Ghost Story by Peter Straub

The most horrifying thing about Peter Straub's Ghost Story is not the decidedly non-ghost creature that it features, but the page count.  At 567 pages, Ghost Story is more tome than horror novel.  And the font size is inexplicably small, as if Peter Straub set out to match the style and word count of the Holy Bible. And not the New International Version… the original Hebrew version… in hieroglyphs. And that would be in Egyptian, not Hebrew. You can see how convoluted that got... so, too, is Ghost Story.

To be fair, Straub set out to tell a story that is bigger than itself, and on many levels he succeeds. He takes a lot of risks, experiments with literary flow, and overall creates a winding, complicated journey through regret and redemption.

But where Peter Straub fails, is his Peter Straubiness… Like his other works, he takes an almost strictly literary approach and too clumsily walks the line between horror and self-serving platitudes.

In my other reviews, I break down the characters and the plot. This one, I feel, should be a cautionary tale of biting off more than you can chew…

Because right from the start, Straub tries desperately to pull the reader into a story we don’t want to get in to. A decidedly uninteresting prologue of 23 pages made me question my dedication to reading, writing, speaking or hearing the English language. There were points over the 23 pages I thought about giving up on school, slipping out of the country (leaving behind my wife and four kids to fend for themselves) and setting up residence in a non-English speaking country. The first 23 pages of Ghost Story made African clicking languages inviting.

But, I persevered!

There are a lot of characters in Ghost Story. Some of them are interesting, but most of them, by virtue of space restrictions, are not. And there are clusters of similar names that makes it difficult to play Who’s Who in the Zoo as the story progresses. Some of these similarities are by design, and are intended to be devices in the narrative. Others, I think, are oversights. Here is a sampling: Hardie, Hardester. Angie, Annie, Anni, Ann, Alma. There are generic, common names, too: Freddie, Edward, Jimmy, Ricky. My point? It was hard to follow! Straub himself even had difficulties keeping his characters straight. On page 409 (of my paperback copy), Straub stumbles and the character of Ricky Hawthorne mentions the name Anna Mobley. The problem? It’s an amalgamation of Anna Mostyn and Alma Mobley.

Eventually everybody gets straightened out, but it was such an impediment at the beginning that I had several false starts in my reading. Once I got in to the flow (around page 404), the book really took off for me.

I’m going to pause here for a disclaimer: If I were reading this for leisure, and not as part of a class, I may have enjoyed it more. As it was, it became an obstacle to overcome. Straub took so many different literary liberties, and wrote so extensively of the mediocre, that I found myself skipping whole paragraphs to get through the experience.

Now back to our regularly scheduled broadcast…

Let’s talk about regret. Let’s talk about fear. Let’s talk about mistakes. Finally, let’s talk about wasps.

Regret. This is the ghost of Ghost Story. Regret over the wrong choices made. Or so Straub would like us to think. Eva Galli is murdered, that much is obvious from the beginning. And it seems not only plausible, but likely the Chowder Society should be haunted by that guilt. After a couple of them are picked off, it’s discovered that what is killing them is not a ghost, not regret, not even old age, but a creature of ancient lineage. At that point, regret should be absolved, and this is no longer a ghost story, but a monster story. Not only were they justified in their killing, but they didn’t even kill anybody! Holy shit! Straub has lost his right to preachiness at that point.

Fear. The creature in this story plays on fear, but not startles. It plays on the fear of rejection, of regret and of the unknown. People die in this book. Some of them die as an afterthought. I died of exasperation. But fear actually kills a couple of people, seeing the creature as its horrible self. Some people kill out fear. Again, it seems preachy.

Mistakes. Yup, lots of mistakes. But I’m going to focus on an over-arching theme: Affairs. Stella’s affairs and Lewis’s affairs. They don’t add anything to the story. They don’t move it forward. They don’t add nuances to the characters. I’d estimate about 30 of the 67 pages are dedicated to talking to about their affairs. Guess what? I don’t care. Especially since Stella’s husband doesn't care, and Lewis is one of his best friends.

Finally, wasps. Some books the prologue isn’t important. This one? It is. Without it, the Epilogue doesn’t make sense. In fact, one could read just the prologue and epilogue and have a pretty good short story experience.

Peter Straub is a great writer and fantastic novelist. But, as a story teller, I find him lacking. I’ve read a lot of his work, and it’s all pretty painful to get through. His acclaim is well earned as he truly is a master of a craft, but it’s just not the craft he thinks it is.

Hell House by Richard Matheson

“Get out of the house!”

That’s what my wife kept saying as she read the seminal haunted house novel, Hell House by Richard Matheson.

