In the Night Room Book

About 20 pages into "In The Night Room," Peter Straub reveals that his previous book, "lost boy lost girl," was a bit of a put-on, a fictional novel written by Straub's fictional alter ego, Timothy Underhill. That seems kind of a dirty trick to play on readers who invested their time and suspension of disbelief in "lost boy lost girl." Waddaya mean the last novel was just a novel??!! Waddaya mean you just made it up and it never really happened??!! This is all getting too meta for me. "In The Night Room" tells the "real" story: Underhill wrote "lost boy lost girl" as a way to deal with his grief over the disappearance and presumed murder of his nephew, Mark.

A week away from the publication of "lost boy lost girl," odd things are happening to Tim Underhill. Tim is the recurring hero of a number of Straub's stories and novels, so odd things rarely ever STOP happening to him. This time, it's odd e-mails: cryptic, fragmentary, vaguely threatening messages from untraceable senders. He's hallucinating(?), seeing his sister's ghost and vengeful angels in the streets of New York. An overly aggressive "fan" accosts Underhill at a diner, armed with multiple copies of "lost boy lost girl" (which hasn't even been published yet) and spouting delirious literary theories about rare "real" books -- the books the authors meant to write as opposed to the flawed versions that actually got published. (It's a clever and witty explanation for why some critics praise obviously wretched books: They just got the REAL version.) Tim's mystery e-mail contact explains that a copy of "lost boy lost girl" made it into the afterlife, where apparently the libraries for dead people are filled with "real" books. Tim's novel seriously pissed off a ghost, who has returned for retribution and to clear his name (and they always told me in journalism school that you couldn't libel the dead).

A quick hop across the state line, in New Jersey, Willy Patrick is also being haunted, though more figuratively. She's struggling to cope with the recent murders of her husband and daughter. She's just written a novel for young people called "In The Night Room." Oh, geez, here we go again.

Amid all the literary bait-and-switch, rug-pulling and games of who's-writing-whom is a running commentary on the writing life itself. Straub presents storytelling as a means of salvation for the writer, a way of molding personal pain into something productive. Occasionally, it can even be lifesaving. There's a playful accounting of the practice of book tours, readings, signings and interaction with the fans. (I've been to a few of these, and I've talked to Mr. Straub. Hope I didn't come off as one of THOSE people.) He literalizes the relationship between author and characters around the framework of a chase thriller.

All of this business about writers writing about writers (writing about writers) could be insufferably self-involved, and there's been too damn much of it going on in too many novels. But in Straub's hands, this doesn't feel like solipsism. It's a natural expansion of longtime running themes in Straub's work as he explores the permeable boundaries of what is factual and what is true. "I like the space between," Tim explains. "The space between dreaming and wakefulness. Between imagination and reality. Between no and yes. Between is and is not. That's where the interesting stuff is." (Willy replies, "That's so stupid it might actually mean something.")

"In The Night Room" isn't a good book for readers new to Straub. It's part of a much larger story arc that goes back a decade and a half, maybe even further. Tim Underhill's got a few novels' worth of history that can't be easily summarized, and that could alienate newbies (who should go back and find a copy of "Koko." Enjoy!). But for those faithful who have been eagerly following Straub into the shadows, this is an elegant addition to the dark universe he's been creating for years.