SOURCE: "Yikes! Peter Straub's Floating Dragon Scares Suburbia," in People, Vol. 19, No. 13, April 4, 1983, pp. 102-03.

In the following review, Small presents a favorable assessment of Floating Dragon.

A specter haunts the suburban paradise of Hampstead, Conn., and it isn't just crabgrass. A housewife gets slashed, a corporate exec turns to liquid, children in Keds march lemminglike into the sea, which is sometimes blood-red and covered with flies. All of this couldn't make author Peter Straub happier: Such imaginative horror, in a suburb so real you can smell the lawn trimmings, has made his latest chiller, Floating Dragon, a best-seller. "The terrifying stuff takes flight because it has a solid grounding in reality," says Straub, 40. "Modern writing tries to prove that the supernatural can be drawn into deserts, supermarkets and Laundromats."

Floating Dragon's verisimilitude receives an added boost because fictional Hampstead is modeled closely on Westport, Conn., the...