“As if Harry Potter was written for grown-ups, Peter Straub’s Shadowland delivers carnage, blood, pain, fairy tales, and flashes of joy and wonder, just like real magic.”—Grady Hendrix You have been there...if you have ever been afraid. Come back. To a dark house deep in the Vermont woods, where two friends are spending a season of horror, apprenticed to a Master Magician. Learning secrets best left unlearned. Entering a world of incalculable evil more ancient than death itself. More terrifying. And more real. Only one of them will make it through. Praise for Shadowland “I thought it was creepy from page one. I loved it.”—Stephen King “As if Harry Potter was written for grown-ups, Peter Straub’s Shadowland delivers carnage, blood, pain, fairy tales, and flashes of joy and wonder, just like real magic.”—Grady Hendrix “A blend of...the old horrors that crouch in the dark corners of the adult mind.”—John Lutz “Gripping.”— The Memphis Commercial Appeal “Savor the novel to the fullest.”— Dayton Daily News “Eerily effective.”— BusinessWeek “You will be transported.”— Houston Chronicle “A masterpiece.”— Richmond News-Leader 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 Note Tom in the Zanzibar More than twenty years ago, an underrated Arizona schoolboy named Tom Flanagan was asked by another boy to spend the Christmas vacation with him at the house of his uncle. Tom Flanagan’s father was dying of cancer, though no one at the school knew of this, and the uncle’s house was far away, such a distance that return would have been difficult. Tom refused. At the end of the year his friend repeated the invitation, and this time Tom Flanagan accepted. His father had been dead three months; following that, there had been a tragedy at the school; and just now moving from the well of his grief, Tom felt restless, bored, unhappy: ready for newness and surprise. He had one other reason for accepting, and though it seemed foolish, it was urgent—he thought he had to protect his friend. That seemed the most important task in his life. When I first began to hear this story, Tom Flanagan was working in a nightclub on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, and he was still underrated. The Zanzibar was a shabby place suited to the flotsam of show business: it had the atmosphere of a forcing-ground for failure. It was terrible to see Tom Flanagan here, but the surroundings did not even begin to reach him. Either that, or he had been marked by rooms like the Zanzibar so long ago and so often that by now he scarcely noticed their shabbiness. In any case, Tom was working there only two weeks. He was just pausing between moves, as he had been doing ever since our days at school—pausing and then moving on, pausing and moving again. Even in the daylit tawdriness of the Zanzibar, Tom looked much as he had for the past seven or eight years, when his reddish-blond curling hair had begun to recede. Despite his profession, there was little theatricality or staginess about him. He never had a professional name. The sign outside the Zanzibar said only “Tom Flanagan Nightly.” He used a robe only during the warming-up, flapdoodling portion of his act, and then twirled it off almost eagerly when he got down to serious business—you could see in the hitch of his shoulders that he was happy to be rid of it. After the shedding of the robe, he was dressed either in a tuxedo or more or less as he was in the Zanzibar, waiting patiently to have a beer with a friend. A misty Harris tweed jacket; necktie drooping below the open collar button of a Brooks Brothers shirt; gray trousers which had been pressed by being stretched out seam to seam beneath a mattress. I know he washed his handkerchiefs in the sink and dried them by flattening them onto the tiles. In the morning he could peel them off like big white leaves, give them a shake, and fold one into his pocket. “Ah, old pal,” he said, standing up, and the light reflected from the mirror behind the bar silvered the extra inches of skin above his forehead. I saw that he was still trim and muscular-looking, in spite of the permanent weariness which had etched the lines a little more deeply around his eyes. He held out a hand, and I felt as I shook it the thickness of scar tissue on his palm, which was always a rough surprise, encountered on a hand so smooth. “Glad you called me,” he said. “I heard you were in town. It’s nice to see you again.” “One gratifying thing about meeting you,” he said. “You never ask ‘How’s tricks?’” He was the