PETER STRAUB WAS BORN in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on 2 March, 1943, the first of three sons of a salesman and a nurse. The salesman wanted him to become an athlete, the nurse thought he would do well as either a doctor or a Lutheran minister, but all he wanted to do was to learn to read.

When kindergarten turned out to be a stupefyingly banal disappointment devoted to cutting animal shapes out of heavy colored paper, he took matters into his own hands and taught himself to read by memorizing his comic books and reciting them over and over to other neighborhood children on the front steps until he could recognize the words. Therefore, when he finally got to first grade to find everyone else laboring over the imbecile adventures of Dick, Jane and Spot (“See Spot run. See, see, see,”), he ransacked the library in search of pirates, soldiers, detectives, spies, criminals, and other colorful souls. Soon he had earned a reputation as an ace storyteller, in demand around campfires and in back yards on summer evenings.

This career as the John Buchan to the first grade was interrupted by a collision between himself and an automobile which resulted in a classic near-death experience, many broken bones, surgical operations, a year out of school, a lengthy tenure in a wheelchair, and certain emotional quirks. Once back on his feet, he quickly acquired a severe stutter which plagued him into his twenties and now and then still puts in a nostalgic appearance, usually to the amusement of telephone operators and shop clerks. Because he had learned prematurely that the world was dangerous, he was jumpy, restless, hugely garrulous in spite of his stutter, physically uncomfortable and, at least until he began writing horror three decades later, prone to nightmares. Books took him out of himself, so he read even more than earlier, a youthful habit immeasurably valuable to any writer. And his storytelling, for in spite of everything he was still a sociable child with a lot of friends, took a turn toward the dark and the garish, toward the ghoulish and the violent. He found his first “effect” when he discovered that he could make this kind of thing funny.

As if scripted, the rest of life followed. He went on scholarship to Milwaukee Country Day School and was the darling of his English teachers. He discovered Thomas Wolfe and Jack Kerouac, patron saints of wounded and self-conscious adolescence, and also, blessedly, jazz music, which spoke of utterance beyond any constraint: passion and liberation in the form of speech on the far side of the verbal border. The alto saxophone player Paul Desmond, speaking in the voice of a witty and inspired angel, epitomized ideal expressiveness. Our boy still had no idea why inspired speech spoke best when it spoke in code, the simultaneous terror and ecstasy of his ancient trauma, as well as its lifelong (so far, anyhow) legacy of anger, being so deeply embedded in the self as to be imperceptible. Did he behave badly, now and then? Did he wish to shock, annoy, disturb, and provoke? Are you kidding? Did he also wish to excel, to keep panic and uncertainty at arm’s length by good old main force effort? Make a guess. So here we have a pure but unsteady case of denial happily able to maintain itself through merciless effort. Booted along by invisible fears and horrors, this fellow was rewarded by wonderful grades and a vague sense of a mysterious but transcendent wholeness available through expression. He went to the University of Wisconsin and, after opening his eyes to the various joys of Henry James, William Carlos Williams, and the Texas blues-rocker Steve Miller, a great & joyous character who lived across the street, passed through essentially unchanged to emerge in 1965 with an honors degree in English, then an MA at Columbia a year later. He thought actual writing was probably beyond him even though actual writing was probably what he was best at – down crammed he many and many a book, stirred by some, dutiful to the claims of others, and, more important than any of this, educated by the writerly example of his dear, eternal friend, the poet Ann Lauterbach.

Stuffed with books and opinions about books but out of money, he married his beloved, Susan, started studying the properties of pink viagra wiki and generic drugs took a job teaching English at his old school, now renamed University School of Milwaukee, and enjoyed a minor but temporary success as Mr. Chips-cum-jalapenos, largely due to the absolute freedom given him by the administration and his affection for his students, who faithfully followed him as he struck matches and led them into caves named Lawrence, Forster, Brontë, Thackeray, etc., etc. On his off-hours, he fell in love with poetry, especially John Ashbery’s poetry, and wrote imitations of same. Three years later, fearing to turn into a spiritless & chalk-stained drudge, he went to Dublin, Ireland, to work on a Ph.D., secretly (a secret even to him) to start writing seriously.

Dublin, 1969-1972. His dissertation, a mess, devolved. He published poems in poetry places, did readings with new friend Thomas Tessier who was writing plays and poems, published two small books of poetry, ISHMAEL and OPEN AIR, and finally surrendered to psychic necessity and wrote a novel, not at all a good novel, called MARRIAGES, accepted by the first publisher to whom it was, heart in mouth, sent. He moved to the larger world of London.