My wife, who would be the first to admit she isn’t a “reader,” has somehow rocketed ahead of me on my reading list. So much so, that I had to get her a book NOT on my list so I could catch up.

So, when I finally did start reading it, I wasn’t terribly surprised when I found myself uttering he same, “get out of the house!”

As the second book in my “Readings in the Genre” class, Hell House took the same tropes as Haunting of Hill House, and, in the words of Spinal Tap, turned them up to 11.

Whereas Hill House lit the impossibly long fuse of a psychological horror and let the reader meander through, Hell House presented more of a pack of fire crackers in a bucket. This kept me on edge for a good portion of the book but…

Matheson seems to have written this book more out of curiosity of his own abilities to tell a ghost story than a desire to tell a good haunting story. The premise starts out as so many of these stories do: deranged rich guy establishes a house of debauchery and wallows in the blood and semen that oozes from the result. So, that drew me in. Of course, horrible things happen, resulting in a dangerous haunting. Then, he throws in some “sensitive” types to get to the bottom of it for another rich dude, who is on the cusp of dying. So, let’s check our shopping list of tropes to make sure Matheson got them all:

Eccentric, evil rich guy? Check.

House of debauchery? It’s there!

Horrible deaths occurring there? Of course!

Troubled medium out to set right what he once did wrong? Two of them!

Shunned academic out to prove his theories and be accepted as a serious scientist? He’s even disabled!

The book is 46 years old. I understand that some of these ideas were new at the time, and it’s a shame that they’ve been watered down by overuse over the years. Matheson does a fine job with them, and his character development is top notch. In fact, the relationship between Dr. Lionel Barret and his wife Edith, and their struggles, felt very real to me. What didn’t feel real to me was how his impotence didn’t come into play until halfway through the book, as if it were nothing more than a simple plot device. It could have been mentioned earlier, because it really is an important piece of the puzzle. As is the age of his wife, who I couldn’t help but feel was much older than she later (also halfway through) turned out to be.

Benjamin Franklin Fischer, the sole survivor of an earlier attempt to clean Hell House, is less defined, though Matheson tries his damnedest to connect us with him. He’s just such a generic character. Child prodigy-turned-jaded-adult is so common, that I feel it deserves its own genre. I’ll call it, “child prodigy-turned-jaded-adult horror.”

Let’s not forget the beautiful ex-actress-turned medium. Because, really, who better to throw into the maw of a sex-crazed house than a gorgeous celebrity. It really did seem like a good idea at the time. Oh, and she’s religious, a spiritualist; Out to hug all the ghosts with her Native American spirit guide Red Cloud. Beautiful former actress + medium + religion + Native American spirit guide = one helluva confused character. She should be nuanced, but she isn’t. When she died, I imagined Red Cloud on the side of the freeway with a single tear.

Remember the Dudleys from House on Haunted Hill? Of course you do. They’re back! This time they’re nameless and much less talkative. They survive, so I’m sure they’ll show up in another book. They’re my new favorite cameo couple.

Let’s get back to Lionel and Edith. She’s young; he’s old. She has daddy issues; he has polio issues. Madcap zaniness ensues. She married him because sex wasn’t really a possibility with his polio-induced impotence. So what could possibly go wrong in a HOUSE BUILT TO HOLD BLOOD ORGIES?

A lot, it seems.

So, I’ve touched a lot on the tropes used by Matheson, and they were probably somewhat fresh at the time. Like, if they were bananas, the greasy black spots were just forming. What I really didn’t enjoy about the book was the slap-shod writing.

That’s a hard thing for me to say when he’s the guy behind classics like What Dreams May Come and A Stir of Echoes. There were points of the story where his sentence structure was so repetitive, I felt like I was reading a nightmarish Dick and Jane book. These moments came at the most inopportune time, when the action was heated and the writing should be doing everything in its power to keep you in the moment. Instead, it does the opposite: it reminded me I was reading. Ugh, I hate that. If I wanted to realize I was reading, I’d pick up literary books. I’m a genre writer, my job is to trick people into reading against their will. I have a basement full of people who, if they’d only read, would be let out.

If it seems like I’m overly critical of this book, it’s only because it was so damned good, but had very notable weaknesses. Overall, seventy-five percent of the book was good. I enjoyed it and would recommend it. I would have enjoyed seeing the “other” ghosts who haunted the house a bit more, as well as more of the horrible things that occurred there. Matheson took risqué subject matters and, at the beginning at least, looked like he was going to exploit their horrors. But he backed off throughout.

There was enough going on, however, that I kept asking myself why they were all staying. Sure, they each had their own reasons, but only the Dr. and Mrs. Barretts' reasons were compelling.

That's why we wanted them to "get out of the house!"