Last month we lost the iconic horror and fantasy author Peter Straub, whose work included collection of poetry and short stories, ten novellas, award-winning novels including Julia, Floating Dragon, and Koko, as well two collaborations with Stephen King, The Talisman and its sequel, Black House. I’ve had his 1979 novel Ghost Story on my TBR Stack for a long time now, and I thought this would be an excellent time to move it up to the top; Ghost Story proved to be an ideal October read.
I love baggy novels. I love novels that go in a lot of directions and make room for tangents and cul de sacs, and trust the reader to come with them. Ghost Story is very much on the end of the novelistic spectrum. The book is resolutely non-linear, jumping around in time and perspective. Occasionally, a few pages of dialogue between people are dropped in. Occasionally, we turn the page and find ourselves in a new mind, or a new decade.
You could be forgiven for getting a little nervous when you open a novel and discover that the protagonist is driving south with a young girl whom, seemingly, is along for this ride against her will. Especially when the man ties her to him in intricate knots before he’ll allow himself to sleep, and when he insists on keeping his hand clamped around her wrist before he’ll let her pee at the side of the road.
I mean, that can’t go anywhere good, right?
And yet in this case there’s a very good reason for this unsettling behavior. You just have to let the story unfold—and the story begins with The Chowder Society.
The Chowder Society used to be five aging men who met about once a week to tell stories: Ricky Hawthorne and Sears James, fine upstanding lawyers—one married to a beauty named Stella, the other a confirmed bachelor (I detected a hint of love for Ricky, actually), Edward Wanderley, a writer of biographies, John Jaffrey, the town doctor, and Lewis Benedikt, who used to be a hotelier in Europe, but came home a widower with a lot of money. (There are some rumors about that.) They stuck to a strict set of rules for their gatherings: the men dressed up; they didn’t drink too much; they didn’t admit anyone else into the group. No matter how much Stella Hawthorne groused and mocked them; no matter how much Dr. Jaffrey’s housekeeper, Milly Sheehan, tried to linger in doorways to hear the stories.
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Ghost Story
Then one of them died during a party another was throwing. And while it looked like a simple heart attack, Dr. Jaffrey can’t shake the sense of guilt for hosting the party, and all four remaining Chowder Society members feel there’s something more sinister afoot. We pick up their story a few days before the one-year anniversary of Edward’s death—a year that the men have spent telling each other ghost stories, and only ghost stories. A year that’s been shot through with nightmares and an increasing sense that there’s some doom tightening around them.
Finally, the men decide to ask for help, and reach out to Don Wanderley, Edward’s horror novelist nephew. He’s the kidnapper we met in the opening pages, and he might be the only one who can save them.
Much like Anne Rivers Siddons’ The House Next Door, which I reviewed for TBR Stack back in July, Ghost Story evokes a very recognizable time period. It’s the very late 1970s again (there’s a poster for Brian DePalma’s Carrie on display at the local movie house) but this time we’re in Upstate New York, in a small-ish, tight-knit town of Milburn, a place where some of the kids might escape to Cornell or even New York City after graduation, but more of them think of Binghamton as the Big City.
The creepiness builds over the whole novel, and one thing I thought was very good was the way Straub shows the uncanny breaking into human life. It starts so gradually, with a few slaughtered livestock and an unseasonable October snowstorm, and before you know it human are being picked off one by one and the entire valley is being bombarded with blizzards so severe that the town shuts down. And then the way that the monster worms its way into people’s minds. The way it implants itself in people dreams until those dreams begin to feel like an inevitable, intractable fate. Or the way it whispers in people’s ears and drives them forward to doom.
The other thing he does well is showing us all the different people in town so we can see the cracks in their personalities that will turn into chasms once the monster gets around to exploiting them. So the sheriff is an alcoholic who plays at being a laconic Texas Ranger even though he’s actually policing a small, genteel New England town and relies on liquor to get through anything remotely stressful; a wild teen who always pushes things just a little too far because he’s so desperate to feel something, but even more important to prove to the town that he doesn’t give a fuck; the farmer who sees himself as a bucolic poet but who’s thinks he’s just the man to battle the aliens whom, he’s convinced, are the ones killing the livestock. The fun thing with a book like this is that you can review different sections like they’re whole other books. For instance there’s a long interlude about Don Wanderley, the young novelist I mentioned earlier, and the uncanny events that maybe knocked his life off-course, and ed to the Chowder Society writing to him for help.
His story, the story of a young writer wrestling with his first academic job, unexpectedly finding love, and then realizing that his new girlfriend might be in a cult, or deeply mentally ill—that’s a whole book on its own. (I’m pretty sure Philip K Dick wrote that one a couple times, actually.) But here it’s just one chapter of Don Wanderley’s life. He heads off to a job at a school. He thinks the biggest challenge will be guarding his writing time from his new responsibilities as an adjunct professor—he needs to get that second novel started after all. He strikes up a casual fling with another young professor, a woman who wants an academic career more than anything. He endures the hatred of her roommate, who assumes he’s just using her friend for sex (which, tbf, yeah) and wants to protect the naive girl from a relationship that might capsize her brand-new career. (The way the real concerns of professional academic women crash into the freewheeling life of a Visiting Author are wonderfully subtly shown here.) Then, Don meets Alma Mobley, an entrancing young woman who seems to be attending the grad program as a lark, and a break from being part of her family’s old money jetset lifestyle. Suddenly we’re in a different novel, as Don’s his life consists of (a) sex with Alma Mobley, and (b) trying to figure out if Alma Mobley is lying to him about every single aspect of her life. Also, Alma’s friends with members of a cult called XXX that are said to be a sort of super-powered Manson Family.
