Ghost Story

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1979

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Background

Authorial Context: Peter Straub’s History of Storytelling

Peter Straub (1943-2022) was an American novelist and poet. Straub was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At seven, Peter was stuck by a car, confining him to the hospital for several months. His early confinement forced him to face his own mortality and gain an appreciation for reading. He attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He earned a bachelor’s in English and went on to earn a master’s at Columbia University. In 1969, he moved to Dublin, Ireland, and began writing professionally while pursuing his PhD. He never finished his doctorate, but instead devoted himself to writing.

Straub’s first book, Marriages (1973), and his second, Under Venus (1974), failed to make their mark critically or commercially. Straub’s next two works, Julia and If You Could See Me Now, were more supernatural, but again failed to make a mark. Ghost Story, his fifth novel, reached commercial success. After Ghost Story’s success, Peter returned to the United States. He went on to write 10 more novels, numerous short stories, and 10 novellas. Peter won his first World Fantasy award in 1989 for best novel with Koko. In 1993, Straub won his first Bram Stoker Award for best novel with The Throat. He was great friends with Stephen King, and the two co-authored The Talisman and Black House. Straub was a two-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Lost Boy, Lost Girl and In the Night Room. His final solo novel, A Dark Matter, was published in 2010 and received the Bram Stoker Award. He passed his love for storytelling to his daughter, well-known American author Emma Straub.

Genre Context: American Gothic Fiction

American Gothic fiction is a sub-genre of gothic fiction popularized in the early 1820s and late 1830s by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Washington Irving. Specific traits of the American Gothic genre include rationality, puritanism, shame and guilt, ghosts, monsters, and the uncanny. The defining characteristic of the American Gothic genre is the characters’ inability to rationalize their way out of the strange situation in which they find themselves. No amount of denial will save Ichabod from the headless horseman. In Ghost Story, the Chowder Society attempts to rationalize and solve the problems in Milburn, but the more they cling to the rational, the further they get from salvation.

American Gothic tales use the wild woods in place of the corridors typical of European Gothic tales. This can be seen as Straub plays on this essential characteristic with Lewis’s coon hunt and Sears struggle to find the Bate house. The two men travel into the unknown and away from society’s safety, adding to the eerie quality of the tale.

The antagonist in Ghost Story follows the monster trope of the gothic tradition, but with the twist that is typical of the American subgenre. The shapeshifter is almost indistinguishable from other humans. It targets Ricky and Don because it knows they will be able to tell it is not quite human, thus making the game more entertaining. The wilderness of the American northwest is mirrored by the wilderness of the characters minds, providing a diverting chase for these inhuman monsters.

Straub grounds Ghost Story in the American Gothic tradition by drawing on Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, two of the most celebrated American ghost story writers. Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne share names with these literary greats. Straub also mirrors Henry James’s Turn of the Screw in the story of the Bate family, only with an impoverished family rather than a rich one. Ghost Story creates a modern take on classic American Gothic themes.