The Endless Bookshelf Names WRECKAGE/WHAT HAPPENS IN HELLO JACK by Peter Straub the Book of the Year

The Endless Bookshelf named Peter Straub’s two volume set, Wreckage/What Happens in Hello Jack the book of the year.

Here are just some of the reasons why…

Wreckage is facinating in so many ways, chief among them the way in which the main narrative Wreckage demonstrates how Straub repeatedly altered and reworked the lines laid down in the “Hello Jack” summary. It is a gripping tale. The matter of Jack the Ripper is addressed and is made new. The playfulness of the novelist is found everywhere, too, with stray shots at a country house partridge shoot (in equal measure homage to Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party and riff on an incident in the life of Dick Cheney, I think); the imaginary books, especially “that dreary children’s book”, The Distant Land, and what ripples out from it; the episodes in the life of painter Hugo Ayling gleaned from a fourth volume of the Autobiography of Francis Frith; and in the cameo appearances by Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, and “Little Alex C.”, a depraved juvenile Aleister Crowley ready to embark upon mischief and worse.

When, deep in the labyrinth of story, Henry James tells Tilly Hayward: ‘It is in the nature of this place, which is not real except in the mind’, it is Peter Straub who has led the reader there. 

Limited: 500 numbered hardcover sets, in slipcase: $225