Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

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 to 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.