London, 1972-1979, Ann Lauterbach lived on the other side of Belsize Square; Thomas Tessier soon materialized, magnificently, as the Managing Director of a publishing house. He wrote & wrote & sometime in 1974, in desperation and despair first gathered up his ancient fears and turned them into fiction & by doing so saved his life. He and Ann talked about poetry, the mysteries of everyday life and everything else; he and Tessier talked about H.P. Lovecraft, NO ORCHIDS FOR MISS BLANDISH, and everything else, including the horror movies shown at the Kilburn Odeon. His writing improved. He and Susan bought a house on Hillfield Avenue in Crouch End, N8, and begat their first child, Benjamin, born during the writing of GHOST STORY.

In 1979 he returned to America, living first in Westport, Connecticut, where Emma Straub was born, then in New York City, where he and his family inhabit a brownstone on the Upper West Side. He continues to enjoy the crucial friendships of Ann Lauterbach, Thom Tessier, and several others, mainly writers and jazz musicians. At some point he became conscious of the central issues of his life, which recognition made it impossible to cast them into the patterns, however imaginative, of horror literature, as least as conventionally regarded. Horror itself, on the other hand, has not abandoned him, nor can it ever, a matter for which he feels the deepest gratitude. He is a member of HWA, MWA, PEN, and though he is without “hobbies,” remains intensely interested in jazz, as well as opera and other forms of classical music.

So matters stood in 2007-08, when (I think) the above was written. Since then, I have continued to live in my brownstone, though there are strong hints this may change sometime in the near-ish future. Books have been written, although these days what seems mainly to go on is rewriting. Seven or eight years ago, the Century Club endured a spasm of absent-mindedness and inattention, during the course of which they admitted me. It is the best club imaginable, with members who have actually accomplished things. (Boredom is not a problem at the Century.)

Somewhere along the way, I turned, rather to my amazement, into an old guy. Me…how’d that happen (I ask, in all innocence)? I lost a lot of weight, gave up alcohol, and grew a beard, so as to be prepared for the trials, infirmities, and indignities of ageing—also, I took up yoga, which whips my skinny butt three times a week.

My children are doing well, Emma as a flourishing young novelist, Ben as a sort of human-dynamo film agent. I am immensely proud of both of them, and grateful that I can be. My marriage is a lovely, solid relationship without which my life would be both impoverished and imperiled. One lives through so much, and after a while things sort of settle down, and most of what one wishes for is a long calm continuance, with work and love, friendship and art, clear-headedness, laughter, and an unbroken awareness of how fragile and threatened any such blessedness must be. As dear Ben Sidran says, Everything is broken, and nothing is gonna be all right. Cue the drummer.

PETER STRAUB

Peter Straub, Benjamin Straub and Stephen King, London, 1977, by Susan Straub

Stephen King and Peter Straub join dark forces – archive, 1985

7 February 1985: The Talisman’s combination of fantasy and horror, with a kid hero, meant it has a special appeal for the youth market

W J Weatherby
Friday 7 february 2020

So successful have Stephen King and Peter Straub been as literary collaborators that they are planning a sequel to their vast fantasy, The Talisman, which was one of the biggest American bestsellers of the past year. Not only have well over a million hardcover copies been distributed at $18.95 each without benefit of book clubs, but Hollywood’s wunderkind, Steven Spielberg, has bought the film rights after long, extremely tough negotiations. And the paperback edition is still to come.

Play and movie collaborations are hard enough, but novels written in tandem seem impossible – a dream that seldom comes true – so the King-Straub venture didn’t arouse much interest at first. They seemed such an unlikely pair of literary collaborators – rather like matching Edgar Allen Poe with Henry James.

Altthough both are bestsellers in the same horror-fantasy genre, Stephen King is a New Englander with a pop style, who frequently writes to a blaring background of rock music, whereas Peter Straub spent much of his literary life in England. It shows in his more stately cadences, what King once described as English diction – “cool, rational, almost disconnected from any kind of emotional base.”

The two men overcame the natural competitiveness of American writers when King gave an enthusiastic boost for the jacket of Straub’s Julia and Straub, who had “quibbles” about King’s Salem’s Lot, because of a certain “sloppiness” in style, raved over The Shining as a masterpiece, claiming King had written “probably the best supernatural novel in a hundred years.” King replied by calling Straub’s Ghost Story probably the best supernatural novel to be published in the wake of the three trail-blazers – Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist and The Other – that ushered in the new horror wave in the Seventies.

