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 …
From the Prolog, among the most famous lines in horror fiction
The premise is simple: A group of men, friends for decades, hide a secret they are ashamed of and do not talk about. And then the actions of their youth haunt them in their advanced years as their past returns to exact retribution. But a simple premise becomes the basis for a complex story examining the psychic weight of culpability, guilt and shame, while also demonstrating the power of friendship, loyalty and love.
The prolog opens with Don Wanderley driving across the country in the company of Angie Maule, a young girl whom he appears to have kidnapped. From there Straub shifts to Milburn, N. Y. during the previous winter, where John Jaffrey, Lewis Benedikt, Sears James, and Ricky Hawthorne have all mostly prospered and lived decent lives. They meet once a month and swap stories, and in time-honored male tradition, no girls allowed, which lead Ricky’s wife, Stella, to derisively dub them, the Chowder Society. From their conversation we gather their current unease and learn that a year earlier they had lost their fifth member, Edward Wanderley, Don’s uncle. Before long they will lose yet another.
Ghost Story is composed of stories, each old man has a story, and together they share the story of Eva Galli, who was an integral part of their secret. Their memories and stories echo in the events of the next few months. Don has a story, too, and working with the Chowder Society he needs to learn the connection between Eva Galli and Alma Mobley, a woman he knew, and Ann-Veronica Moore, a woman his uncle was close to, and Angie. Meanwhile, forces gather in Milburn and as the snow begins to fall and fall and fall, ghosts appear, townspeople die, and the vengeance of the past push the men, those who love them and the entire town of Milburn to their limits.
Where Stephen King’s writing at the time had a folksy appeal, Peter Straub was perceived by fans as a literary writer – he came from an academic background. And I think that’s visible in how he organizes his chapters and shorter sections, how he orchestrates the flow of information to the reader, his alternating points of view, his emphasis on character and on perception/reality. As when I first read this, I find his prose accessible and appealing; there’s nothing overly showy, but he draws from the writer’s toolbox those tools he needs, be it passages of stream-of-consciousness, broken sentences, shifts in time and place, but nothing that makes his story hard to follow.
While the critical reception was mixed for Ghost Story on publication, it was taken up by horror fans and recognized as an important and noteworthy inclusion in the genre, reaching the New York Times best-seller list. If not the great novel I thought when I first read it over 40 years ago, it remains a high point in the surge of horror novels in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and an indication of the power Straub demonstrated again and again until his death in 2022. Any reader interested in the influence Ghost Story has exerted on the genre, need only read Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians to see it at work.
GHOST STORY by Peter Straub
(Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979)
483 pages
ISBN: 978-069 8109 599
Review by Randy Money
