Sweet Jesus, I'm Tired.

Getting up at 5:30 AM, and working until 8:30 PM, sucks.
That said, at least I earned a good chunk of change today.

Believe it or not, you get a lot of good reading done if you're driving a cab. Sometimes you can drop someone off and sit for half an hour before you get another trip, and sometimes if you're waiting at a hotel or club to see if anyone comes out, (in gamer-speak, "spawn-camping" like a mofo,) you can end up with a good chunk of time on your hands. Frankly, there's not a whole lot to do if you're sitting for 45 minutes in a car, in a parking lot somewhere.

So, you read. My tastes run to the Speculative Trifecta: SF, fantasy, and horror. Recently, I re-read Peter Straub's classic novel Shadowland.

Shadowland is one of a very small number of works by Straub that I actually like. As far as I know, I've read everything he's published, but he's very hit-or-miss for me. A short breakdown follows:

*Ghost Story: Just plain cool. At first it tends to wander a bit, but when all the myriad plot threads finally come together at the end of the book you get a dose of severe creep-out.
*Floating Dragon: This novel suffers greatly from schizophrenia. It has all the elements of two pretty good novels, including two complete storylines; sadly, it's meant as one novel, and as such just plain makes no damn sense.
*Koko: Crap. Really. Don't bother.
*The Throat: Sequel to Koko. Remember what they say about sequels.
*Houses Without Doors: Anthologized short fiction, some of which is really amazing. "The Juniper Tree" is very hard reading, for reasons which will become immediately apparent to anyone who picks it up, but it's only one excellent story among several in this collection.
*The Talisman (with Stephen King): This book is cool, but it's obviously the first time King and Straub have worked together. Their writing styles are so wildly different that the book suffers from a sense of disjointedness. It's clearly evident to anyone familiar with both authors' work when one leaves off and the other takes over.
*Black House (Sequel to The Talisman, also with King): This time around it worked much better. Their writing styles, both of them having matured a bit in their craft, flow more smoothly into each other, so that this is a much more coherent narrative; there's never really a point where the narrative voice shifts clearly from one writer to the other, and as a result you can enjoy the story without getting jarred out of your immersion by wild linguistic shifts.

*Shadowland.

This is Straub's best book as far as I'm concerned. I've come back to this book maybe 15 times as I've grown up, and gotten something a little different from it every time. Not many books can do that - Clive Barker's Imajica, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, Richard Bach's Illusions, J. G. Ballard's Concrete Island. The few, the proud, etc.

Shadowland is the story of a young man who is taken to an estate, called Shadowland, to visit his friend Del's uncle, Coleman Collins, who is a magician. Not a nice one, either; Tom is brought to Shadowland because Collins sees that Tom has the potential to be a magician, and plans to vampirize his power to continue his unnaturally extended life. Tom, in the process of learning magic from Collins, learns how to defeat him.

This book isn't what I would call light reading; but it shouldn't be. This is the kind of book you should enjoy, night after night, in a comfy armchair. Read it. It's really good.