Experience the true nature of terror in this "deliciously imaginative" ( San Francisco Chronicle ) horror thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author Peter Straub. The quiet suburban town of Hampstead is threatened by two horrors. One is natural. The hideous unstoppable creation of man’s power gone mad. The other is not natural at all. And it makes the first look like child’s play... “Unspeakable horror…has ‘Bestseller’ written all over it.”— Los Angeles Times “Straub’s effects are quite spectacular…I was fairly awed by some of the more nightmarish scenes in Floating Dragon .”— The New York Times Praise for Floating Dragon “From the dark terrors of the human heart to those of the mysterious, dangerous world all around us, this is Straub's horror on an epic scale.”—Thomas Tessier “Here is a novel guaranteed to double the national nightmare quotient, so watch out.”— Cosmopolitan “Buy it today. Anything by Straub is worth several thousand John Sauls and a million V.C. Andrewses.”— Philadelphia Inquirer “A book that positively bubbles with invention, jammed with characters, color, events, hackle-raising twists of fate, horrific monsters, terrifying nightmares, and a reality that shimmers and shifts as much as the noxious stream from a witch’s cauldron.”— Book World Peter Straub  authored numerous bestselling novels, including  Ghost Story , Floating Dragon , Shadowland , and  Julia —as well as  The Talisman  and  Black House , which he co-authored with Stephen King. He also published short fiction, poetry, and a graphic novel. A prolific Grand Master of Horror, he won the British Fantasy Award; ten Bram Stoker Awards; three International Horror Guild Awards; ten World Fantasy Awards; and was the recipient of several Lifetime Achievement Awards. PeterStraub.net 1   1962–1963 For Stony Baxter Friedgood, her infrequent adulteries were adventures—picking up a man who thought he was picking her up gave her life a sense of drama missing since she had been twenty and a student at Scripps-Claremont. Not only adventures, they were the salvation of her marriage. In college she had juggled four boyfriends, and only one of them, a mathematics graduate student named Leo Friedgood, had known of the existence of the others. Leo had seemed amused by her secretiveness, as he was amused by her private school nickname. Only after several months did Stony realize the extent to which amusement masked arousal. She married him just after graduation—no graduate school for Stony, and no more for Leo, who shaved his beard and bought a suit and took a job with Telpro Corporation, which had an office in Santa Monica. 2   1969 Tabby Smithfield grew to the age of five in an enormous stone house in Hampstead, Connecticut, with four acres of well-tended ground and a burglar alarm on the front gates. The neighborhood, consisting of sixteen houses along Long Island Sound, was impressive enough to attract its own tourists; perhaps six cars a day trolled down Mount Avenue, the drivers and passengers leaning to glimpse the mansions behind the gates. Locally, Mount Avenue was “The Golden Mile,” though it was twice longer than that; it was the original road between Hillhaven, the Victorian suburb of Patchin, and Hampstead. Mount Avenue, the site of the original farm settlements of Hampstead and Hillhaven, had once been the principal coaching road north to New Haven, but its hectic days were long past. Manufacturers with plants in Bridgeport or Woodville, a doctor, and the head of Patchin County’s biggest legal practice lived in the impressive houses, along with others like them, older people who wished no excitement in their private lives. Tourists rubbernecking along the Golden Mile rarely saw them—there might be a visiting movie star taking the sea-laden air along the coastal road or a college president pausing for breath before he made his pitch for funds, but the owners of the houses were invisible. Outside the gray stone house, however, those taking a fast peek through the opened gates in 1969 might have seen a tall dark-haired man in tennis whites playing with a small boy. Perhaps a uniformed nanny would have been hovering on the steps before the front door, her posture inexplicably tense. And perhaps the boy’s posture too would have seemed awkward, inhabited by the same tension, as if little Tabby Smithfield were half-aware that he was not supposed to be playing with his father. They make an oddly static and incomplete scene, father and son and nanny. They are badly composed: one figure is missing. 3   1964 Stony Friedgood’s first affair after her marriage was in 1964, with the husband of a friend, a neighbor in their neat row of tract houses: he was unlike Leo, being jovial and blond and easygoing, a very junior banker, and Leo invariably spoke of him with contempt. This affair endured only two months. Stony’s delicate face, which was sharp-featured and framed in shining brown hair, became familiar in galleries an