#Spooktober-‘Ghost Story’ by Peter Straub

About the book…

In a seedy motel in Florida, a young man holds captive a little girl in a soiled pink dress. He is anxious, tormented, introspective. She is calm, passive, strangely detached. She says her name is Angie Maule.

In the small upstate town of Milburn, New York, four old friends meet to honor the traditions of the Chowder Society. They drink good whiskey and trade ghost stories. As chilling as these tales are, and as strangely prophetic, they pale before the horrific nightmares that began a year ago when one of their members attended a party for a visiting actress – and there died of a heart attack. Or was it fright? Ask the actress. She says her name is Ann-Veronica Moore.

In California, a talented young novelist teaching creative writing at Berkeley finds himself hopelessly obsessed with one of his students. She is exquisitely lovely, infernally elusive. She says her name is Alma Mobley.

What is the connection between these places, these people, these agonizing events?

‘Ghost Story’ by Peter Straub, was published in 1979, and subsequently adapted into a film starring Fred Astaire in 1981. A stone cold classic of modern cinema, the book is one which I personally felt un-filmable until I watched it, under duress from my inner snob and had to agree,it was bloody brilliant.

The 4 men who comprise the Chowder Society are connected by more than friendship, they are joined by a terrible secret that makes their lives a living ghost story.

It is a Russian doll of a novel with the stories which they tell each other at Society meetings revealing more and more about each character as a force beyond their control is wielding a fierce sense of vengeance beyond the grave.

I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read it, Straub had a particular and unique style which was exemplified in flawed, fallible and often unlikeable characters.

He is a chronicler of American life,he nails the small town claustrophobia and the chills he raises down your spine come from a highly cerebral place. He explores this through many novels, pinpointing the time and place where actions are allowed to occur because of the environment certain individuals are raised in.

Do we feel sorry for the principle characters as they fear their lives are in danger?

Do they deserve the haunting that keeps them awake with hideous nightmares?

What makes a ghost story a ghost story?

Does it actually require ghosts or does it need the suggestion of them as a concept?

I love love love this deep and abiding novel of resurrection,death, evil and good which are never as linear as the way these words lie on the page.

What Straub succeeds at so mightily is making you care, making you scared and getting you to the very last page with your nerves in shreds. It’s a book that rewards the patient reader.

And afterwards, you will be pressing it on anyone you know who may read horror as being so worthy of their time.

About the author…

Peter Straub is an American novelist, born in Milwaukee, educated at the University of Wisconsin, Columbia University, and University College, Dublin. His first books were acute psychological studies, but he is best known for his horror novels such as ‘If You Could See Me Now’ (1977), and ‘Ghost Story’ (1979), which has been filmed. In these books, he manipulated the horror genre’s crude obsession with the past into a subtle series of confrontations of guilt-ridden protagonists with their own ancient fears. ‘Shadowland’ (1980) and ‘Floating Dragon’ (1983) were fantasies, as was ‘The Talisman’ (1984), and ‘Black House‘ (2001)written with Stephen King. ‘Koko’(1988), ‘Mystery’(1989), and ‘The Throat’(1993) were complex thrillers in which the supernatural rhetoric of his earlier work is less marked.

Links-http://www.peterstraub.net/