When I was a kid, I had a long list of fears. A short summary would include: tornadoes; big dogs; bullies; the basement; fire; music class; swimming lessons; spiders; cat burglars; and girls. As I got a bit older, say around middle school and high school, that list changed. Some items remained (girls, the possibility of being forced to sing in public), some fell away (tornadoes, big dogs, swimming), and some new fears were added (school dances, acne, various other complex social interactions). Now, as an adult, the list has changed entirely. I don’t fear the weather, or the water, or women (though I still do not understand them). And I’m not afraid of the many, many things that the local and national news tells us to fear. I’m not scared of airplane crashes, murderers, or terrorist attacks. This is not because I am brave, which I am certainly not, or because I am idiot, which is debatable; rather, my limited understanding of probabilities allows me to rest assured that I am far likelier to die in a car crash because I am texting, than I am to plummet earthward in a Boeing 747, and that the mounting nights of pizza and hard drinking are more lethal to my person than a sociopathic killer just escaped from the county asylum on a dark and stormy night.The simple fact is that for most of us, all the terrorists and all the murderers and all the faultily-constructed planes in all the world are not nearly as likely to hurt us than uncontrolled cell growth within our own bodies. Sure, I get a little jittery when my plane hits turbulence; and yes, I sneak around my own house with a baseball bat every time I hear a bump in the night. But truthfully, the only thing that really scares me is cancer. That kind of fear, though, based solidly in statistical reality, is almost too much to bear. It’s impossible to live your life constantly thinking about that possibility, that probability, lingering up ahead in the future. We need distractions. So we distract ourselves with other fears. Not just terrorists, airplanes, and killers, but sex offenders and immigrants and razor-studded apples on Halloween and China’s emergence as an economic powerhouse. This is not to say that these fears are baseless (well, the fear of immigrants and China are), but we’re talking about probabilities. Can these things be dangerous? Yes. Are they statistically likely to be dangerous to you? No. These fears, though, play an important psychological role by diverting our attention. And this is not a new phenomenon. Human beings have always been scaring each other. I venture that Neanderthals in their caves would gather round the fire and swap stories about a legendary wooly mammoth with a taste for blood, even though they were more likely to die from an infection caused by scraping a knee on a rock. Peter Straub’s Ghost Story plays with this idea of spook stories. At its center are four old men – Lewis Benedikt, Sears James, Frederick Hawthorne and John Jaffrey – who have a haunted past; in order to cope with this past, they get together and tell ghost stories to each other. Scaring each other becomes cathartic. I could go on with the plot, I suppose, but one of the pleasures (or frustrations, depending on your nature) of this book is how you gain understanding gradually, as the story unfolds. For instance, the novel opens with a brief prologue in which a man we do not know has apparently kidnapped a child we do not know. These scenes won’t pay off for many hundreds of pages, and to say anything more ventures into spoiler territory. Besides, the plot is relatively dense, and if I tried to explain it, I’d probably get it wrong anyway. Suffice it to say, the thing or things that is haunting our four main characters has returned to the small town of Milburn, New York. And it didn’t come for the maple syrup festival. I’ll leave it to you to discover the rest. What I appreciated about Ghost Story was that it understood the nature of fear. Fear is that moment when you think something is about to happen; it is that part in a horror movie when the main character is about to open the closet door, and you, the viewer, start to duck your head beneath the blanket. When something finally jumps out of the closet, and the main character starts running, and you scream and spill popcorn, that’s not fear. That is the release of tension. The reason I always liked the first Friday the 13th film is because it recognized this distinction. The whole movie was people being watched and stalked by something faceless and nameless and left to our imaginations. There is very little running through the woods, which is good, because chase scenes aren’t scary. In the 7,000 sequels that followed, the distinction was lost; the killer was known, was given shape and form, and all that was left was to run. The most elegant metaphor I can think of to explain this is lovemaking. Please, bear with me. A good ghost story (like Ghost Story) is like that Spanish or Italian lover with the sensitive eyes and velvety voice, the one who drank wine from your navel and has nothing but time to devote to all manner of foreplay. This Spanish or Italian will taunt and tickle and tease and sing you a lilting love-song in Spanish or Italian that you can’t understand before finally bringing you to that place you want to go. A bad ghost story is like a drunk