SOURCE: "Horror of Horrors," in Times Literary Supplement, March 11, 1983, p. 249.

In the review below, Bold reviews Floating Dragon's style, which he describes as "cinematic."

Although Peter Straub makes references to writers such as Washington Irving and Wilkie Collins, the immediate sources of his huge novel Floating Dragon are cinematic. Addicts of horror and science-fiction movies will recognize images from Alien (humans stripped to their gleaming bones), The Exorcist (graveyard stench and vomit), The Shining (torrents of blood), Zombies (decomposing creatures laying hands on the living), The Invisible Man (a key character wrapped up in bandages), The Birds (with bats replacing Hitchcock's crows) and The Quatermass Experiment (the chemical transformation of a man into soapsuds). Straub also indulges in cinematic similes, with a house exploding "like the Death-Star in Star Wars", and sets a central scene around a special screening of the violent film The Choirboys.

The construction...