Peter Straub

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All but the Clanking Chains

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SOURCE: "All but the Clanking Chains," in Newsweek, Vol. XCIII, No. 13, March 26, 1979, p. 104.

[In the following review, Prescott provides a brief plot summary and a favorable assessment of Ghost Story.]

Surely this is the longest ghost story ever written. That alone should cause the aficionado to hoist an eyebrow, for the genre virtually demands brevity. I was equally troubled by the author's declaration that he wanted to push the elements of the ghost story "as far as they could go." That, I thought, had long since been accomplished by grandmasters from Hawthorne and Le Fanu to Blackwood and M. R. James. Groundless fears, these. With considerable technical skill, Peter Straub has constructed an extravagant entertainment which, though flawed, achieves in its second half some awesome effects. It is, I think, the best thing of its kind since Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House."

I mustn't be precise about the plot. It involves some elderly men in an upstate New York town who share a common guilt: an actress, at one of their parties 50 years earlier, was accidentally killed. They gather to tell ghost stories. A lovely woman appears in different guises and with different names, though her initials are always the same. She means to kill these men and those around them. Snow closes in the town. The ghost woman with her familiars—a werewolf and an idiot boy—set about their slaughter. Men and women are tricked into suicide or brutally destroyed. Corpses walk, victims return to claim their kin; mirrors and windows give false reflections, strange music plays and strange footprints appear in the snow, trees beckon; the reek of rotting flesh yields to the smell of cut flowers. Repressed sexuality, terrifying dreams and treacherous hallucinations abound, as do the promise of hellish immortality and, of course, the suggestion that each victim brings his fate upon himself.

In short, Straub employs every trick that this kind of fiction can offer except clanking chains—I missed them. He breaks up his narrative in a determinedly literary way with elaborate flashbacks and parallel constructions which are at first irritating but in time allow him to work impressive variations on a single scene and to bring off several horrifying climaxes in succession. I mentioned flaws: the ghost explains herself too much; the final pages gloss over the ghastly crime that must be committed to restore moral order, and the story takes too long getting into stride. Only after 200 pages was I sure that it was going to work, but it does work—and, in its own grisly way, triumphantly. My unconscious approved of it before my conscious mind did: Ghost Story gave me bad dreams the first night out.

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