By the time the two writers met for the first time in London, they were beginning to sound like a mutual congratulation society. “How can you afford to live in a country with this kind of taxation?” King asked Straub.

When King and his wife came to dinner, Straub recalls, “they burst in full of energy, on a torrent of talk. It is safe to say that they were completely un-English, which at first was disconcerting – we’d been in England 10 years and were used to a less muscular social style — but then refreshing.”

As Straub commented in a recent anthology of King studies, “a wrong word, a breath of rudeness, can lead to undeclared warfare” between writers, but these English meetings with King seemed to confirm their mutual admiration and inspired a wish to collaborate.Straub had already found King’s pop style a healthy, liberating influence. “He had shown me how to escape from my own education. Good taste had no role in his thinking: he was unafraid of being loud and vulgar, of presenting horrors head-on, and because he was able to abandon notions of good taste he could push his ambition into sheer and delightful gaudiness – into the garish beauty of the gaudy.”

Straub told King they were the Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler of their genre. He meant their genre had to “live in the wider world of literature or it was merely a warped species of children’s novel, that it had to be as well written as any other sort of novel to be worth anything.” They had to take their chances in the world outside the ghetto of horror-fantasy.

King agreed, although “he was charitable enough to refrain from pointing out that he was doing this rather better than me.” With his string of bestsellers and movie sales, King had already become what he calls a brand-name author, and he likes to joke that he is the Green Giant (or Heinz soup) of the modern horror story.So, when at last the two writers decided to do a book together, it meant brand-name authors were attempting an ambitious collaboration that would take them out of their ghetto. They discussed an epic yarn about a 12-year-old boy’s quest in this world and in another known as the Territories for a magical object to save his mother’s life. Friends tried to talk them out of it sure they’d end up hating each other. But they persisted, mapped out the plot twists, and then retired – King to his mansion in Bangor, Maine, and Straub to his home in Westport, Connecticut – to bring the detailed outline to life.

The only real strain on their relationship came during the protracted movie negotiations, which became as tense and required as much anxious waiting as an all-night poker game. But their talk now of a sequel shows that no permanent harm was done.

From The Talisman’s first appearance in bookshops, it jumped to the top of the bestseller lists and stayed there, but the reviews were another story. Many American critics decided that blending pop King and cool Straub hadn’t resulted in the best of both, but in a heavy-handed, slow-moving, rather styleless narrative that reads like the novelisation of a film. Straub calls this charge obscene, and King describes the reviews as “the worst I’ve ever gotten.”

Straub noted long ago that every writer he knew talked a lot about money, and much of their response to The Talisman’s reception concerns not the critics but the fact that the book will make them both multi-millionaires. Straub describes himself as positively numb. On each hardcover copy alone, they split $3. The American publisher, Viking-Penguin, spent at least $500,000 on advertising, well over half of it on a TV commercial, and refused to sell it to the book clubs, gambling correctly that as many copies could be sold through wholesalers for a higher price.The Talisman’s combination of fantasy and horror, with a kid hero, meant it has a special appeal for the youth market – this probably explained Spielberg’s determination to get the film rights – and the book was published in time for Christmas. But King claims that vast numbers of teenagers themselves – the same audience that made Spielberg movies like ET so profitable – saved up their quarters, dimes and nickels to buy the book.

The King-Straub collaboration thus brought young moviegoers – or their relatives – into bookshops in unprecedented numbers and in that sense is a great success. But admirers of King and Straub may conclude that their individual talents need to be left alone to produce the work that will spring them from the ghetto into the literary mainstream.

THE GUARDIAN

Peter Straub obituary

Award-winning horror writer whose novels included Julia, Ghost Story and the bestselling The Talisman with Stephen King

Michael Karlson

Friday 9 September 2022

The essence of horror fiction is fear of the unknown. What made Peter Straub, who has died aged 79, so successful as a horror writer was his understanding that this unknown is at heart a reflection of the deeper unknowns all people face.

His bestseller Ghost Story (1979), which was made into a 1981 film starring Fred Astaire, Douglas Fairbanks Jr and Melvyn Douglas, is informed by the reflection of the living that is provided by the dead. This can sometimes be funny, not in a macabre way; one thinks of Thorne Smith’s Topper stories, where the ghosts who haunt Cosmo Topper’s house try to liberate him from his own personality, and a handful of famous films from the golden age of Hollywood. Straub wrote of his own turn “toward the dark and garish” and discovering his own “first effect” when he found he “could make this kind of thing funny”.

