Wild-eyed backwoods weirdness indeed dominates If You Could See Me Now. Peter Straub's third novel initially deceives by the familiarity of its opening formula: the bourgeois narrator is pitched against a conspiracy of silence among inhabitants of a farming community rocked by a sequence of killings. Apple-pie cosiness on every level, however, is quickly eroded. Miles Teagarden, steeped in useless campus apprehensions, is tossed with dour brutality round a circle of folk whose cult of the normal is interestingly offset by a tendency to maul and harry their wretchedly obtuse victim at every turn. His cousin Alison's childhood promise to 'come after' him, made minutes before her murder, reaches sinister fulfilment when Miles's Eng. Lit. sophistications crumble against a barrage of impenetrable surliness and suspicion, and the valley reverberates with death.

Straub is good at slick manipulation of pace, punctuating the story with chunks of police statement (whose...