Review: Ghost Story

STRAUB, Peter, Ghost Story, Jonathan Cape Ltd., London, 1979.

First edition: octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine-titling; 507pp., top edges dyed navy blue. Minor wear; spine heel softened; previous owner’s ink inscription to the flyleaf; mild offset to the endpapers; mild spotting to the text block edges. Dustwrapper is mildly edgeworn and sunned. Very good to near fine.

Here’s a weird thing – from a very young age, I always thought that Stephen King and Peter Straub were the same guy. It came about, I think, because I saw a paperback re-print of Ghost Story with a blurb on it by King around about the same time that I learned that King wrote under an alias – remember, I was the kid who used to hang around in bookstores looking at the covers, but not buying because I was always worried about what my parents would think (which is why I became a comics fan, but – another story). I conflated King and Straub rather than King and Bachman, and – because I was never really a fan of King’s work – I avoided Straub like the plague.

What a mistake! I am just now – at the age of 51 – reading Ghost Story and it’s a wonderful experience. What irks me about King’s books (and even moreso in James Herbert’s books) is that much effort is spent upon characters who then get crunched down like corn chips. We get presented with an individual; we get told about their work habits, lifestyle choices, the minutiae of their daily lives... then wham! They’re toast. What is the point? We get so invested in a character that lasts three or four paragraphs while the main protagonists are blank slates that barely resonate after 300 pages. Something is horribly wrong here, and it’s not the vampire lurking in the woods, the rats boiling up from the sewers, or the pet cat buried disrespectfully in the indigenes’ sacred site. It’s a mistake in the narrative.

How enjoyable is it then to find a writer who has things the right way around? In Straub’s major opus, incidental characters are just that – incidental – while the main players are revealed to us, not over paragraphs, but over the course of chapters, getting built up layer by layer until we know them completely. Then, when the hammer falls, its impact is so much greater.

Straub writes like a dream. It’s the difference between riding in a finely-tuned high-end Jaguar and bumping along in a 60s VW Beetle. From the first page you feel like you’re in capable hands and the narrative draws you in like a well-oiled machine. I made the mistake of starting to read this one morning when I got up too early to go to work; in no time at all I was six chapters deep and running late.

The story takes its time to unfold but that’s in no way an issue. Like the best ghost stories, the source of the menace is nebulous and not easily explained – in fact, the root cause of the horror in this tale is the tiniest of catalysts, so small that those involved aren’t actually sure about what’s happening themselves.

The story revolves around five elderly friends who live in a small town in New England. Two are the local lawyers, one is a doctor, one is a writer and the last is a retired hotelier. When we begin our journey with this quintet, the writer is dead of a heart-attack, apparently frightened to death. The remaining four decide to maintain a tradition of meeting each fortnight to drink whiskey and tell tall (but true) tales, although now, they tell stories about awful things that have happened to them in their pasts, effectively ghost stories.

This bi-weekly ritual, known as the Chowder Society, has a creeping effect on its members: as we meet the friends, we learn that they have all been having nightmares, and – more alarmingly – they have started sharing the same dream. They decide to contact the son of their dead friend – a novelist who wrote a successful horror novel containing echoes of the Chowder Society’s woes – and he agrees to hear them out, but not before the doctor injects himself with morphine and jumps off a bridge into a frozen river in fright. Time, it seems is running out.

The narrative switches back and forth in time and we get to see different aspects on the nightmare that is slowly closing in on the Chowder Society. Strangers come to town; relatives of those involved in the death of the writer appear unexpectedly; sheep in the local fields are killed and drained of their blood; an invisible entity starts pursuing our group of friends. In between the spooky tales of the Society’s members, we have the distinct sense of a crystallising menace coming into play. It’s a treat, and I’m just sorry it took me so long to get here!

If you’re a fan of Stephen King, give this a try: it feels like the sort of thing that everyone thinks King writes but patently doesn’t. The only downside is that Straub is nowhere near as prolific as King, so if you go on a ‘Straub binge’, you’ll run out of things to read very quickly!

Four-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors.