By the time Leo returns home it is high above Hampstead and already causing death and hallucinations, but his dead wife in their bed is no hallucination in fact, she was not even killed by DRG it was another, older, more transcendent evil, one that has returned each generation to this town and is known by many names in men of ugly hungers and strange eyes, men who meet awful fates for their awful deeds: Gideon Winter, Robertson Green, Bates Krell. DRG-16, a new kind of nerve gas, has turned three men into slush as it seeps out of its containment tank and soon becomes very nearly conscious, a malevolence creeping across the land. The novel begins with the 1980 murder of Stony Friedgood, a promiscuous housewife who seems to have picked up the wrong man at a local bar.Īt the same time, Stony's husband Leo is called to a secret government defense plant to help do damage control on a chemical spill. Events occur simultaneously in different chapters, future events are revealed like spoilers as asides and in visions, and past events creep up everywhere ("Pasta is prologue," quips one character when being served overdone fettuccine at an unfortunate dinner party).
Set in idyllic seaside Hampstead, Connecticut, in 1980, populated by snooty folks whose roots go back to the bloody battles of the Revolutionary War, Floating Dragon establishes a solid sense of place but it is time that Straub bends and jumbles immediately.
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