Lost Boy Lost Girl

Peter Straub is generally a classy writer. I thought so with the other books I've read. There are some good elements, some lovely sentences, and he's obviously intelligent. That said, I usually find that the endings of his novels (that I've read) fall a bit flat. Anti-climactic and all that. As for this book, I also found the dialogue of the two teenage boys to be a bit difficult to believe. It didn't quite ring true in that it almost tried to hard to sound like two modern teenage boys. I didn't believe they'd be interested in 69 Love Songs as much as hip hop. And the Midwestern town didn't quite ring true to me either, but I live in the Midwest in a CITY, so what do I really know. And the bloody romance in the end. That killed me. It was almost out of left field. Not totally, but there wasn't enough lead-in. And it was limp. The girl was lame, and Mark should have gone for his bestie. But that's usually the case in real life, anyway.