[1] The work was first published in hardback on October 26, 2004 through Random House and it won the 2004 Bram Stoker Award for Novel.

He is still struggling to come to terms with the loss of his sister April and Timothy tries to channel his sorrow and frustrations into a new novel he is writing, without much success.

Of the themes in the work, professor Gary K. Wolfe wrote that Straub used "metatextual and metafictional chapters, anagrams, and coded messages" to "repeatedly create a feeling of revelatory horror, for both Underhill and the reader".

[4] He also commented on Straub's narrative techniques in In the Night Room and Lost Boys, Lost Girls, which he felt "[called] into question the nature of fantasy and the nature of narrative reality and serve as a meditation on the purposes, methods, and limits of fiction as a way to frame experience, particularly when that experience involves extreme or traumatic events.

"[4] Critical reception for In the Night Room has been mostly positive,[5][6] and The Washington Post praised it as being "a powerful and arresting foray into the dark fantastic".