THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, March 13, 1996 TAG: 9603130030
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY GEORGE HEBERT
LENGTH: Medium: 72 lines
FOLLOWING THE clues and the action in Peter Straub's horror mystery, ``The Hellfire Club,'' is somewhat like trying to put together half a dozen jigsaw puzzles from a pile that has all the pieces scrambled together - and with some kind of sinister deadline spooking you.
Toss in a slow human dissection and some all-too-explicit sexual brutality in a couple of mid-book chapters, and you have an unsettling experience. And unforgettable, too.
There is a vague guide to the edge pieces of the puzzles in a dark fantasy novel from the past called ``Night Journey.'' Various characters keep bringing it up; some have even memorized segments. This ghostly story, along with its heavily-hyped author, Hugo Driver, have become cult objects, the way it was with the Tolkien books.
For the Chancel publishing family, the other-worldly tale and two posthumous (possibly spurious) sequels have become jealously guarded sources of revenue. For others, the scary adventures of the lost boy, Pippin Little, have become a haunting halo for real-life scandal and terror.
We see events through Nora, who has married into the Chancel family and who is a battered nurse-veteran of Vietnam - where she was raped by two of her male compatriots. That degradation left her scarred, but with the capacity to retreat into an unfeeling cocoon whenever life becomes too cruel.
The action develops as she deals with David, the husband of her weak sister, and then with a lunatic serial killer who kidnaps and brutalizes her. We are inevitably mesmerized. Driving her captor across New England, enduring motel ordeals, shifted from one stolen car to another, escaping only to be recaptured, Nora combines her Perils-of-Pauline nightmare with a long skein of amateur but adept detective work.
The various riddles she seeks to solve, and does solve, include identifying her husband's real parents, the connection to The Hellfire Club (where collegiate and post-collegiate members go to gratify their grossest whims), the nature of the secret held in a vault somewhere (like the secret in the ``massy vault'' that Pippin Little pursued) and the true authorship - if Hugo Driver didn't write it - of the ``Night Journey'' fantasy.
The Hellfire Club business seems the least important. Indeed, the choice of the club as the title of the novel is a bit odd, as the subject doesn't take up but a few pages. Granted, however, ``Hellfire'' does give off some of the appropriate vibrations.
Juggling all of this in simple words that never desert the story line takes quite a clever writer. Milwaukee native Peter Straub is that. He teases and plays the reader like a fly fisherman with a tacklebox-ful of surprises.
And although the book suffers from too many characters and lapses into the grisly and the sexually graphic (the tension could have been wound almost as tight without some of the details), ``The Hellfire Club'' adds an almost certain 13th bookstore success to Straub's remarkable chain of horror and thriller novels.
When the half-dozen or so jigsaws are finally assembled in the concluding chapters, all the mysteries are logically resolved, the patterns are clear and the pieces fit snugly. If any of the pieces seem to be missing, it isn't Straub's fault. They must be on the floor where the reader dropped them. MEMO: George Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star.
ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
BOOK REVIEW
``The Hellfire Club''
Author: Peter Straub
Publisher: Random House. 462 pp.
Price: $25.95.
by CNB