Floating Dragon
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| Author | Peter Straub |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Horror |
| Published | 1982, Putnam |
| Media type | |
Floating Dragon is the seventh novel by author Peter Straub, originally published by Underwood-Miller in November 1982 and G.P. Putnam's Sons in February 1983.
Set during the spring and summer of 1980, the novel deals with events that befall the affluent suburb of Hampstead, Connecticut.
An adulterous housewife named Stony Friedgood is brutally murdered by a man she picks up in a bar; at the same time, her husband, Leo, is involved in a cover-up at a chemical plant conducting research for the Department of Defense. DRG-16, a new kind of nerve gas, has turned three men into slush as it seeps out of its containment tank and soon becomes very nearly conscious, a malevolence creeping across the land. By the time Leo returns home it is high above Hampstead and already causing death and hallucinations, but his dead wife in their bed is no hallucination; in fact, she was not even killed by DRG; it was another, older, more transcendent evil, one that has returned each generation to this town and is known by many names in men of ugly hungers and strange eyes, men who meet awful fates for their awful deeds: Gideon Winter, Robertson Green, Bates Krell... Many names, but ultimately one: the Dragon.
Meanwhile, the descendants of the town's original founders have returned to Hampstead for the first time in over a hundred years: Richard Allbee, an architect and former child actor with a wife and a baby on the way; Graham Williams, a screenwriter and amateur local historian whose career was derailed by the McCarthy hearings; Patsy McCloud, an abused housewife with supernatural powers; and Tabby Smithfield, an extraordinary young boy with similar abilities.
Drawn together by fate, the four find themselves struggling against a cycle of evil that plagues the town every thirty years.
Richard Allbee: An architect and former child actor in his mid-thirties, and a descendant of one of the four original families that settled Hampstead (then called Greenbank) in 1645. As a young boy, Richard starred as the youngest child on a Leave It to Beaver-style family sitcom called Daddy's Here that aired in the 1950s. As an adult, Richard is plagued by memories of his former co-star, Billy Bentley, who played his character's older brother on the series, and later committed suicide after sliding into a life of petty crime and drug abuse.
Graham Williams: A novelist and screenwriter whose career was destroyed when he was labeled a Communist sympathizer for refusing to testify before the House Unamerican Activities Committee. Born and raised in Hampstead, Williams had his first brush with the sinister forces plaguing the town as a young man, when he discovered the identity of a serial killer, Bates Krell, responsible for the deaths of several local women, and later killed the man during a violent confrontation. Afterward, Williams (who, like Richard, is also a descendant of one of the original founding families) became obsessed with researching the history of the town, eventually discovering a "cycle" of death and mayhem that seems to visit the area once in a generation (or approximately once every thirty-odd years).
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