Like [Stephen] King, Peter Straub has a string of creepy best-sellers behind him, but he knows that he is a new arrival and knows, too, which club he wants to join—the one to which Hawthorne, Poe and Henry James belong. In fact Shadowland takes as its principle a remark of Hawthorne's which is quoted approvingly in Straub's previous novel Ghost Story: "I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far as my own mind is concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in which the spiritual mechanism of faery legend should be combined with the characters and manners of everyday life."

It is one of the faults of Shadowland that it is too bound up with the mechanism of the faery legend to recreate convincingly the second half of that combination….

Straub deals well with the bizarre son et lumière of spectral effects...