Ghost Story

I always had a bit of a preference for Peter Straub over Stephen King. Both superb writers, Straub did not have King's tendency to clown around with his writing, to splurge words all over the page. I realised, rereading this, that the difference beteween Straub and King is like the difference between classic ghost stories and pulp horror. It's clear from this that Straub reveres the old-school styilings of Hawthorne, James and James. It's centred around a group of old men who sit around in formal evening wer telling each other ghost stories for God's sake, and the example we get is an homage to The Turn Of The Screw. Straub is conservative, intellectual, formal, and it shows through in his writing and his structure, but at the end of show more the day it's still a massive town-besieged-by-evil story that became the mainstay of eighties doorstop horror.

It opens, of course, with that eerie, unsettling image - a man driving somewhere with a child he has just taken. The air of mystery and dread surrounding this is unmatched in anything else I've ever read. The rest of the book delivers on the promise of this opening, but I will say there's one part set on a college campus that made me want to punch the character when he started interrogating a young woman he had only just met about her love life - we may have dodged a bullet in not losing Straub to what I think they call The College Novel, or maybe he just exorcised that literary inclination here. Yuk. Maybe it was the Evil Influence Of Evil (because she turns out to be Evil), or maybe men talked to women like that in the 70s?

Anyway, classic, brilliant horror novel, full of heart and atmosphere and occasional splatters of blood. show less

Ghost Story was Peter Straub's breakout novel in 1979, and I remember seeing it in the "new" section of my local public library at the time. The publisher flogged it as a supernatural horror book with literary merit, and it was a fair boast. Straub was an admirable prose stylist, and his monsters have come a long way from their folklore and pulp origins. I found precursor comparanda in some of Seabury Quinn's semi-traditional creatures and most especially Jack Williamson's Darker Than You Think. Straub, who would eventually edit the two-volume American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny for Library of America, consciously adverts to his more literary antecedents Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, even going so far as to name two show more central characters Ricky Hawthorne and Sears James.

It's a big book, with the storytelling heft of, say, a full season of the Stranger Things television horror drama. Like that show, it is multigenerational in scope, although Straub's key ensemble is geriatric rather than adolescent. And Straub's imagined town of Milburn, New York provides the Hawthorne-to-HPL New England sense of a lost frontier buried deep in the unconscious, rather than the vulnerable bucolic Midwestern sensibility of Hawkins, Indiana. All sorts of characters are powerfully drawn, with relationship tensions extending in every direction.

The body of the book provides several layers of background for the frame story focused on the horror novelist Don Wanderly. There is naturally some metafictional positioning that results, both from Wanderly's metier and from the ghost-storytelling preoccupation of the Chowder Society, the clique of old friends around whom most of the novel is constructed. The climax takes place in late December, thus attaching the book to the English tradition of the Christmas ghost story, for which those of M.R. James are paragons. While there was less metafictional meat here than in Straub's later book The Hellfire Club (i.e. Wanderly's The Nightwatcher is neither so well-developed nor so pivotal to the story as Hugo Driver's Night Journey), it still put a shine on the writing.

I have not yet seen the 1981 movie which was "loosely based" on the novel, but the book itself gives more than a little attention to cinema. Attorney Ricky Hawthorne is a movie aficionado given to describing people in terms of old screen icons, and he is friends with the proprietor of the local picture show. A key background character Eva Galli was a film actress, having appeared in a single silent film China Pearl (1925), and there is also important business involving a more recent actress Ann-Veronica Moore. The film of Ghost Story turned out to be the final screen appearance of Fred Astaire (in the role of Ricky Hawthorne), and Astaire is actually name-checked in the novel: "... Clark Gable in a bush jacket turning into Dan Duryea in a gangster's nipped-in-suit turning into graceful, winning Fred Astaire in a Chowder Society tuxedo" (465).

My copy of this book is the first edition, which has a feature of interest extirpated from later re-issues. The chapter "Alma" (181-221) details Wanderly's previous marital engagement during a brief university gig in Berkeley, California. By way of making the Alma character mysterious and creepy, Straub associated her with something presented as more dreadful than "California lunacy at its worst," to wit: "O.T.O. ... Ordo Templi Orientis ... raw material for nightmares" (194-5). Some incidental details demonstrate that Straub's awareness of O.T.O. was almost certainly based on press coverage of the Solar Lodge pretender organization. In any case, he never presents any specific characters or activities as being part of O.T.O., he just uses the allusion for nebulous menace. Since the actual O.T.O. was operating in Berkeley in 1979, they felt a bit slandered and reached out to Straub, who graciously apologized and made an edit for later printings to change the name to an occult order of his own invention: Xala Xalior Xiati.

