Ghost Story by Peter Straub

I had heard this was one of the scariest books of all time. I was ready for it. After reading, Beloved by Toni Morrison, also a ghost story but “literature” you know, I was eager for a straight-up page turning thriller. And this one was presented as a classic of the horror fiction genre.

What a disappointment. For most of the book my biggest emotion was boredom. I didn’t expect Nobel prize winning writing, and Straub’s prose is certainly serviceable, but it’s definitely airport paperback level. There’s a lot of exposition. There are numerous characters. It’s over 500 pages. By the time the story finally gets going I would concede it got interesting but never actually scary.

The story takes place in a fictional small town called Milburn, near Binghamton, New York. This is Lovecraft country, and also Stephen King country. And also Poe and Hawthorne. One of the main characters is named Hawthorne. Other characters borrow names from The House of the Seven Gables. There’s a Jaffrey and a Maule. Another character is named James, presumably a reference to Henry James and his ghost story, The Turn of the Screw. One of the novel’s best scenes takes place in an empty movie theater where Night of the Living Dead is being shown as the characters battle each other in front of the screen. Straub is not shy of claiming his legacy.

Ricky Hawthorne and Sears James are law partners. Along with John Jaffrey and two other men they are “The Chowder Society” life-long friends who meet every other week at each other’s home to drink, smoke, and swap stories. The main action takes place in the early 1970s when the five men are each 70 years old, or nearly. But the real beginning of the story takes place 50 years earlier, when the friends are smitten by a mysterious woman who comes to their small town. There’s an accident. The woman dies. The young men decide to cover up the death instead of going to the police. They get away with it but are haunted the rest of their lives.

Haunted, literally, in that the woman, who was never actually a woman but a supernatural being called a shapeshifter, has now come back to enact her revenge. Many people die. Not just members of the Chowder Society, but a wide swath of the small town: a farmer, his family, an elderly woman, an adulterous woman, the owner of the local movie theater, the guy who operates the snow plow, and on and on. The death count mounts but it all seems meaningless, random, unmotivated, and not scary.

Because Straub’s story is about the whole small town it takes forever to introduce all the characters. It’s impossible to care about so many people introduced so slightly. With no sense of care invested in the characters there’s no sense of danger or suspense about their fate. It’s like the deaths of the red shirt characters on Star Trek, except that it takes about 400 pages before any of the few characters you actually do come to care about finally step up to try to confront the evil in their town. Other characters just disappear from the story because there’s simply too many threads that just don’t matter.

There is a story here and a good one. I wish it had been told more efficiently. Give us the incident that started the whole thing upfront instead of holding that story as a mystery that isn’t revealed until page 370. Without that knowledge the prior deaths seem random and unmotivated. And tighten the story down to its core characters instead of sprawling over the entire village.

The book was published in 1979. There’s a lot in here that seems very familiar to other horror stories that came later. The shapeshifting evil in Ghost Story is very much like the one in Stephen King’s It, which came out in 1986. In Ghost Story the evil presence sometimes takes the form of a jazz impresario called Dr. Rabbitfoot, where It has Pennywise the clown. There’s references to evil living in the places where we dream – like Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). And when the evil is finally vanquished the haunted house at the center of the action implodes and disappears like the house in Speilberg’s Poltergeist (1982).

In 1977, two years before this book came out, I read, The Amityville Horror. That scared me. Parts of Salem’s Lot (1975) scared me, too. It did not scare me. Perhaps I just got too old for this particular thrill.