Straub’s use of his insights was amplified by the quality of his prose. One of his early influences was Henry James, whose The Turn of the Screw is one of the greatest ghost stories, but he would also cite many other classic novelists, as well as poets such as John Ashbery and William Carlos Williams. There was always the sense of his reluctance to be pigeonholed as a “genre” novelist. Stephen King, with whom Straub collaborated on two novels, called him “a modern writer who was the equal of, say, Philip Roth, though he wrote about fantastic things”. What was unsaid was that Roth wrote about such things too; his late bestseller The Plot Against America is a classic alternate-history science-fiction novel.

The core of Straub’s writing might be found in his early years. He was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; his father, Gordon, was a salesman, his mother, Elvina (nee Nilsestuen), was a nurse. At the age of seven Peter was hit by a car and injured so severely he had to relearn how to walk after spending a year in a wheelchair. He developed a stutter that he eventually managed to control, most of the time. He later wrote that since he had learned prematurely that the world was dangerous, he was jumpy, restless and hugely garrulous, in spite of his stutter.

He was a prodigious reader, and bright enough to win a scholarship to Milwaukee country day school, from where he went on to take a BA in English in 1965 from the University of Wisconsin, followed by an MA from Columbia University in New York City the following year. Then he returned to Milwaukee, married his college sweetheart, Susan Bitker, in 1966, and began teaching English at his old school.

In 1969 they left for Dublin, where Peter worked on a PhD at University College. His dissertation on DH Lawrence was never completed, but he met another expat American, Thomas Tessier, who would also become a horror writer. Their small press, Seafront, published his first book of poetry, My Life in Pictures, in 1971.

Moving to London, Straub published two more poetry chapbooks, Ishmael from Bernard Stone’s Turret Books and Open Air from Irish University Press. He was astounded to have his first novel, Marriages, accepted by the first publisher he sent it to, and published in 1973. Another, Under Venus, followed in 1974. He continued writing poetry; in 1983 the science fiction publisher Underwood-Miller issued Leeson Park and Belsize Square: Poems 1970-75.

But neither poetry nor mainstream fiction had been lucrative, and he decided he “just wanted to write a novel that would make money, so I wouldn’t have to get a job”. That was Julia (1975), about a woman haunted by a ghost she thinks is her daughter. It came along at a good time, as the horror genre moved into the mainstream, with bestsellers such as Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen and King’s Carrie, which appeared in 1974. In 1977 the British director Richard Loncraine made Julia into a film, The Haunting of Julia, with Mia Farrow, Keir Dullea and Tom Conti.

If You Could See Me Now was published the same year, followed by Ghost Story (whose filmed screenplay was written by Lawrence Cohen, who also did the screenplay of Carrie), which became a bestseller. In 1979 Straub moved back to the US, first to Westport, Connecticut, and then to New York City, where he spent the rest of his life. His 1983 novel Floating Dragon won the British Fantasy award but, after collaborating with King on The Talisman (1984), which was also a huge seller, Straub began moving away from horror, though the horror field was not quite ready to let him leave.

The first of his Blue Rose trilogy, Koko (1988) won the World Fantasy award; it was followed by Mystery (1990) and The Throat (1993), which won the Bram Stoker award from the Horror Writers Association. About a 10-year old boy who survives a near-fatal accident and becomes obsessed with an unsolved murder, the trilogy is more mystery thriller than horror fantasy. After another thriller, The Hellfire Club (1996), and the offbeat Pork Pie Hat (1999), set among jazz musicians, in the next decade he produced four novels, all of which won Stoker awards, as well as a sequel to Talisman, Black House (2001), again with King. Lost Boy, Lost Girl (2004) won both the Stoker and World Fantasy awards.

Throughout this time Straub was also writing short stories and proved an able anthologist; in the end he was awarded four World Fantasy and 10 Stoker awards. He was keen on the camaraderie of writers; he revelled in fan conventions the same way he had felt in the pubs of London or Dublin. His daughter Emma, who became a novelist, eulogised him as “Big Pete”, and wrote of the joy he took in interacting with others.

It reminded me of his moving 2012 remembrance of the fantasy writer Karl Edward Wagner. He described how Wagner, who drank himself to an early death, “to an extent well beyond the usual human capacity, even as represented by most fiction-writers, and it now seems to me to an extent so drastically uncomfortable as to be painful … was able to see what was actually before him”. In his own way, Straub’s strength was his ability to transmute what he saw before us into less fatal discomfort.

Straub died of complications from a broken hip suffered in a fall. He is survived by Susan, Emma, and his son, Benjamin.