What I love here is that obviously the reader is watching all the warning signs. We see when Don Wanderley’s choices—they seem so reasonable to him in the moment!—shove him into the plot of a horror story. And that horror plot only works because Straub gets the details of his campus sex comedy so completely right.
Her eyes were brimming behind the big glasses. “Oh, I’m a horrible mess. I knew I should never have come out here. I was happy in Madison. I should never have come to California.”
“You belong here more than I do.”
“No,” she said, and rolled over to hide her face. “You can go anywhere and fit in. I’ve never been anything but a working-class drudge.”
“What’s the last really good book you read?” I asked.
She rolled back over to face me, curiosity defeating the misery and embarrassment on her face. Squinting, she considered it for a moment. “The Rhetoric of Irony by Wayne Booth. Just reread it.”
“You belong at Berkeley,” I said.
“I belong in a zoo.”
And too, after Don and Alma are engaged, and he takes her for a weekend away at his rich brother’s seaside cabin, which is equipped with a hot tub, a Betamax, and “Art Deco gewgaws, a bed the size of a swimming pool, a bidet in every bathroom…”—in other words, Don hates it and finds it unspeakably tacky. He’s uncomfortable from the minute they get there. But Alma, his Bohemian dream girl?
…as she cooked in the gadget-laden kitchen, as she reveled in David’s collection of expensive toys, I grew increasingly sour. I thought she had adapted to the house in some uncanny fashion, had subtly altered from the student of Virginia Woolf to a suburban wife: suddenly I could see her stocking up on chip dip at the supermarket.
The woman he was convinced was a cultist a few pages ago is now too bourgeois.
And again, this is just one section. We spend time with the town’s ne’er-do-well, who’s hellbent on corrupting his best friend before the other boy goes off to Cornell; we listen in on the chatter at Humphrey Stalladge’s bar, and at a couple different dinner parties; we follow Ricky Hawthorne’s wife on a few of the dates that her husband ignore with grim determination; we hear a long, probably true story about Sears’ past; we duck into the mind of Milly Sheehan, Dr. John Jaffrey’s longtime maid. We see that Stella, who could have just been a cliche of a desperate housewife, is both fiercely dedicated to her husband, and that she understands a great deal about the life of the town that goes over his head. We find that the gun-toting, Martian-fearing Elmer Scales has a rich inner life. We learn the truth of what happened to Lewis’ wife. And because Straub inhabits his characters so fully, and gives us real time with them, it actually means something when the bodies start piling up right after Christmas.
Which, about Christmas. This is what Straub gives us:
In December, under several inches of snow, Milburn always took on a festive, almost magically pretty look. A tall tree always went up in the square, and Eleanor Hardie matched its light by decorating the front of the Archer Hotel. Children lined up before Santa Claus in Young Brothers’ department store and put in their nonnegotiable demands for Christmas—only the older ones noticed that Santa looked and smelled a little bit like Omar Norris. (December always reconciled Omar not only with his wife, but also with himself—he cut his drinking in half, and talked to the few cronies he had about “moonlighting down at the store.”) As his father had done, Norbert Clyde always drove his old horse-drawn sleigh through town and gave the kids rides so they would know what real sleighbells sounded like—and would know the feeling of skimming through pine-smelling air behind tow good horses. And as his father had done, Elmer Scales pulled open a gate in one of his pasture fences and let the town people come out to sled down a hill at the edge of his property: you always saw half a dozen station wagons pulled up alongside the fence, and half a dozen young fathers pulling Flexible Flyers laden with excited children up Elmer’s hill. Some families pulled taffy in their kitchens; some families roasted chestnuts in their fireplaces. Humphrey Stalladge put up red and green lights over the bar, and started making Tom and Jerries.
And several more paragraphs along those lines, overflowing with details that create a specific small-town Christmas. And again, he dips in and out of a cross-section of the town—we hear about what the high school kids are doing, as well as the housewives, as well as the folks who spend most of their December under Humphrey’s Christmas lights. Once he’s brought the usual Milburn holiday season to life, he shows us the despair of the current December, with blizzards that haven’t let up since October, food shortages, flare ups of domestic violence, tragic deaths—and everyone in town sensing that something’s wrong, even though they have idea that there’s a monster in town, or that the ridiculous old men of the Chowder Society are trying to fight it.
I realize in the quotes above that I’m not summing up how scary the book can be, but that’s mostly because I don’t want to give too much away. When Straub wants to lull his readers into a slice of life tale, it works perfectly, but the horror, when it hits, is extremely unsettling largely because his characters think they’re living ordinary lives. Weirdly the thing that came to mind the most as I read was Ari Aster’s film Hereditary—Straub creates a similar sense of an implacable evil winding around people’s lives. Ghost Story got way under my skin and promises to stay there.
Leah Schnelbach knows that as soon as this TBR Stack is defeated, another shall rise in its place. Come join them in the ever-unfolding ghost story that is Twitter!
