SOURCE: "Enough Fearful Twists for Everyone," in The New York Times, February 1, 1996, p. C17.

In a mixed review of The Hellfire Club, Lehmann-Haupt praises the reach of the novel, but feels that the story occasionally gets away from the author.

In Peter Straub's latest horror novel, The Hellfire Club, Nora Chancel, the story's heroine, suffers in a hellfire of masculine patronisation. Like her namesake in Ibsen's play A Doll's House, Nora is treated by the men around her as an object of little consequence.

Her husband, Davey, cheats on her with other women and even neglects her for his obsession with Hugo Driver's "Night Journey," a "wildly successful" fantasy novel that supports his family's publishing business, Chancel House. Her father-in-law, Alden Chancel, treats her with disdain and clearly would prefer that she were not married to Davey. Even Dick Dart, the dissolute son of Chancel House's lawyer, makes...