King. From there I trudged through Ghost Story and Shadowland and Floating Dragon. Straub seemed to me to be an author struggling with his sense of diction and eloquence. A writer that was working in the horror/supernatural genre that was trying way too damn hard to be brilliant and literate and smarter than many of his readers. Well...that doesn't make for a good career when you alienate the masses, especially in his line of work. So...I fell off the Straub bandwagon for quite some time. I remember buying his novel Mystery when it very first came out in hardcover and trying to read it, only to put it down time after time. It was nearly a decade later when I finally read it. Koko was the novel that brought me back into the fold. Peter Straub seemed to have gotten the hint and took his fiction down a few levels so that the common reader, the casual reader could manage his prose. Did his work become dumber. Absolutey not. He just wasn't trying to write in the style of Hawthorne anymore. One of the main characters in Koko is Tim Underhill. He's Straub's favorite main character. Along with Millhaven resident recluse and crime-solver Tom Pasmore. Mystery. The Throat. All Millhaven stories. Lost Boy Lost Girl is another. Stephen King proclaims it to be Straub's best novel...we shall see.
Tom Underhill, writer, New York resident, gets distrubing news. His sister in law is dead. She has committed suicide for no apparent reason. He goes back to his hometown of Millhaven for the funeral and to comfort his nephew Mark and his prick of a brother Phillip. Fifteen days later, Mark disappears off the face of the planet and Tim once more returns to Millhaven to see if he can unravel the disappearance of his nephew. The Sherman Park Killer must have claimed him... That's what his father thinks, but uncle Tim isn't so sure. Just before his disappearance and just after his mother's unexplained suicide, Mark becomes fascinated with a creepy abandoned house directly behind his own. On the street over, 3323 Michigan Street sits deserted, its windows clouded with grim, its front porch showing the signs of where some weary neighbor tried in vain to burn it down. What lies within? Mark has to know, because whatever is in there is responsible for his mother's death. The house belonged to infamous serial killer and relative of Mark's deceased mother Joseph Kalender. Filled with secret passages and horrible memories and relics of the attrocities committed there twenty years before, 3323 Michigan Street takes over Mark's attention completely. But what else in in there?
You'll soon see.
Definitely on par with Mystery or The Throat or Mrs. X or The Hellfire Club, Lost Boy Lost Girl is easy to sink into and hard to put down. Genuinely creepy. I've read tons and tons of scary books and this one gave me the willies when reading it at night. One of Staub's finer moments. The only drawback here are the inconsistencies with the plot. Nancy Underhill's suicide is explained, but not that well. Mark's infatuation with the derelict house borders on insanity and yet his best friend Jimbo does little to dissuade his interest. I have to disagree with Mr. King whe he said it was perhaps Staub's best novel. I think Koko still holds that place. But Lost Boy Lost Girl is worth the time and the gooseflesh.
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