Ghost Story
Ghost Story is not, it turns out, about “ghosts” at all. Its originality of concept is one of the reasons why Peter Straub’s horror novel was not only the best of its kind in 1979, but must also be ranked as one of a handful of modern dark fantasies that have transcended the limits of the genre to establish themselves as significant works of art.
Perhaps the uniqueness of Straub’s novel can be most clearly seen by a brief comparison with another excellent contemporary dark fantasy, Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1975). The basic plots of these two works are quite similar: a young, introspective, troubled writer comes to a small, provincial Eastern town where he encounters a mysterious and unnatural menace. Viewed with suspicion and hostility by the local authorities, he nevertheless manages to recruit a small group of converts, most notably a bright teenaged boy, to do battle with the evil before it destroys them and overwhelms the town. After a harrowing and protracted conflict, the menace is finally vanquished, but not before much of the town has been ravaged and most of the hero’s allies killed. However, in Salem’s Lot the menace is vampirism; in Ghost Story it is a new (or at least obscure) species of evil capable of destroying its adversaries in new and different ways. The qualities and tools needed to fight the vampires in Salem’s Lot are well known; the creatures in Ghost Story demand new tactics and weapons. Therefore, once we know what we are dealing with in Salem’s Lot, the novel takes a thoroughly predictable shape, but even after the evil in Ghost Story has been unmasked, defeating it remains difficult and problematic. Moreover, Stephen King narrates Salem’s Lot in a thoroughly straightforward manner, while Peter Straub approaches his material indirectly and experimentally, keeping us off balance and constantly surprised, as much by his manipulations of narrative technique as by the originality of his concepts. Thus, for all of the skillful plotting, excellent characterization, and fine writing in Salem’s Lot, it never becomes more than a first-rate vampire story. Ghost Story, on the other hand, breaks new ground in the horror genre.
Ghost Story opens with a short “Prologue” that frames the narrative. Donald Wanderley, the protagonist, is driving south with a female child he has apparently kidnapped. Wanderley is obviously distraught, harried, and frightened; he carries a knife which he constantly fingers as he debates using it on his captive. The child, however, is calm, self-possessed, and strangely ironical in her responses to her captor. Even as Wanderley drives toward the Pacific, his mind wanders. Images from memory blur into hallucinatory scenes. Names, events, and scattered details from the story are tossed out as tantalizing hints. For a few moments he thinks he is in New York City. Later, walking alone in a strange Southern town, he suddenly comes upon his brother’s tombstone. Back at the motel he feverishly quizzes the girl: “What are you?” he demands. “I am you,” she answers him as the Prologue ends. The same question and answer occurs every time a doomed character has his/her final confrontation with “it,” and in this exchange lies much of both the novel’s power and its meaning.
This short, brilliant Prologue prepares the reader for what is to come, both in substance and in technique. It provokes obvious questions: why is he kidnapping the child? Who is she? What will he do with her? What could bring a man to consider murdering a ten-year-old? Also what awful sequence of events has led them to this strange confrontation? All such questions...
(This entire section contains 2231 words.)
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must wait, of course, until the end of the book, but this opening lingers in the mind as we move through this long and complex dark fantasy.
The technical adroitness of that opening sequence—the sudden jumps in time and place, the instant breakdown of objective reality into apparent hallucination, the pervasive sense of nightmare—sets the reader up for things to come. While, as with Salem’s Lot, even the best modern horror tales tend to be conventional and straightforward in presentation, with at most an occasional flashback, flashforward, or dream sequence to vary the chronological presentation, Ghost Story is given to us in fragments. The primary story, which takes place in the late 1970’s, is continually broken up by other bits and pieces of narrative: stories within stories, time shifts, scenes, images events—real and imagined—from the past, glimpses of the future, seemingly irrelevant incidents and details, bizarre yet realistic hallucinations, and terrifying nightmares. Not only does Straub create that required sense of unknown supernatural menace but he also blurs the distinctions between reality and illusion so effectively that the horror seems to be as much from within as without.
Despite this fragmentary approach, however, Ghost Story is never arbitrary or chaotic; its underlying structure is, in fact, quite stable. One of the real pleasures of the book lies in seeing how these apparently unrelated bits and pieces gradually come together to form a coherent, powerful whole. Straub takes two basic plot lines, the first concerning Don Wanderley and the second centering on the “Chowder Society,” counterpoints them for a while, and then merges them. Thus, once he has established his narrative spine, he can bring in a host of minor characters and play their lesser dramas out against his larger background without ever losing the main thrust of his story.
Having introduced us to Wanderley in the Prologue, Straub shifts his focus to the “Chowder Society” as he begins the novel proper. The Chowder Society consists of four elderly gentlemen who represent the elite of Milburn society—Frederick Hawthorne and Sears James, law partners, Lewis Benedikt, a well-to-do playboy, and John Jaffrey, a prominent physician. For over thirty years the small group has met regularly, dressed in formal attire, drunk fine whiskey, and told one another ghost stories. The group had had one additional member, Edward Wanderley, a writer and uncle to Don, who has been dead over a year at the point the narrative begins. The mysterious, sudden death of Edward during a party thrown in honor of a visiting actress named Ann-Veronica Moore, followed by a sequence of weird experiences and terrifying “shared” nightmares, have induced the men to summon the nephew, Donald Wanderley, in an effort to analyze and explain their doubts and fears.