The rich character development in this book is the feature that makes it most effective as supernatural horror, in my opinion. You can't be very afraid for people you don't care about. On the other hand, there are doubtless adrenaline junkies for whom the pace of this novel with its nested retrospection is just too slow to keep them engaged. (I've certainly read complaints to that effect online.) It continues to find a place in "best of" horror indices, and it deserves one. show less

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

I. "Panama City? Panama City, Florida? What was he doing there?"

What, indeed? I've read Ghost Story at least eight times during the past three decades, and was always curious about why Peter Straub set the prologue and epilogue of the novel in my family's old vacation spot. The answer lay hidden in plain sight in another of my favorite books, a work of nonfiction, but I'll get to that in a moment. For now, a word about the quality of Straub's writing: Ghost Story is unquestionably a masterpiece, and arguably the greatest horror novel ever published. The scenes intended to frighten the reader actually are frightening, and the characters are subtly, realistically rendered. (Not just the members of the Chowder Society, show more either; Straub makes Stella Hawthorne fascinatingly repellent but avoids coming right out and saying that she's a terrible person, while Sheriff Hardesty immediately recognizes that something unnatural is happening in Milburn, despite being held in universally low regard by the townspeople.)

But it's not purely fiction.

II. "They're playful. Think of those initials. Anna Mostyn, Alma Mobley, Ann-Veronica Moore. That was playfulness: she wanted us to notice the similarity. They love to flaunt themselves."

Readers who recognized Straub's "Xala Xalior Xiati" as the Process Church of the Final Judgment probably have also deduced the significance of the initials A.M.: reversed, they are the initials of Process co-founder Mary Ann MacLean. This is not the novel's sole reference to the Process and its associates, however. The town of Milburn is based in large part on Yonkers, New York, where Son of Sam shooter David Berkowitz lived and was arrested in 1977. Though Berkowitz confessed to all the attacks, there was abundant evidence that he had accomplices...and that the late John Carr, one of the two real-life sons of Sam (Sam Carr, Berkowitz's neighbor in Yonkers), was among them. A mechanic in the U.S. Air Force, John was at one time stationed in Panama City, Florida. (The Ann-Veronica Moore character was based on a real person, a Yonkers local and long-time regional occult figure who knew the Carrs and Berkowitz. Like Ann-Veronica, her real-life counterpart appeared in a play and then abruptly left town. Real people named Don and Eva were associated with this play, and Straub used their names for the characters Don Wanderley and Eva Galli.)

III. "And for Don Wanderley, when he would see it, the mystery would lead to Panama City, Florida, and a little girl who said, 'I am you.'"

In The Ultimate Evil, investigative journalist Maury Terry convincingly argued that Berkowitz and the Carr brothers belonged to a Yonkers cult with links to both organized crime and the Process Church. The second of two letters penned by the (alleged) lone Son of Sam killer identified John Carr as "John 'Wheaties' - Rapist and Suffocator of Young Girls," and former cult member Paul Ranieri told Terry that, according to Carr, "some kids nobody would ever miss were taken from an orphanage and killed in rituals." This places in an especially ghastly light Don Wanderley's long drive from Milburn to Panama City (with Angie Maule, the orphaned girl he has abducted) in the novel.

And there's another odd little item to be addressed...one which seems to have been eerily predictive of a future event. In Ghost Story, the vengeful shapeshifter A.M. takes animal victims before moving on to her human targets; sheep, cattle and hapless insurance salesman Freddy Robinson are all found dead, the blood completely drained from their bodies. Straub's novel was published in April 1979. In December of that year, a Brooklyn couple named Howard Green and Carol Marron were stabbed and beaten to death. Their bodies (found in West Paterson, New Jersey) had been drained of blood, possibly with a veterinary syringe. Police said the couple appeared to have been killed "in a satanic rite" and that the man being sought for questioning "was last seen in Oklahoma near the scene of where several cows were found dead and drained of blood." (See "Blood drained from victims," Tonawanda News, February 23, 1980.) The double murder remains unsolved.