“I don’t know how her life turned out, but I do know that nobody can protect anybody else from vileness. Or from pain. All you can do is not let it break you in half and keep on going until you get to the other side.”

― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

Emma Fusco-Straub, River Fusco-Straub, Michael Fusco-Straub, Peter, Benjamin Straub,
and Susan by Deborah Copaken Kogan 2013

“Narcissus, gazing at his image in the pool, wept. A friend passing by saw him and asked, “Narcissus, why do you weep?” “Because my face has changed,” Narcissus said. “Do you cry because you grow older?” “No. I see that I am no longer innocent. I have been gazing at myself long and long, and so doing have worn out my innocence.”

― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

BOOKS ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BUY THE BOOKWORD Powell's Amazon
Hauntings: The Official Peter Straub Bibliography
Compiled by Michael R. Collings
(Overlook Press, 1999)
Includes book-length publications, short fiction, non-fiction, poetry, liner notes and miscellaneous writings of Mr Straub beginning in 1971. Illustrations of many book covers. First section is six-part interview of Mr. Straub by Stanley Wiater. If you collect Mr. Straub or need a reference, you need this book!
BUY THE BOOKPowell's Amazon
At the Foot of the Story Tree
By Bill Sheehan
Dustjacket and autograph page art by Alan M. Clark
(Subterranean Press, 2000)
AT THE FOOT OF THE STORY TREE was written to fill an inexplicable gap in the small body of critical literature that deals with modern horror fiction. Despite the fact that literally dozens of books have been written on the life and work of Stephen King, and that writers as diverse as Dean Koontz, Anne Rice, Clive Barker and Ramsey Campbell have become the subjects of biographies and critical monographs, no one — up to now — has published a book-length study of the fiction of Peter Straub. Reflecting on the situation in the fall of 1997, I decided it was time for someone to correct this oversight. With an arrogance born of innocence and inexperience, I decided to do the job myself. Now, two years and many travails later, the book is done, and will be coming to you shortly courtesy of Subterranean Press. AT THE FOOT OF THE STORY TREE (a title which should be familiar to readers of SHADOWLAND) is an old-fashioned work of criticism that takes a hard — and hopefully thorough — look at the entire body of Peter Straub’s fiction, from his relatively obscure mainstream novel, MARRIAGES, through his ambitious new supernatural thriller, MR. X, and from the shorter fiction collected in HOUSES WITHOUT DOORS through such recent, still uncollected stories as the Stoker Award-winning “Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff.” Book by book, story by story, I have done my best to untangle the complexities of Straub’s fiction, to isolate and illuminate its central concerns, and to articulate my highly personal sense of its unique — and, I believe enduring — value. Whether or not I’ve achieved any of these objectives is not for me to say. Anyone who takes the time to read my book can make that judgment for him or herself. I only hope that AT THE FOOT OF THE STORY TREE encourages readers to take a second — perhaps, in some cases, a first — look at the novels and stories of Peter Straub. In the end, real criticism exists to serve its subject, and this particular subject has, over a period of more than twenty years, provided me — and many others — with a large number of complex pleasures. This long overdue critical study is my personal response to those many pleasures. Writing it has been, in the truest sense of that overused expression, a labor of love. — Bill Sheehan