The names “Hawthorne” and “James” are not, of course, accidental or arbitrary; they are deliberate attempts to evoke the great masters of American dark fantasy, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James. Direct and oblique references to both are scattered throughout the novel. The most important of these references occurs early in the book at a Chowder Society meeting when Sears James tells a “true” ghost story about an experience he had had as a rural schoolteacher prior to his taking up law. The story is an ingenious lower-class variant of The Turn of the Screw, stripped of its psychological ambiguities, but following the same basic story line. In his version, Sears James assumes the role of the governess, two of his students, Fenny Bate and his sister, Constance, replace the children, and Fenny’s older brother, Gregory, stands in as the demonic spectres. As in the Henry James original, the “ghost,” Gregory Bate, returns to continue his undescribed but clearly perverse relationship with the youngsters. At great personal risk Sears James vows to defend them against “his”—“its”—intrusion. He apparently succeeds in saving the girl, but again, as in the classic version, at the moment of final confrontation the boy dies. Of course, in Ghost Story, the tale of the Bate brothers does not end with Sears James’s recollections: they reappear throughout the novel, confront all of the major characters, wreak havoc on Milburn, and help to carry out the insidious designs of the primary malevolent force, “the woman.”
In keeping with the best horror fiction, Ghost Story combines a sense of progressing evil with the gradual unraveling of a first-rate mystery. The Chowder Society members are vulnerable not only to external menaces, but to their own consciences as well. As the fragments of narrative coalesce, we learn not only about the malevolent forces that are currently devastating Milburn, but also of the strange events that preceded them.
At the center of each man’s story is a woman and a guilty secret associated with her. As a group, the Chowder Society feels guilty for having “killed” Eva Galli, the first of the dangerous females, when they were young men. Lewis Benedikt blames himself for his wife’s suicide because he left her, rather than himself, to tend a strange child named Alice Montgomery. Donald Wanderley feels himself responsible for the death of his brother—also an unexplained suicide—having put him in contact with yet another mysterious female, Alma Mobley.
Thus, the key to the mystery and the ways to fight against it lie in the men’s personal histories. They must come to terms with their own pasts, first by reliving them in order to understand their meanings, and then by finding the strength to break free of them. Those that can, survive; those that cannot, die. The arrival of Donald Wanderley provides the stimulus for this encounter with their personal histories, but it is not until they recruit Peter Barnes, a teenager, and hence a man without a past, that they are able to fight effectively in the present.
The central revelation of the novel is the realization that, however different they may seem in appearance, age, personality, and circumstance, these women—Eva Galli, Anna Mostyn, Alma Mobley, Ann-Veronica Moore, Alice Montgomery, Amy Monckton, Angie Maule—are all the same person—or “thing.” The most frightening aspect of the relationship that each man establishes with his particular version of “her” is that “she” uses their own personalities, needs, guilts, and fears to damn them: that is the primary meaning of the “I am you” accusation each female makes to her intended victim. In the end, however, it is by accepting this insight that the men are able to retaliate.
“We chose to live in your dreams and imaginations because only there you are interesting,” “she” tells the group on a tape left for them to hear. “You are at the mercy of your human imaginations, and when you look for us, you should always look in the places of your imagination. In the places of your dreams.” The taped voice is meant to taunt and convince them of their opponent’s omnipotence, but it has the opposite effect. The group is galvanized into action, formulates a plan, and, by following clues found in their memories and associations, confronts the creatures, beginning with the Bate brothers and ending with the woman.
With the exception of the last bloody fight with the Bate brothers—the weakest scene in the book—all the climactic episodes take place in hallucinatory dream sequences. Rather than a palpable enemy, each major character, and a number of important minor ones, meets his own past and his dead friends and loved ones, in a jumble of scenes, characters, sounds, smells, and images that climax with his death or, if he can break through the nightmare to act, his deliverance. These moments of terror in Ghost Story are among the most harrowing in dark fantasy because of the intense identification we feel with the character and because we face not only supernatural malevolence, but also a powerful disorientation of reality itself. In a nightmare there is no place to hide.
In the final analysis, most horror fiction fails because stereotyped supernatural beings are simply dropped into a landscape full of predictable characters. In Ghost Story, however, the characters are real, believable human beings whose fates are closely related to their own unique makeups (the best way to test the literary merit of a horror story is to subtract the horror and see what is left). Ghosts are often encountered in the novel, but they are not traditional ghosts. Victims are frequently drained of blood, but the villains are not traditional vampires. Gregory Bate resembles a wolf and ravages his victims, but he is not a traditional werewolf. All the evil creatures behave demonically, but none is a traditional demon. Instead Straub posits a species of being that, by combining the traits of such typical menaces, offers a common explanation for them all. Probably the most disturbing aspect of his creatures is that Straub has taken one of our most cherished romantic notions—the “dream girl”—and inverted it. The most frightening myth lurking beneath the surface of Ghost Story is that of the succubus, the beautiful, tantalizing, idealized woman who turns suddenly, in the midst of sexual ardours, into the ravaging, devouring monster.
Straub uses many traditional horror-story devices, but in original and vivid ways. Ghost Story is not simply the best of recent dark fantasies, it is a veritable synthesis of the genre. Straub has said that “the novel refers back to the classic American novels and stories of the genre by Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne.” It is probably this “classic” dimension, given a striking contemporary twist, that sets Ghost Story apart from the plethora of mostly indifferent horror and occult works that have inundated the market in the past few years.