Shadowland by Peter Straub, 1980

Read again in 2000.



Synopsis: First setting: an all-male prep school in Arizona, where two sensitive freshmen form a bond based on their interest in magic tricks. Second setting: the labyrinthine house of a weird magician uncle in New England, where the two boys spend a memorable summer being trained in the art of illusion. Or is it real magic? Third setting: an alternate world where dark forces are at play--forces that first show up at the school, but intensify their power the summer.

My memories of this book are very strong – stronger perhaps than the actual book is to me now that I’ve read it again. Not that it has no impact for me today, but that my mind is matured and I am more jaded than before. Oh how I wish for the brain of my late-teens sometimes. I remember this book as being dark, brutal and deeply layered with different realities. I remember thinking that my brain almost hurt with having to keep the different realities straight in my head. Which was real, which was dream, which was hallucination? As a 32-year old reading this book, those things are clearer to me. This time I didn't try to take each incident or feat that the boys performed and fit it into the course schedule that Uncle Cole set for them.

Also clearer to me is the Magician’s motive in wanting Tom and Del at Shadowland. Dr. Charles Nightingale goes to WWI as himself and comes back as Coleman Collins, a magician of awesome ability with the name of a long-dead (and black) stage magician. Collins has no intentions of going on the stage, but somehow does and invents evil characters through which to perform. Herbie Butter never struck me as a funny or amusing role (mostly because Herbie is almost a clown and I hate clowns). Herbie is a mechanical magician who did physically impossible things. The Collector was much more straightforward. He was a receptacle for people who got in Collins’ way. Eventually, Skeleton Ridpath ended up there and could continue to terrorize Del and Tom.

Also terrorizing Tom and Del are The Wandering Boys. Troll-like thugs who used to perform with a rival magician on the same tours that Collins and Speckle John were part of. I am still not sure if these guys (all with weird names like Root, Thorn and Seed) were the original guys, or newly hired thugs a la the Dread Pirate Roberts. They live out by the lake which is part of the Shadowland estate and enjoy badger baiting which not only kills the badger but also the dogs. They end up helping Collins crucify Tom. One or two of them hesitate, but don’t interfere in Collins’ plan and willingly go on to beat the crap out of Del when the Magician tells them to.

The crucifixion scene was more vivid to me in memory than in the present. I think my young and inexperienced mind was more receptive (shocked, sympathetic to?) to human brutality than it is now in my media-hardened adulthood. It generally comes as a shock to a first time reader of Shadowland. I’ve never before or since read a crucifixion scene (except for the Bible).

I liked the private school theme also. It wasn’t a boarding school for Tom or Del but it had that same kind of intimacy. Masters and Prefects who were petty tyrants and under-classmen that were forced to wear beanies and to endure other humiliations. Learning the school song and facts under threat of punishment. Secret friendships, rivalries, passageways and legends. A world I’ll never know.

Skeleton Ridpath seemed more evil to me when I was younger. The 32-year old me sees him now as a pathetic kid who became twisted and dangerous after his mother died and his father’s only contribution to his upbringing was to humiliate and degrade him. His evil consumed him so much that he was the perfect instrument. Not just for the Collector, but for Del who wanted him gone from the school so much that he controlled him into stealing a valuable object from a rival school while they were all there for a football game.

Collins seems more evil to me now than when I was younger. He wanted to take the power from Del when he thought Del could be his successor, just as he took his mentor Speckle John’s power from him when he found he surpassed his teacher.In time he became aware of Tom and knew that this boy could possibly take his place as the King of the Cats. To prevent that, he brought him to Shadowland. There he created a world expressly to make Tom rebel. When he did, Collins found justification to kill him. But, he didn’t count on Tom’s ability to make even his untried talent work for him. Collins was forced into the Collector and then the mechanism from which it sprang to life, destroyed. A neat trick.

Del dies in the personification of the sparrow that his Uncle Cole forced him to. Rose Armstrong returns to the watery world that she belongs to, free from the pain of razor blades and nails when she walked (a mermaid in a lake?). Tom ends up a two-bit stage magician forcing himself to play in dives and live hand to mouth. He gave up the Owl chair forever it seems. And Skeleton – once freed from The Collector, goes back to school and then on to theological college and then to a monastery.