[In Floating Dragon] Peter Straub has returned to the same ground of his acclaimed Ghost Story. Once again he has created four main characters who are linked, albeit tenuously, by a murder. But unlike his earlier tale, in which a well-defined spirit was motivated by revenge, Straub has conjured up a pervasive "wrongness" that haphazardly destroys for wanton pleasure. "Hampstead's always been rotten as a bucket of month-old oysters," says an old newspaper compositor. But this is at best a vague explanation for the series of ghastly occurrences—earthquakes, fires, suicides—dating back to 1645 when a mean Englishman named Gideon Winter tried to wrest the town from its founders.

Like the spirit of Eva Galli, the murdered beauty in Ghost Story, Floating Dragon's amorphous demon is insidiously malevolent. It takes as much pleasure in toying with its victims as it does in viciously murdering them….

Unfortunately, Straub...