Mr. X
by Peter Straub
Summary
Every year on his birthday, Ned Dunstan has a seizure and a vision: he rides along, paralyzed, inside a black coated figure who stalks and kills, a presence Ned has privately named Mr X. As his thirty fifth birthday approaches, a premonition pulls him back to Edgerton, Illinois, where his mother is dying, and her deathbed gifts are a name, the father he never knew, and a warning that something in Edgerton intends his death.
What unfolds is Straub's family gothic at full complexity. The Dunstans are not a normal line: their history in Edgerton runs through fires, doubled men and inexplicable talents, and Ned's inheritance includes a shadow twin, Robert, who has lived the unlived half of his life and appears, when he chooses, wearing Ned's face. His father, when Ned finally traces him, is the book's blackest joke: Edward Rinehart, a failed horror writer and successful monster, who took the cosmic mythology of H. P. Lovecraft as literal scripture, believes himself the destined instrument of the Elder Gods, and has been murdering toward his apotheosis for decades. Straub plays the Lovecraft material both ways at once, parody of the acolyte mind and genuine cosmic dread, while the plot performs its doubles and substitutions with a stage magician's timing.
Around four hundred and eighty pages, intricate by design; inattentive readers will drop stitches, and second readings are widely reported to be better than first ones.
Best for readers who want Lovecraft handled by the genre's most literary architect, a horror novel that is also a hall of mirrors about inheritance.
Historical Context & Significance
Mr. X won the Bram Stoker Award for 1999, Straub's second of the decade, announcing itself as Straub's return to the supernatural after the Blue Rose trilogy's realist crimes.
The book's Lovecraft argument gave it a particular place in the field's conversation. Published as the Lovecraft revival was institutionalising, Straub filtered the Providence cosmicist through a killer who reads him as gospel, affection and diagnosis in one, and Straub himself went on to edit the Library of America's Lovecraft volume, the canonisation his novel had slyly rehearsed.
It also seeded his late career: the doubled men and untrustworthy narratives here flow into lost boy lost girl and In the Night Room, both Stoker winners in their turn, making him, behind only Stephen King, the award's most decorated novelist across the span. Edgerton joined Millhaven on his private map of haunted Midwestern cities, the geography his obituaries would treat as permanent territory.