Stephen King and Peter Straub

Revelations: Peter Straub

December 13, 2019
As an aspiring writer, you often don’t realize the influences certain authors have over your developing style and voice. You’re busy reading books and stories which really excite you, writing away in your own little world, and in many ways, you can’t see the forest for the trees.
I’ve been especially prone to that over the years. I tend to read many books simultaneously at frenzied paces (I’ve often said I read like other people breathe), and it’s sometimes hard to keep track of where I draw my inspirations from. It was once said Rod Serling was the same. When Ray Bradbury actually accused Serling of stealing his work for The Twilight Zone, some said Serling could never completely deny it, because he’d read so many things so quickly, he always had difficulty attributing a source to his story ideas.
Not too long ago, I re-read a novel which I remembered adoring in college, Peter Straub’s Floating Dragon. Not only did I find the novel just as striking as I’d recalled (even more so, given twenty years of “relative” maturity added to the reader), I experienced a shocking revelation. I’d tried to write this novel, over the past ten years. Several times, in fact.
It was a humbling, remarkable realization. The mixed narrative of first-person meta-author intruding into a third-person limited narrative, with occasional slips into third-person omniscience? Yeah, definitely. I’d absolutely tried to write this exact novel, several times over. The only other time I’ve experienced that realization was when, right around the same time, I re-read Needful Things by Stephen King, and realized that, indeed, I’d tried to re-write that novel, also.
I can’t think of a better compliment to an author and their influence.
*
We all harbor “ghosts” from our past. Former selves. Family members long gone. Loves cherished or now despised. Victories, defeats, snapshots of nostalgia or despair.
Every place we used to live in or frequent is populated with the ghosts of who we were. We’re all haunted, because we all have memories. Ghost stories fueled by the power of memory are powerful examinations of the human psyche, examining the hold history has over us. The well-told ghost story confirms the fears we all struggle with. The past isn’t dead and gone. It isn’t resolved. It’s still there, waiting in the darkness for the right time to rear its head.
Peter Straub’s novels Ghost Story, If You Could See Me Now and Floating Dragon stand as three of the best expressions of this fear, and proved fundamental in developing my thoughts on “hauntings” and “ghosts.”
“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
“I won’t tell you that, but I’ll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me…the most dreadful thing…”
And so begins Ghost Story. Six men—Frederick Hawthorne, Sears James, Lawrence Benedickt and John Jaffrey—spend a year after the death of their friend Edward Wanderley telling each other ghost stories, or stories about “the worst thing” they’d ever done. Straub blends several horror tropes together in Ghost Story, offering an existential explanation not only for ghosts but also vampires and werewolves, but the unifying thread running throughout is this: you can’t escape the past. Its consequences are far-reaching and exert power over not only you, but also the generations which follow.
If You Could See Me Now invokes this power of history in a more personal way. Miles Teagarden grew up a troubled youth skirting the edge of the law. The only person he ever felt connected to was his likewise troubled cousin, Allison Greening. Allison’s mysterious drowning stains Miles’ life. Despite moving on to a somewhat successful career teaching college literature, he can’t leave the past behind—especially considering the mysterious circumstances of Allison’s death. She’d been found in a rock quarry where they’d been skinny-dipping, drowned, Miles found unconscious on the shore.
He’s never been able to get over Allison’s death, or the clinging guilt and mystery surrounding it. Especially the flitting sensation that someone else had been at the quarry that night, watching them from a distance. This guilt ruins his marriage and leaves him adrift. Making matters worse, not long after their divorce, Miles’ wife drowns in a swimming accident.
Intensifying Miles’s complex was Allison’s promise that, should neither of them find love within twenty years, they would return to Arden and be together. On the pretense of needing to “get away” to write an academic critique of D. H. Lawrence, Miles heads out to his deceased grandmother’s farm, now owned by his other cousin, Duane. His plan to write this book, of course, is nothing more than a thinly veiled excuse to keep his appointment with Allison Greening, whom he believes will keep her promise from beyond the grave.
Leaving aside the novel’s outcome, If You Could See Me Now is an even more powerful example of the past exerting its influence over the present. Even if Allison Greening never does make her appearance, (and I’m not saying she does, or that she doesn’t) Straub offers a compelling story about a man completely ruled by the past.
Floating Dragon, the novel which so impacted me I tried to write something very much like it, is a wonderfully complex novel which takes this dominance of the past and its influence over the present and expands it over an entire community. For generations, the suburb of Hampstead, Connecticut, has been tormented by the lingering spirit of Gideon Winter, a man murdered vigilante-style centuries before by Hampstead’s founding families, for suspicion of child murder. Over the generations, this malevolent spirit finds outlets through serial killers, town uprisings, mass killings and strange outbursts of violence.
The present of the novel kicks off in a seemingly unrelated chemical accident several counties away, which sends clouds of toxic gas toward Hampstead. The spirit of Winter (ironically, nicknamed “The Dragon” and co-opting a gas code-named DRG), uses this as the perfect opportunity to once again rear its head and cause chaos within Hampstead. In typical Straub fashion, this spirit doesn’t simply goad people into doing inexplicably violent things. It knows them. Their pasts, their secrets, their private anguishes. In this case, a spirit from the past invokes the past in specific individual cases to bring about ruin.
