It's a Metaphor!: Ghost Story by Peter Straub

I will shamefully admit that I hadn’t heard of Peter Straub’s acclaimed novel Ghost Story before this class. When I checked it out before reading, I was excited. It had wonderful reviews and was endorsed by horror titan Stephen King as one of the best horror novels ever.

So imagine my disappointment at finding Ghost Story to be one of the more boring books I’ve read.

I wanted to like this book. Straub pays homage to literary heavyweights Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and hints to Edgar Allen Poe through the writing itself, which affects the overall style of the novel. It’s always been my experience that the pacing of classic novels is slower than in modern novels, and for being published in 1979, I consider Ghost Story to be a modern novel. Yet after the prologue which was filled with intrigue and tension, the pace of the story slowed to a crawl. On page fifty of my edition, Sears James tells his story about Fenny and his brother Gregory. This story grabbed my interest. Yet once it was told, it wasn’t until page 200 when Don Wanderly tells his encounter with the mysterious Alma Mobley when the story grabbed my attention again. Yet after her story was told, my interest waned until the last page. Had I prepared myself for a story told in a more classic literary style, I might’ve more readily forgiven the slow pace. Yet by the time I realized this was partially how Straub was paying homage, I couldn’t connect with the story.

The lack of character connection also contributed to my struggle of connecting to the story. Straub utilizes an ensemble cast, and while I usually don’t mind head hopping or multiple POVs, it didn’t work for me in this book. There were so many characters and so many POV shifts that I never really cared for any of the characters. The closest I came was to Don during his entry about Alma, yet the story didn’t stay with him long enough for me to truly become vested in.

Finally, my last gripe. I thought it was safe to assume that with the title of Ghost Story this would be a story about ghosts. Yet look what happens to people who assume. On the surface, this is not a ghost story despite the title. The big bad is a Manitou, or shape shifter who has taken the form of many women—Alma Mobley included—in order to seek revenge for her murder fifty years before the book takes place. Her henchmen are referred to as vampires or werewolves. Now, I have no problem with beasties as the antagonists, yet I don’t considered monsters the same as ghosts. I felt mislead that the antagonist was a beastie as opposed to a ghost, even though I liked the idea of using a Manitou as the monster. The ghost in this story is metaphorical: it is the memory of murder that haunts the four old men that is the real ghost. Call me literal, but I wasn’t expecting metaphors.

There were elements of Ghost Story I enjoyed, and maybe I’d have a different impression of it if I went back and read it with the literary homage in mind. Yet after this first read, I didn’t think it lived up to the hype.