Coincidence? Perhaps, but how many coincidences add up to a disturbing pattern? The reader who has made it this far is invited to note the names of the two individuals (Valli Shaio and Gregorio Kohon) to whom Ghost Story is dedicated. show less

Peter Straub has created a timeless tale of terror, an enduring classic. Reduced to its essentials, Ghost Story is a tale of supernatural revenge. As young men, Ricky Hawthorne, Sears James, Edward Wanderly, Lewis Benedikt and John Jaffrey accidentally kill a woman named Eva Galli. They panic, and decide to cover up her death. Placing her body in a borrowed car, they push the vehicle into a nearby lake. As the car sinks into the muck, they see a sight that haunts them for the rest of their lives: for a moment, it appears as if Eva is still alive, as they catch a glimpse of her face through the rear window. Shaken, they vow to keep her death a secret, and go on with their lives. Fifty years later, the group still lives in their hometown show more of Milburn, NY, prosperous and content. Now known as The Chowder Society, they meet on a regular basis to swap ghost stories, but they never speak of Eva. Then, Edward Wanderly dies during a party given in the honor of an actress named Anne-Veronica Moore, apparently of fright. The remaining members experience a series of prophetic dreams in which several of them die. Unable to admit to themselves that Eva Galli has returned to haunt them, they send for Don Wanderley, Ed's nephew. A writer by trade, Don has penned a horror novel called The Nightwatcher, based, we later learn, on his own experiences with Eva, known to him as Alma Mobley. Don's arrival in Milburn seems to send a signal to the evil which threatens the group, resulting in the deaths of two more of their number. The survivors band with Don and Peter Barnes, a young man whose mother has been killed by Eva and her minions. Together they struggle to locate and destroy their nemesis.

I read this book for the first time twenty-four years ago. I recall that I liked it then and it was one of the first books in the horror genre that I had ever read. I believe this book was the one that got me started reading other authors that write horror suspense, and I have never forgotten it. show less

I am SO glad that I finally re-read this book! I was afraid that it wouldn't hold up to my memory of it. I worried about that for decades. Silly me-I needn't have worried-it was even better than I remembered!

This beautifully written story of evil in a small town has a lot in common with Stephen King's IT as far as the small town portion goes. Derry and Milburn are similar in a lot of ways. Despite the title, this book isn't really a ghost story. Just like in IT, IT isn't really a clown.

Ghost Story is about a small group of men who made a mistake in their youth and rather than face up to it, they went about hiding it instead. This leads to consequences none of them could have possibly foreseen. But WE can see those consequences, and show more unfortunately, they are often deadly.

GHOST STORY was my favorite novel for many years-mostly because of the intricacy of it. The stories of these men, the stories about the relatives of these men, and the stories about the town itself, wind around and through each other-to me it's like a beautifully woven tapestry of art. I have to think that the author had it all planned out from the very beginning, otherwise how could it have been so wonderfully done?

This book isn't for everyone, and I get that. (It wasn't even for me at one time, it took me three tries to get into it back in the day.) For those people that it DOES work for? They will sit back when they're done, just like I did, and marvel at the skill on display here.

My highest recommendation!

*I've purchased this book 3 times so far, (my original copy was lost), then I bought a paperback copy, but the print was too small, so I purchased a Kindle copy. I'd buy it again, if I had to!* show less

The more horror you've read, the more you'll enjoy this book, but it's a worthwhile venture into the horror story regardless. At times, it drags, but this is one of those books that might very well sneak up on you. In my own case, I found it refreshingly unfrightful after a semester-long reengagement with horror literature, but a week after I'd finished it....well, to say that it became frightful with further thought is an understatement. This book might be most horrifying for readers who regularly engage with the horror genre or who are artists themselves, but I think it's fair to say it should be at least entertaining for most any reader. The characters and situations here are disconcertingly believable, even when they really show more shouldn't be, and the book as a whole is a careful exploration of what horror has been and can be in the present and future. On top of that, it's just plain creepy, the farther in you get. Yes, I recommend it heartily, especially to readers who write (anything). show less

This was a terrible first read for 2019 - it's going to be difficult, nigh impossible, for any book to beat it as my favorite for the year. This is by far one of the best and most frightening books I've ever read. Straub's writing here is beautiful, even as it makes you want to tuck the book into the freezer to keep yourself safe (the cover even came to make me nervous and jumpy - literally. I saw the cover out of the corner of my eye at one point and flinched). It plays perfectly to the human condition, namely the fear of your past literally coming back to haunt you.

I will admit to struggling with whether to give the book 4 or 5 stars, simply because the ending was not as good as the rest of the book. Toward the end of the book, the show more tension dies out and the overwhelming terror that runs throughout dwindles to nothing. But, for me at least, this is a case of the rest of the book being good enough that the ending did not ruin it for me. I would absolutely read this again and recommend it. show less