Why is Gideon Winter’s spirit suddenly bent on destroying Hampstead, once and for all? The past, of course. For the first time since Winter’s death hundreds of years before, the descendants of the founding fathers who killed him have returned to Hampstead. This is the trigger. These figures from the past, unlocking a demon from the past to wreck havoc on the present.
In much of Straub’s work, the past is very often the heart of his stories’ horror, and the reach of that past is unforgiving, unrelenting, a malicious spirit from which there is no escape.
*
I read Shadowland many years after Floating Dragon. At that point I still didn’t consider myself a horror fan or someone who wanted to write horror (somehow, loving Stephen King’s stories and wanting to write like Stephen King didn’t count as wanting to write horror), so I picked up this novel—boasting the tagline “The Ultimate Masterpiece of Modern Horror”—with a bit of trepidation. I still hadn’t read much horror at the time, and didn’t understand the kind of stories the genre had to offer.
Shadowland quickly enthralled me. Whatever I was expecting, this tale of magic and mystery (probably the best way to describe Straub’s work in general) left me breathless. The story of two boys—Tom Flanagan and Del Nightingale—learning magic from Del’s uncle quickly sprawled into a tale of magic, history, and folklore. Filled with rich backstory stretching through World War I, and the kind of prose which made me want to become an English teacher, it also appealed to me on a very basic level. It was the story of a nephew desperate to live up to his uncle’s reputation, only to discover that his friend is the source of his uncle’s designs, and not him, and how that twists the darkness inside him.
It would be some time before I encountered Straub’s work again, but when I read The Throat and then dove into the rest of the Blue Rose trilogy (Mystery and Koko), I realized I’d discovered my favorite kind of writer—the kind who could paint huge stories on sprawling tapestries which seemed like worlds onto themselves.
Also, for the first time, I encountered Peter Straub’s meta-fictional author Timothy Underhill. Call me a neophyte, but the thought of blurring the lines between an a author and a fictional character and story and reality absolutely astounded me (and became the direct inspiration—for good or for ill—for Gavin Patchett, my fictional alter-ego in my fictional town of Clifton Heights). Straub did it so effortlessly and naturally, I’m still half-convinced Timothy Underhill actually exists, and that he co-wrote those novels with Straub.
The Blue Rose trilogy also, for the first time, showed me how “slippery” the marketing term “horror” was, and how almost any kind of story could posses elements of “horror.” This far-reaching epic story ranging from the tragedy and the violence of the Vietnam War, to the tribulations of growing up, to the hunt for a serial killer and a string of murders, went past the mere label of “horror.” Like Shadowland, it offered so much more. This was life breathed onto the page, but it also possessed all the necessary ingredients for powerful and entertaining story-telling. Suspense, mystery, action, and, yes, horror.
I encountered Timothy Underhill again in lost boy, lost girl and in the night room. lost boy, lost girl, to this day, stands as the most emotionally powerful “horror” novel I’ve ever read, and it’s begging for a re-read soon. Timothy Underhill’s nephew disappears shortly after his mother’s mysterious suicide. In his investigation, Underhill learns that not only is a pedophilic serial killer on the loose in his old home town, but before he disappeared, his nephew Mark had become obsessed with an abandoned house in the neighborhood in which he believed the serial killer was not only hiding, but was also using to torture and kill his victims.
lost boy, lost girl was one of the first novels which really, truly whispered to me what horror should mean to me. In lesser hands it’s merely a novel about the hunt for serial pedophile/killer who sexually abused his victims before killing them. In Straub’s hands, it becomes more than just a dark mystery, it becomes a spiritual journey. He deftly wove together supernatural elements with the hunt for an earth-bound killer, all the while hinting that supernatural, spiritual forces move behind everything good and bad in this world. There’s a scene near the end in which one of the killer’s victims—now lost as a spirit (hence the title, lost boy, lost girl)—reclaims the site of her ruination in an intimate, sensual, yet spiritual fashion which blew my mind and crushed my heart. To this day, I’ve never read a scene more powerful or affecting.
in the night room also features Timothy Underhill, and it as well served as a huge inspiration for me (again, for good or bad, Clifton Heights and Gavin Patchett owe a large debt to Straub’s work). In it, Timothy Underhill learns that his current manuscript may or may not be actually happening as he writes it. To say much more about this novel would spoil it, so I won’t. But, again, this novel proved revelatory for me, a huge milestone. Again, you could claim I was only so astounded by this blurring of lines between fiction and reality because I wasn’t well-read in the horror genre at the time, and such a claim would be correct.
Even so, I fell in love with the concept (as anyone who has read my Clifton Heights series well knows). The idea that writing is so powerful it creates its own reality speaks to me on a deep, fundamental level. It puts into fictive form the truth that we who love stories hold close to our hearts: that fictional constructs speak truth into the world, and are sometimes more real than the “real world.”
I could go on about Straub’s work. His masterful collection, Houses Without Doors. His novel Mr. X, a novel of supernatural destiny and the link between the polar forces of good and evil, which is also somehow a riff off cosmic horror and Lovecraft. The existential power of A Dark Matter. The works I’ve discussed, however, have had the most impact on me, and have also been re-read multiple times. I dare say I’m not the same for those readings, and this is a very, very good thing.
The Work of Peter Straub
Kevin Lucia is the Reviews Editor for Cemetery Dance. His short fiction has appeared in several anthologies. His first short story collection, Things Slip Through, was published November 2013, and his most recent short story collection, Things You Need, was released September, 2018. He’s currently working on his first novel. For free monthly fiction, book reviews, YouTube commentaries, and three free ebooks, visit www.kevinlucia.blogspot.com and sign up for his monthly email newsletter.
CEMETERY DANCE

