The Hellfire Club was published by Random House in 1996. Nora Chancel, pregnant and living in suburban Connecticut, discovers that her husband’s family fortune is connected to a literary scandal from the 1930s — the theft of a manuscript by a now-famous author — and that powerful people will do anything to keep the secret buried. Her investigation brings her into contact with a serial killer, a corrupt police department, and the “Hellfire Club” — an eighteenth-century secret society whose descendants still exercise hidden power.
The novel combines several of Straub’s recurring interests: the dark underside of affluent suburban America, the power of literary texts to shape reality, and the way present-day violence connects to historical patterns of corruption and concealment. The Connecticut setting (Straub lived in Connecticut for decades) is rendered with the detailed social observation of a realist novelist: the country clubs, the antique shops, the hierarchies of old money and new.
The book is more a thriller than a horror novel: the menace is human rather than supernatural (serial killers, conspirators, corrupt police). But Straub brings his characteristic literary ambition to the genre: the prose is precise and allusive, the structure is complex (alternating timelines, multiple points of view), and the themes (who owns stories, who controls the past, what power conceals) are serious.
Collecting The Hellfire Club
First edition (Random House, New York, 1996): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Signed: $40–$80
Projected values (2026–2036): Modest appreciation.
1950s Connecticut Noir
The Hellfire Club (1996) is set in the fictional Connecticut town of Westerholm in the 1950s, where Nora Chancel — married to the grandson of a famous publisher — is framed for murder and must uncover a conspiracy reaching back to a 1938 literary hoax. The novel is Straub’s most elaborate puzzle-box plot, combining elements of Gothic fiction, literary satire, and serial-killer thriller. The “book within a book” — a lost novel called Night Journey — is central to the mystery. Critics praised the ambition but found the novel overlong. It remains a rich, rewarding read for patient readers.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Hellfire Club? In the novel, it is not the historical Hellfire Club but rather a metaphor for the hidden corruption and violence beneath Connecticut’s affluent suburban surface — a theme Straub shares with writers like Richard Yates and John Cheever.