high-school student pawing at you in the backseat of a Honda Civic, concerned only with the end-release. Oh, I’m sorry. Did I say the “most elegant” metaphor? Because I meant to say crass and vaguely disturbing. Ghost Story takes its time reaching the climax, and this is a good thing. As long as things are still a bit unclear, as long as you can’t quite see around the next corner, the novel retains tension. I’m not saying it will scare you. It won’t make you scream aloud, for the simple reason that, unlike a movie, you can look away at any time and stop the action. However, there are parts that will give you the creeps; and there will be parts where your eyes will try to cheat by skipping ahead; and there is a chance, if you read this before bed and take a slug of Nyquill, you will have odd nightmares. What I liked about Ghost Story, other than the fact it was like a Spanish or Italian lover, is that it made a real attempt to stay grounded in reality. Obviously, when you are dealing with ghosts, there is a paranormal or supernatural element involved. The more things tilt towards those elements, the less scared I become, for the simple fact that I can no longer relate to the world being described. To that end, Peter Straub makes an enormous effort to give his characters backgrounds and back-stories and meaningful traits. He grounds the most fantastical elements by devoting equal time to the human element. I’m not saying that he achieves supreme psychological depth with each person, but he certainly surmounts the confines of his genre (and goes far beyond you might expect in a book titled Ghost Story). One of my favorite aspects of Ghost Story is its sense of place. Straub spends a lot of time making the hamlet of Milburn into a character. You get to know its layout, its history, its local hangouts, and you meet dozens and dozens of its denizens. Indeed, you meet so many, you might want to keep a list (this will come in handy when attempting to recall who is sleeping with who, and who just died). Ghost Story is horror with a literary bent. Sure, there are some lines of dialogue that land with all the grace of me dropping War and Peace on my toe. But that’s to be expected. For the most part, the level of the writing defies the primitiveness of its subject. You see this not only in the care taken with the characters (both main and supporting), but with the story’s complex structure, which involves numerous flashbacks and stories-within-stories. Of course, as with any ghost story, there has to be a “Boo!” moment. At some point, the mysteries start to resolve themselves, the enemy takes shape, and our heroes must find a way to kill it. I’ll admit, my attention started to wane towards the end, once the explanatory dialogue started flying (and there is a lot of explaining to do). Eventually, there is a final battle between good and evil, human and not-human, and it is suitably over-the-top and gory, for those that expect that sort of thing, and when the dust settles all the puzzle pieces come together to form a whole. It satisfies, I suppose, but is not nearly as interesting as the long, detailed, creepy road that led to that point.
Lectura conjunta del grupo Letras Macabras reseña en español en mi blog: Click AquíGhost story is considered Peter Straub's best book and Stephen King says that it's "one of the finest horror novels of the late 20th century", with such endorsement I had high hopes for this book and it didn't disappoint me. I have to say that this wasn't a light read, the first half of the book is full of details that become important later on the story but if you endure, the second half of the book is truly amazing.It can be confusing at first because the prologue take place moments before the ending of the story so it only make sense as you progress through the book. I think this was great because it wrapped up the story perfectly.You may think that ghost aren't scary but trust me, the ghosts described by Straub on this book are very creepy and relentless. Also he gives a really original vision about them. I don't want to spoil the story, but there's uncertainty about what these supernatural beings truly are (not for me, I'm convinced that they're ghosts but whatever, read this book and make your guess).Another good aspect of this novel was that the main characters are four elderly men that formed a group called "The Chowder Society" where they tell each other horror stories. The setting is another thing that I really liked, it reminded me Salem's Lot by Stephen King because Milburn is a creepy little town in the middle of nowhere, an ideal scenario for a horror story.I totally recommend this book. Be warned that this is not an easy read (especially the first half) but if you keep reading you're rewarded with an extremely original horror story.I won't compare Peter Straub with Stephen King, he's not better or worse only different. I find his books to be extremely detailed but they are really well written and I think that fans of Stephen King would enjoy his novels.As a final note, Straub connects his novels: Ricky Hawthorne (one of the members of the Chowder Society and a main character on this book) is mentioned in Floating Dragon (a great book that I also recommend) where his nephew is one of the characters. Also the town of Milburn is mentioned in Koko.