Peter Straub

AWARDS AND HONORS

2012

World Fantasy Convention Lifetime Achievement Award
2011
Bram Stoker Award Superior Achievement in Long Fiction, for THE BALLAD OF BALLARD & SANDRINE
2011
Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Award for Distinguished Achievement
2010
Bram Stoker Award Superior Achievement in a Novel, A DARK MATTER
2009
University of Wisconsin Distinguished Alumni Award
2008
Poets & Writers Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Award
2007
International Horror Guild Living Legend in Horror & Dark Fantasy
2007
Bram Stoker Superior Achievement in a COLLECTION, for 5 STORIES
2006
Horror Writer’s Association Life Achievement Award
2004
Bram Stoker Superior Achievement in a Novel, IN THE NIGHT ROOM
2003
International Horror Guild Award, Best Novel, for LOST BOY LOST GIRL
2003
Bram Stoker Award, Best Novel for LOST BOY LOST GIRL
2000
Bram Stoker Award, Fiction Collection, for MAGIC TERROR
1999
Bram Stoker Award, Best Novel, for MR. X
1998
International Horror Guild Award, Best Long Form, for “Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff”
1998
Grand Master at World Horror Convention, Niagara Falls, NY
1998
Bram Stoker Award, Long Fiction for “Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff”
1996
Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a novel about THE HELLFIRE CLUB
1994
British Fantasy Award, Best Novel, for FLOATING DRAGON

1993
World Fantasy Award, Best Novella, for “The Ghost Village”
1993
Bram Stoker Award, Best Novel, for THE THROAT
1989
World Fantasy Award, Best Novel, for KOKO
1985
World and Locus Fantasy Awards for THE TALISMAN with Stephen King

1984
August Derleth Award for FLOATING DRAGON

PETER STRAUB

POETRY

The Devil’s Wine
(Cemetery Dance, 2004)
Leeson Park and
Belsize Square
(Underwood Miller, 1983)
Open Air
(Irish University
Press, 1972)
Ishmael
(Turret, 1972)

NOVELS

A Dark Matter
(Random House, 2010)
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The Skylark
(Subterranean Press, 2010)
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In the Night Room
(Random House, 2004)
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In the Night Room
(Borderlands Press, 2004)
Lost Boy, Lost Girl
(Random House, 2003)
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Lost Boy, Lost Girl
(Borderlands Press, 2004)
Black House
(Random House, 2001)
Black House
(Scribner, 2012)
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Black House
(Donald Grant, 2002)
Mr. X
(Random House, 1999)
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The Hellfire Club
(Random House, 1995)
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The Throat
(Dutton, 1993)
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The Throat
(Borderlands Press, 1994)
The Throat
(Anchor Books, 2010)
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Mystery
(Dutton, 1990)
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Mystery
(Anchor Books, 2010)
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Koko
(Dutton, 1998)
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Koko
(Anchor Books, 2009)
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Koko
(Centipede Press, 2009)
The Talisman
(Viking Penguin, 1984)
The Talisman
(Scribner, 2012)
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The Talisman
(Donald Grant, 1984)
The Talisman
(Orion, 2012)
Floating Dragon
(Putnam, 1982)
Floating Dragon
(Berkley, 2003)
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Floating Dragon
(Cemetery Dance, 2012)
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Shadowland
(Coward, McCann
& Geoghehgan, 1980)
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Shadowland
(Gauntlet Press
15th anniversary, 1995)
Shadowland
(Berkley, 2003)
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Ghost Story
(Coward, McCann
& Geoghehgan, 1979)
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Ghost Story
(Pocket Books, 2001)
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If You Could
See Me Now
(Coward, McCann
& Geoghehgan, 1977)
If You Could
See Me Now
(Ballantine, 2000)
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If You Could
See Me Now
(Centipede Press, 2009)
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Julia
(Coward, McCann
& Geoghehgan, 1975)
Julia
(Ballantine, 2000)
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Julia
(Centipede Press, 2014)
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