At first he wanted to be a literary writer of novels of concept. Peter Straub was an author in search of mainstream success throughout the 1970’s. I looked skeptically at my guide but trusted his taste more than the description on the back cover.

The people who wrote the one for Ghost Story completely buried the lede in their description. Most of my book buying at that time was driven by what was on the back cover describing the contents. He smiled and told me it had just come out in paperback and pointed at Ghost Story. As I was running out of possibilities I asked the guy who was working at the Grove Bookstore if there was a horror book I was overlooking. In 1980 when there was no such thing as the internet I relied on the clerk at my favorite bookstore to guide me to something I might like.

The answer I gave that summer is the same answer I would give to the question in 2016 Ghost Story by Peter Straub. Throughout that long summer full of suspense and my screaming “don’t do that!” in my head just before someone on the page “did that” I was asked which book was the scariest. Revisited the classics of the genre by Shirley Jackson, Daphne DuMaurier, and Oscar Wilde. In the summer of 1980 the topic was horror fiction. I would inevitably binge read within a genre. He passed away in 2022.When I was a young man summer always meant time to read for fun. Straub was on the Locus Science Fiction Foundation board of directors for several decades. He was named a World Horror Grandmaster in 1997, was given the Horror Writers Association's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005, was named an International Horror Guild Living Legend in 2008, and received the World Fantasy Convention's Life Achievement Award in 2010. In all, Straub's books and stories were nominated for a dozen World Fantasy Awards, winning four, and 14 Bram Stoker Awards, with ten wins, among many other award nominations. Lovecraft: Tales and the Library of America's two-volume anthology, American Fantastic Tales. He wrote two volumes of poetry and two collections of short fiction, and he edited the Library of America's edition of H.

X, In the Night Room, and two collaborations with Stephen King, The Talisman and Black House. Peter Straub was the author of seventeen novels, which have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Ghost story by peter straub review