"Ghost Story" by Peter Straub
A look back at an emerging American horror classic

    It's unlikely that Peter Straub intended to define the modern American horror novel when he began writing 1979's "Ghost Story", but that's exactly what he did.  And he did it rather quietly.  The story here is nothing especially groundbreaking (a woman's ghost comes back for revenge against the men that killed her).  It is the unprecedented execution and manipulation of the tried-and-true theme, as well as its clear influence on future horror writers and their increased focus on narrative richness, that has made the book an emerging classic of the genre.  There is a pervading sense of literal and thematic ambiguity joined with effectively terrifying writing that raises the novel to a higher level, smashing the snobby literati's notion that old-fashioned fright tales built upon a familiar narrative framework cannot constitute genuine literature without the use of self-serving poetic language and high-minded prose. 

*********************************

    "What's the worst thing you've ever done?"
    That's the question the novel smacks you with from the get-go, and it immediately yanks the reader into the story and blankets them with a unversal fear that our sins, which we all have and many of which remain our own secrets, are never truly hidden or forgotten.  Five old men did something terrible when they were young.  They accidentally killed a girl named Eva, then put her body in a car and drove it into a lake.  To make it worse, she may not have been dead before they sent her to the bottom.  Now, not all of us have done something that bad, but that's what jacks up the stakes and dramatic core of the story.  Well, it fifty years later, and these guys are now old men in the same town, meeting regularly to exchange ghost stories.  But they're about to experience a horrifying ghost story of their own, as the ghost of Eva has come back to their town in for form of a shape-shifting spirit bent of punishing the entire community for these people's long-ago crime.  The resulting carnage and terror are equal to the scares in any horror novel of the modern era, but that's not what makes Straub's take on the story a stroke of genius.  
    The horror genre is a realm often reliant upon and indeed strengthened by a focus on tightly constructed narrative and straightforward plotting, which are often essential for scary stories to maintain their tension.  Mystery is fine, but it usually has to be revealed and resolutely explained eventually for the narrative to meet its goal, which is to not merely frighten the reader, but leave them frightened.  Fear of the unknown only works for so long, especially if the author is trying to tie things up with a nice little literary bow. 
    Shaub throws those conventions into the garbage bin.  While the spectral horrors carry the story along and heighten its effectiveness within the genre, the strength of "Ghost Story" is that it keep things frustratingly and brilliantly ambiguous, opening the story up to a new world of thematic implications and narrative interpretation.  The idea that this is even a real ghost story in the first place may ultimately prove to be a red herring.  The novel's complex plotting and intense imagery, which manages to be both chillingly clear and fundamentally mysterious at the same time, carry our minds and our fears into areas we don't even remotely understand.  Is this even a ghost at all?  Evil is certainly present in the proceedings, as it is in the dealings of the real world, but where is it really coming from?  And to what end?  
    "Ghost Story" only appears to present us with our villains and our terrors at face value.  What it really does is lead us to reconsider our notions of what really frightens us, and what it is deep inside ourselves that makes us accept such punishments even as we fight against them, without truly understanding them.  Straub wrote the novel as Stephen King was skyrocketing to the thrown of the genre, and the two owe a great deal to each other (in fact they are very close friends and have collaborated on numerous occasions).  It's been said that if King represents the narrative heart of modern American horror, then Straub is its head.  He injected effectively complex and ambiguous plotting to the field while King was fleshing it out with colorful thematic inventiveness and rigid storytelling.  "Ghost Story" does lack some of those greater elements of King, namely his clear, concise, and easily understood style.  It should also be noted that King's work, and the work of many other horror writers that blossomed out of the seventies and eighties, took important cues from "Ghonst Story" that have enriched and empowered the genre, keeping it afloat in an increasingly cynical American marketplace.  But Straub is not Stephen King, and if he had tightened his story to fit the popular manner of his contemporary, then this novel would not have turned out to be horror classic it has become.