Books: Julia By Peter Straub (1975)

 

“In a house in London a woman starts a new life, trying to put tragedy behind her. Then a pretty blonde child runs into view, bringing with her an inexplicable suggestion of evil. Once Julia Lofting had a husband and a daughter, but everything has changed since she bolted from her marriage, in flight from the unbearable truth of her daughter's death. For Julia, there is no escape. Another child awaits, another mother suffers, and a circle of the damned gathers around her. The haunting has begun.” 

Julia was Peter Straub’s third book, but the first that that touched on supernatural elements. I have generally enjoyed his work, including Ghost Story, Floating Dragon, and many others. I have never read his first two books, which were attempts at mainstream fiction. But what starts out as creepy ride into ghosts and haunted houses soon became an exercise in tedium. This book became a chore to finish, because there is no way a 290 page mass market should’ve taken me this long to finish. I think part of the problem lies in Straub basically answering everything about half-way through the book, forcing me to read on despite my misgivings for as this. Plus all the main characters are unlikable, including Julia (who really comes off as unreliable narrator). So, Julia lost a child, but you never get the sense she is mourning for that loss, which I found distracting. Her husband, Magnus, and sister-in-law Lily are stereotypical English folks, put off by modern things, and speak as if they’re stuck in Masterpiece Theater episode set around 1922. The book is also very dated, with women being portrayed as submissive and as objects, with random killings of animals (for really no reason, other than to show kids can be evil).

It just reminded me why it took all these decades to read Straub’s first foray into the horror genre. It’s gothic to the core, but dull as dishwater.  

Books: Ghost Story By Peter Straub (1980)

I originally read Peter Straub’s Ghost Story in 1980, right around when the paperback version was released. I was in the midst of reading Stephen King and knowing that Straub and King were friends, I thought I try another horror novelist. I had already read Dean Koontz, and found him lacking (and find him even today, a pale imitation of King, and John Saul seemed to be stuck going over the same territory again and again. I had enjoyed –for a time-the gothic aspects of V.C. Andrews. But on the whole, over these decades I’ve been reading, only King remained the one author I read continuously in the horror genre. 

After the huge success of Ghost Story in 1979 –Straub had published two mainstream novels before he found moderate success with Julia (1975) and If You Could See Me Now (1977), books with heavy supernatural themes –he went on to write the best-sellers Shadowland (1980) and Floating Dragon (1983). He teamed up with Stephen King to write The Talisman in 1985 before his writing took a turn into more gothic and psychological territory that was formed with what would be called The Blue Rose Trilogy in Koko (1988), Mystery (1990), and The Throat (1993). These complex and intertwined novels extended Straub's explorations into metafiction and unreliable narrators. The thriller Hellfire Club (1996) and Mr. X (1999) would follow, continuing his more literary approach things that go bump in the night. In 2001, he and King published the loose sequel to The Talisman called Black House (which was also disguised as a Dark Tower novel).

Lost Boy, Lost Girl (2003) and In the Night Room (2004) where a return to previous characters featured in The Blue Rose Trilogy (like King, Straub had a tendency to set his stories in and around the same areas, which meant characters and towns from previous novels popped up). A Dark Matter was released in 2010 and remains his last book, though he seems to have a book coming, possibly in 2016.

Anyways, I’ve not read every Straub book, like I’ve done Stephen King. While I like his work, his books are fairly dense and defiantly more literary than long-time friend King. But I had been thinking lately of re-reading a few of his old books, in particular Ghost Story, Shadowland and Floating Dragon. As I’ve noted many times before, I don’t usually re-read books. But here is October and maybe, in this month of Halloween, reading a spooky book seemed appropriate. So, yeah, I re-read Ghost Story.

While I still remembered the structure of the book –it is a ghost story that spans fifty years- I found I still things I had forgotten. The book is way over long, though. This book could’ve been 100 pages less and not lessened his ideas one bit. But it also contains one the best scenes I still remember to this day, when Peter Barnes figures out where some of the ghosts haunting Milburn are hiding out. 

It also got me thinking about the 1981 movie adaptation of this book. I remember how much I disliked it, as the movie jettisoned a lot of the book and stuck with its basic themes of a vengeful ghost. Much like what Stanley Kubrick did with Stephen King’s The Shining, director John Irvin and screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen sort of took a bare-bones approach. Most likely though, because the novels structure of flashing back and forwards in time and its large cast of supporting characters would’ve made a linear movie difficult. 

Honestly, though, much like Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, I would not mind a large screen (or even a small screen, multi-part) remake of this book. I think it deserves a better treatment.  

Books: In the Night Room by Peter Straub (2004)

Near the end of Peter Straub’s Lost Boy, Lost Girl I discovered he wrote a sequel to the book that was released in 2004, a year after the first one. So I looked up the book at the library by my house –and not a huge surprise- they did not have In The Night Room (when it comes to the books I want to read, my library –a four minute walk from my front door- never carries them), but the San Dimas location did. I was going to go there, but on Friday last week, I went to the local used book store by my house and found a beat-up copy at the Book Rack, so I bought it. 

In some ways, this book seems less a sequel and more a continuation of Lost Boy, Lost Girl. Set a year after those events, Tim Underhill is struggling writing his newest book. Still traumatized by the loss of his nephew -to some Elsewhere land- he begins getting cryptic email messages that tell him that the Dark Man –Joseph Kalendar- is in need of something, and Underhill is the man to do it. Whether he wants to or not. He’s also being stalked by a fan that has menace on the mind. Meanwhile, we meet a woman named Willy Patrick –who after a horrible young life that continued with the murder of her husband and daughter- who is about to marry the perfect man –at least in her eyes. But this award winning author is also drawn into places, like a warehouse, where she knows that her daughter Holly is being held in there, despite knowing she is dead.

