Book: Ghost Story

Well this was a disappointment.

Horror lit is one of my favorite genres (I know, I'm a man of low class tastes), and when I perused Flavorwire's 50 Scariest Books of All Time list I was sure I would get some good suggestions. I'd already read 19 of the suggestions, andI don't like gore, really, or descriptions of torture, so some of the books didn't strike my fancy. But ghost stories? Stories of the supernatural? That's right down my strike zone. For that reason,I was pretty excited about the 4th recommendation on the list: Peter Straub's Ghost Story, a 1979 novel about a group of old men who may have brought their worst fears into existence.

That sounds like a pretty good kernel for a novel, and there were a few passages that really were gripping and compelling--Sears' story of Fenny and Gregory, for example, was grim and oppressive, an echo of The Turn of the Screw that really worked. Don's story of his mysterious love affair with Alma was also not bad.

Overall, though? This was incredibly dull. The characters were one-dimensional, the dialogue sounded false on almost every note, and it just wasn't as scary as I was expecting. Or at all, really, other than the two exceptions above. I had to force myself to get through it so that I could move onto something more interesting. 

Part of the problem is that I don't feel like Straub had a handle on his narrative structure. We had a weird omniscient narrator--or maybe limited omniscient?--that bounced from character to character and made them fairly indistinguishable from one another. Structurally we moved back and forward in time as well, but not in a particularly compelling fashion. Straub comes off here like a second rate Stephen King, which is ironic, because their collaboration The Talisman was pretty good, and I know Stephen King is a big fan of this novel as well.

For me, however, there wasn't a lot of there there, and this may end up as my most anticlimactic read of 2013 after my initial excitement of ordering it. When pressing the "Checkout" button on Amazon is the best part of the reading experience, however, I can't help but feel let down.

Grade: D