Ghost Story: The classic small-town horror filled with creeping dread

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Ghost Story by Peter Straub has been on my to-read-list for at least 20 years. It’s one of those books that I needed to read, especially if you’re a horror genre lover. TIH 533: Joe Sullivan on Cemetery Gates Media and Publishing In this podcast, Joe Sullivan talks about Cemetery Gates Media,… Peter Straub was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the son of Gordon Anthony Straub and Elvena (Nilsestuen) Straub. Drew’s parents are leaving. He feels sad, but he doesn’t want to cry in front of his father. So, he runs off to a nearby room where an old man is sitting in a wheelchair. The figure hisses at Drew and says that it’s now his house and not Drew’s anymore. Aunt Blythe arrives and calms down her father (who was very agitated).

This is a book that combines the chill of the New York winter with the arthritic helplessness of old man nightmares. It plays shamelessly with reality. The devices Straub incorporated in this book are so subtle that they had to be corrupted or ignored entirely when a movie was made based on this book. 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. That kind of fear, though, based solidly in statistical reality, is almost too much to bear. It’s impossible to live your life constantly thinking about that possibility, that probability, lingering up ahead in the future. It has evil and horror elements in the book but if you are looking for a haunted house or poltergeist, you’ll not find it in Ghost Story. 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 will not go into plot details at this stage, since these can be had by reading the book synopsis. Instead, in general terms, I'll try and explain just why this book should be on the reading list of any self respecting horror fan. Secondly, it is a pretty complicated story: dense and epic. It’s a story about terrible things that happen to people and the secret lives people lead. The cast is also fairly big. Think you know what's going on around here? Think again.

In 1982, the film was nominated for a Saturn Award for Best Horror Film. [ citation needed] Home media [ edit ] Ghost Story was released on DVD on March 25, 1998, by Image Entertainment. [19] [20] Universal repressed the DVD with an alternate cover art, which was released September 7, 2004. [20] The film received its first Blu-ray release in the United States on November 24, 2015, by Scream Factory. [21] This release featured new bonus material, including an audio commentary with director John Irvin, as well as interviews with Peter Straub, Alice Krige, Lawrence D. Cohen, Burt Weissbourd, and Bill Taylor. [21] See also [ edit ] When I finished school, I sold my The Shining, my The Stand, all of my horror books except one. There was one novel with which I could not part--Peter Straub's "Ghost Story." The Time Out film guide deemed it a "disastrous distillation of Peter Straub's overrated but at least tolerably coherent novel." [17] TV Guide awarded the film two out of four stars, criticizing Cohen's screenplay, but adding: "Director John Irvin does manage to evoke some mood and atmosphere from the snowy New England setting, and the performances from the four veteran lead players are enjoyable." [18]I hate it when this happens. You have a great writer. You have what is allegedly his magnum opus. You have a decent movie adaptation, which, though flawed, boasts a storyline original and creepy. Vanessa Armstrong Horror Film It Follows to Get a Sequel, Reasonably Titled They Follow 4 hours ago New York Times bestselling author Peter Straub’s classic tale of horror, secrets, and the dangerous ghosts of the past…