But worlds are about to collide for both Tim and Willy, and the doorway between reality and fiction blurs and nothing will be the same.

With In the Night Room, Straub’s recent stab at metafiction comes fully out. Readers of Jasper Fforde will understand what Straub is doing here, by creating a novel within a novel, and mixing in some dark fantasy along with psychological horror, he blends the genres and creates a fast-paced, at times Dickensesque type story. 

Plus, I sense, Straub is not done with this arc.

Books: Lost Boy, Lost Girl by Peter Straub (2003)

Over the years, I’ve read a few Peter Straub books (Ghost Story, Shadowland, Floating Dragon and the two he wrote with Stephen King, The Talisman and The Black House). While he writes a lot of horror, I don’t think its traditional horror like what made Stephen King a household name. His novels have tendency to bit more gothic-like thrillers with supernatural overtones.  Plus he is a bit more florid with his prose, but not in a way that seems to imply any sort of negativity. It’s an interesting style, that’s all. His books are more about atmosphere, about unreliable narrators that include things that go bump in the night.

Now while I’ve been reading books since I was 13 or 14, I’ve remembered all of them. I’ve never re-read a book unintentionally (I was always amazed when working in the book business when I encountered a person returning a book because as they began reading it, they suddenly remembered that, yes, they had read it before). And it was only back in 2006 that I started keeping a full digital record of what I’ve read. For a while, I remember keeping a note book, but for the life of me, I’m not sure what I ever did with them.  

Anyways, the point is I thought I read Lost Boy, Lost Girl before, but that I simply forgotten about it. Which was strange, considering I never forgot what I read. As I began reading the book, I suddenly thought all of this seemed familiar; had I read this? So I racked my brain and came to the conclusion that it was possible to forget a book. But then again, I had just finished reading The Throat back in '03 or '04 and must’ve read a chapter of this book when it came out in hardcover, which is why I remember reading some passages.

But I will admit this is the first time I’m not clearly sure if I have. 

So I rattled on –if I read it before, well so what. 

Beginning in 1988, with his Vietnam novel Koko, Straub introduced us to Tim Underhill, a veteran who has become a successful novelist but continues to be haunted by the atrocities in ‘Nam and encounters with the supernatural. That book formed a sort of loose trilogy called the Blue Rose that included Mystery and the after-mentioned The Throat. While Underhill is mentioned in Mystery, he does not reappear until the third book. 

Tim returns in Lost Boy, Lost Girl and has him struggling to help his brother Philip and his nephew, Mark, cope with the recent suicide of Philip's wife, Nancy. As perplexing as her death is, Tim begins to realize that just before her death, Mark finally “noticed” the empty house that lies just behind his house –as if it wanted Mark to see it. That triggered an obsession with the fifteen year-old to discover the history of the house, only to learn that Nancy was somehow connected to its dark past. But when Mark disappears, it is first suspected that he fallen victim to a serial killer stalking Millhaven. But with no body, no one is sure what happened to him. Timothy and Philip must struggle to connect the threads of this mystery and find Mark before he falls victim to the horrors of the abandoned home; horrors both human and supernatural in nature.

Straub is a good writer and deserves a wider audience than he has. While some say he plays in the same sandbox that his long-time friend Stephen King does (and has stories set in and around the same area that also features Tom Pasmore, another recurring character) his style is certainly different. While King goes for the juggler, Straub takes a different route, one a bit slower, more deliberately paced. 

So in that way, he makes the same genre a little bit different, yet just as creepy.

Books: A Dark Matter by Peter Straub (2010)

While Stephen King and Peter Straub write completely different styles of horror, they are obsessed with growing up in the 50s and the 1960s. Both me have written many books set in that period, or have stories set in the present, but have many roots in those halcyon years. Straub admitted the idea for A Dark Matter came out of the turbulent 1960s, set in the college town of Madison, Wisconsin (Straub was raised in Milwaukee).

The tale is about a charismatic and cunning man named Spenser Mallon who is a campus guru in 1966, where he’s attracted the devotion - and sometimes sexual favors- of his young acolytes. After he invites his most fervent followers to attend a secret ritual in a local meadow, the only thing that remains is a gruesomely dismembered body—and the shattered souls of all who were present.

Straub told the FLAMES RISING web site that the book “evolved out of a desire I had to think about the various sages and gurus I had seen pass through Madison. I think there were three altogether; at least, I witnessed the actions and behaviors of three of these gents. They were all articulate, interesting, and predatory. Almost all of what they said was nonsense, but they did get a bunch of kids to look into the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I started to wonder: what might happen if one of these sleazy wisdom-merchants did actually reveal a portion of the Other World, the World Unseen, in the course of a home-made ritual.”

Anyways, years later, one man attempts to understand what happened to his wife and to his friends by writing a book about this horrible night, and it’s through this process that they begin to examine the unspeakable events that have bound them in ways they cannot fathom, but that have haunted every one of them through their lives. As each of the old friends tries to come to grips with the darkness of the past, they find themselves face-to-face with the evil triggered so many years earlier.

More psychological thriller than horror of his early (a trend Straub started back in the 80s) works, the novel is also very literate –very unusual in this genre. Still, despite many things that work – a shifting character perspectives, nested flashbacks, a story that spans four decades, and an attractive, if not somewhat charming cast – the novel takes way too long to kick in. Why spend 500 pages talking, investigating and going on and on about a single event and then, somehow, make that event not really matter?

Straub is a rare writer, able to write some great fiction with heart, believable people and layer it with great words that can inspire a reader. So while A Dark Matter is a good read, it falters when it comes to actually being what I had hoped it would be.