A Winter Haunting--Dan Simmons

Very effectively creepy.  Reminds me a lot of an Aidan Quinn/Kate Beckinsale movie, Haunted, and John Gielgud, in which everyone's a ghost, and everything's haunted, and that the beautiful mansion he saw was actually a decrepit wreck of a former mansion.  Both this book and that movie have an almost sex scene, too.  No, check that--Quinn and Beckinsale have a scene, maybe the first nude scene with a "ghost" ever on film.  And the dead talk to each other, and there's animosity...Well, anyway, both are credibly creepy, hard to do these days, when we all know the tripes of horror and ghost stories.  That this book succeeds despite that is deserving of applause in of itself.  But perhaps the best thing to say about it is that I read all 371 pages in half a day, and this after finishing another long novel, Straub's A Dark Matter, today as well.  Not feeling well, physically and psychically.  Anyway, a good psychological tale that tips its hat to the works of Henry James, and a few other works of creepiness...though I could have done without the Egyptian gods parts, and the extensive Beowulf references, but you need something to set your writing apart, right?  The ending of the occasional ghost-narrator taking over the recuperating, and coma-resting, body of the main character is sort of inspired, and not believable, and a nice touch, all at the same time.  Another Dan Simmons winner.

Getting Back, Slowly--Peter Straub's A Dark Matter

Interesting read from the POV of a writer.  Might have liked it less if I'd read it when I first encountered Straub in the 80s, solely as a reader.  What I mean is, the ending isn't really in doubt, per se, in the sense that you're not worried about any of the characters.  You know they'll be okay.  It's a little like The Decameron, in a way, maybe like Canterbury Tales as well: basically a small bunch of specifically designed people (they're not stock characters; that's important) who all tell their angle or POV of the same instance.  Speaking of which, An Instance of the Fingerpost springs to mind, as well.  Anyway, you never see one of the major characters--except maybe briefly in an airport, and in a hotel lobby and elevator--and the whole thing may just be an excuse for Straub to go phantasmagoric on us (which he does well), but as a stream-of-consciousness step into evil, and a bit into the unknown, it holds up well.  The existential scene with the boy and the cards and colors representing the realities he thinks he's experiencing was a nice touch.  He still goes on a little too long about the mundane--where they're eating; what they're eating--which is a constant slight, and sometimes not-so-slight, critique of Straub as a writer for me, but he gets away with it.  (One gets the feeling at this time that Straub himself cares a great deal about where he's eating and what he's eating, and that he likes the good stuff.)  In short, if you like various views of the same scenes in a book, and how they're all different, yet the same, you'll like this book, and if you don't, you won't.