What do You think about Ghost Story (1989)?
First off, let me say that this is a very good story, and it had its scary moments. But I think I have some sort of problem with Peter Straub's writing. I can't quite put my finger on it but at times it seems long winded and confusing. Where with Dan Simmons and Orson Scott Card their words just seem to effortlessly flow into my mind, I find there are times when I need to reread Straub's sentences. This doesn't happen a whole lot, mind you, but it got annoying when it did, and I was glad to finally finish it. But hey, that's just me. I figure Straub simply doesn't "click" with me so I think it would be unfair for me tocriticize this novel. I've read Shadowland (it was OK) and Mystery (found the ending terribly unsatisfying) and felt I should read this, his "best" work. As far as the story goes, I was a little disappointed that there weren't more Chowder Society ghost stories within the main story, which I was expecting. I thought the characters were well drawn, though. I very much enjoyed Ricky, Sears, Lewis and John, and would love to sit in on moreChowder Society sessions.So...overall, did I like it? Wellllll....yeah. If you like Peter Straub you will love this.
—Bill
"What was 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." That's how Peter Straub's GHOST STORY begins.....Something's going to happen to the whole town of Milburn, and The Chowder Society members with their spooky stories and premonitions are right in the middle of "it"........For Ricky Hawthorne, his law partner Sears James and friends Edward Wanderley, Lewis Benedikt and Dr. John Jaffrey, their nightmares all began on the same day, October of 1929....and what happened on that day was the beginning of the evil presence........Not the scariest book I've ever read, (then we all have our own definition of scary) but a darn good GHOST STORY!
—Carol
“SF/F/H”, the holy trinity of genre fiction, my neck of the woods for reading. I read a hell of lot of sci-fi (SF), I read about a couple of fantasy (F) titles a year, but I've been neglecting the horror fiction (H) genre in recent years. The reason is that beside Stephen King I don't tend to hear much about exciting new horror titles. Sci-fi and fantasy books win the prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards and I am always aware of the winners. As far as I know the equivalent award for horror fiction is the Stoker Award and somehow people don’t seem to talk about them very much. Anyway, to cut a long story short I miss reading horror fiction and want to get back to it.Ghost Story is Peter Straub’s best known and most popular book, I remember reading it in my teens when it was in the bestsellers list, I remember liking it but for the life of me cannot remember any of the details. Having just reread it this is not so surprising as this is quite a complex story and the title is somewhat misleading. The book is divided into several parts with a nonlinear timeline. It starts off intriguingly with a 24 pages prologue about a man who has kidnapped a strange little girl but the kidnapper is more afraid of the kidnappee than the other way around. The girl seems to take it all in stride and may, in fact, not be a girl at all. After this prologue the story goes back to a few years earlier where a group of for elderly gentlemen meet on a regular basis to share ghost stories which may or may not be true. They call themselves “The Chowder Society”, apparently there is some kind of therapeutic value for them in telling these stories; there has been an undertone of fear in this little club since one of their members died under mysterious circumstances at a party while in the company of an actress who disappeared.The next part of the book tells the story of Donald Wanderley, the child kidnapper from the prologue. He is a nephew of the dead club member of the Chowder Society and an author of a horror novel.After publication of his book he took a temporary job teaching at Berkeley, there he meets and falls madly in love with a mysterious beautiful girl. They get on famously, make wedding plans and one day she just disappears; next thing he knows she meets his brother David in another town, they fall in love and soon David dies under mysterious circumstances. The girl disappears again.Ghost Story is not a whodunit, but it is not really about ghosts (though a few do show up). The story is quite a complex but not at all hard to follow. A creepy atmosphere pervades the entire book and the reader what is going on with the disappearing girls and the dead people they leave behind. It is meticulously written by Straub. The supernatural element often has a hallucinogenic feel to it and the climax is quite rousing. The characters are well drawn but not particularly memorable. I find that Straub’s storytelling is not as taut as it could be and the pacing drags a little in the earlier parts of the book; too many scenes of the old gents pottering around grumbling. His brand of horror is subtle and often psychological, there is very little in the gore department.If you are looking for an elegantly written, unusual and complex horror story this is for you, but how many people are looking for such a thing?
—Apatt
