Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

Although Ghost Story takes many pages to set up the weft of its characters and setting, Straub titrates information to provide repeated forward echoes of events to come. "Jesus she moved she can't she's dead" intrudes into the thoughts of Ricky and the other members of the Chowder Society, along with the name of Eva Galli. The repeated squirming of the men tells us that the Society was responsible for her death. The meaning of these signifiers won't come clear until near the end of the novel. Still, the combination of hints of the undead mixed with the men's obvious guilt is all that is needed to create knowledge of a haunting. We see them running, and we know it's from something freaky.

The complexity of the novel and its lengthy setup is necessary because it focuses on the impact of a haunting on an entire population. When Peter Barnes looks out the window of his home to find a crowd of ghosts standing in his front yard, this hits home, as though they are the assembled dead from the play Our Town. At the beginning of some chapters, the point of view is unclear. My own occasional confusion about who was speaking seemed to infuse the prose with the texture of many voices, like the hustle and bustle of a small town.  

One device that utilizes point-of-view with a surprise is on page 249. The section begins with an introduction that contains dialog by Harold Sims. In this italicized paragraph, he tells Stella how he views the current academic trend of storytelling as hackneyed. He grinds his ax by using an example of the myth of the Manitou to illustrate his point. But what the paragraph does is provide us with information about the shapeshifters and how they hint at who they are because they are so vain. I was delighted by Harold actually "interrupting" another character's point-of-view with this aside. I wonder if critics considered this technique innovative at the time.

We also receive detail about the shapeshifters' behavior by Jim Hardie's catalog of discoveries about Anna Moysten. For instance, Anna has nothing in her closet at first, but later all her clothes are there. Now we know the shapeshifters can make things appear and disappear as Alma Mobler's furniture did. We also learn that the shapeshifters can read minds or engage in remote viewing because Anna knows that Jim looked in her closet and noticed it was empty—next time he looks, clothing is there. We see Anna smiling at Jim and Peter as they spy on her from the church--she can see them through the darkness. We also learn that the creatures don't sleep because the covers on her bed are never disturbed. If a character's initials are A.M., chances are she will share these qualities.

Straub’s prose is dazzling. An example of the exquisite language in Ghost Story can be found in this virtuoso paragraph:

…the air had a peculiar midday darkness which seemed unaffected by his headlights. These were no more than a glow nearly invisible at the front of the car. It was the objects and oddments of the town which instead seemed to glow, not with the yellow glow of headlights but whitely, with the white of the clouds still boiling and foaming overhead–here a picket fence, there a door and molding shone. Here a scattering of stones in a wall, there naked poplars on a lawn. Their bloodless color reminded Ricky eerily of John Jaffrey's face. Above these random shining things the sky beyond the boiling clouds was even blacker. (Straub ch. 1)

This paragraph taught me, finally, why professors don't want us to write cinematically. It contains so much more than action. It is pure art—the written equivalent of an Ansel Adams photograph.

The last chapter of Ghost Story is cinematic, however. For that reason, I didn't enjoy it as much, with Dr. Rabbitfoot replacing the little girl and being over-the-top obnoxious. The scene would have been more horrifying if Don had stabbed the child, rather than Dr. Rabbitfoot. The horror lay in this awful creature being a little girl. Why stray from that? 

I was left with some questions:

• Why was Jeffrey's face referred to first as ravaged, then as ruined?

• If all the shapeshifting women had names with the initials A.M., why wasn't Eva Galli similarly named? 

• Was Florence DePeyser a shapeshifter, if not, what kind of being was she?

• How did Otto Norris die, exactly?

• Why did Alma let Don live when they were together at Berkely?