GHOST STORIES: PETER STRAUB (1943-2022)

A Brief Bit of Autobiography

When I was seventeen, I wrote my first play.

My English teacher persuaded me to do it. New York was launching the first “Young Playwrights Competition,” and she knew that I was a writer. She thought the competition was ideal for me. I was not as certain, however. I’d written two novels by that time, and a number of short stories, but never a play. Prose was more my thing. Still, my teacher was persuasive and the prize—seeing your play produced and staged—was too tempting to pass up. I decided to give it a try.

Mara ended up taking first place out of five hundred entries (as a side note I entered again the next year with The Wine of Violence and took first place again). It was the story of three young men who reunite a year after they were all in a horrific car accident. One of them was left paralyzed from the waist down. One of them was traumatized (what later we would call PTSD). The third—the driver during the accident—is blasé about the entire thing. There was, however, a fourth victim that night…the young woman driving the car they collided with. She was killed.

No sooner do they reunite than a sudden blizzard—the same weather conditions as the night of the accident—snows them in. Housebound, the power and phones go out. There is the sound of an accident and a young woman stumbles to the door before collapsing. They take her inside and tend to the unconscious stranger.

As they do, hidden resentments slowly surface. The traumatized young man resents the driver, who seems completely callous about the incident. The young man in the wheelchair resents the other two for being able to walk away from the accident. The driver resents that the other two hold him responsible, that they seem to think he should feel guilty. Tensions mount and it ends in murder and suicide. Only the wheelchair bound narrator remains…and the unconscious guest.

She awakes soon after the violence, and (you guessed it) confirms she was the fourth victim that night. Just as the wheelchair bound man invited the other two, he summoned her from the grave. This was his revenge as much as hers. When the ghost vanishes we are left with the narrator, who stares out into the blizzard and debates rolling out into it to quietly freeze to death.

I received a lot of praise for Mara. The editor of the Albany paper said it exemplified all the classic conflicts, man versus man, man versus himself, man versus nature, man versus the supernatural. The reviews were generally positive. I worked closely with the director, and was there for the auditions and castings, and took my bow hand-in-hand with the company at the end of opening night. For a young writer, it is the kind of validation you dream of. I was very lucky.

Before writing Mara, I had gone back and researched the craft. I read every play I could get my hands on. Shakespeare. Ibsen. Williams. Miller. That was how I learned stage directions and the inner workings of a play. But what people asked me most about it was where the idea had come from. What my inspiration was. 

The answer to that was simple. 

Peter Straub.

Ghost Stories

Peter Straub (1943 - 2022) left us last week. I was deeply saddened by his passing. While pre-teen me was inspired to write by Stephen King, adolescent me was driven by admiration for Straub. To my mind, Peter Straub was to the ghost story what Shirley Jackson was to the haunted house novel.  He was the master of the genre. Straub’s ghosts—always female—are not insubstantial wraiths but manifest as flesh and blood entities. They haunt by corrupting their victims and inducing mental breakdowns. Here, I’d like to talk about three of my favorites. 

1975’s Julia was Straub’s first foray into the genre. A young American woman living in London flees her domineering husband (with the aid of his younger brother, and it is unclear if he does this out of genuine concern for Julia, desire for her, or just to piss off his brother). She has just recovered from a mental breakdown in the wake of killing her own daughter. The little girl had been choking to death, and Julia performed a tracheotomy to try and save her. But as soon as Julia moves into her new house, there are disturbances, which may or may not be hauntings. She begins to catch glimpses of a little blonde girl who looks strikingly like her daughter. The most dramatic is at a park near her home, where she spies the girl in a sandbox…

Almost immediately, she saw the blonde girl again. The child was sitting on the ground at some distance from a group of other children, boys and girls who were watching her…the blonde girl was working at something intently with her hands, wholly concentrated on it. Her face was sweetly serious…this is what gave it the aspect of a performance…

When Julia goes back to the sandbox she finds a turtle mutilated in the sand. It looks like the blonde girl had given it a tracheotomy.

Things intensify and Julia cannot be certain if this girl is a hallucination, a ghost, her daughter, or her husband trying to drive her mad.

Straub followed this with 1977’s If You Could See Me Now. Miles Teagarden is a recently widowed English professor who returns to the rural community where his grandmother once lived to write his dissertation. Or so we are at first led to believe. In the summer of 1955, Miles and his cousin Alison—whom he was in love with—made a promise to meet up there again twenty years later, in 1975. That is what brings him back. The only catch is that Alison died that summer…and he is expecting her to keep her promise anyway.

No sooner than he takes up residence there young girls begin getting murdered in the community, just as Alison had been. The police suspect him. He suspects Alison. And the reader is not quite sure who to trust.

The novel that put Straub on the map, however, was 1979’s Ghost Story.

Probably his most famous solo work (Straub cowrote both The Talisman and The Black House with Stephen King), Ghost Story is a ghost story about ghost stories. A group of old men, the “Chowder Society,” hold meetings where they tell each other ghost stories, each of which the reader gets to share. They are bound together by a terrible secret. When they were college boys, a mysterious older woman came into their lives, seducing them, playing mind-games with them, and ending their innocence. An argument and some alcohol leads to them accidentally killing her, and then hiding the body and covering the murder up.

Meanwhile, Donald Wanderly, the nephew of one of these men, becomes a successful author and lands a university teaching position. There, he meets and falls in love with a beautiful young graduate student, Alma Mobley. But there is something wrong with Alma, something cold and alien that becomes ever more evident in the relationship. One of the most chilling scenes comes when he touches her skin one night and feels an electric shock of revulsion, as if he had just touched a dead body or slug. Later, he wakes to find her standing naked in front of the window. He asks her what’s wrong and she answers “I saw a ghost.” Later, he begins to believe she said “I am a ghost,” and later still…”you are a ghost.” When he ends the relationship Alma re-emerges engaged to his brother soon after. Donald tries to warn him about Alma but his brother dismisses it all as jealousy. Then the brother ends up committing suicide.

The members of the Chowder Society reach out to him for help as they become increasingly convinced their past has come back to haunt them, that the woman they killed is back and may have indeed been his Alma. There is more at work here than this, however, and they begin to understand the nature of the shape shifting horror they are dealing with. Wanderly kidnaps a little girl he firmly believes is the latest manifestation of Alma, and in this interaction we get to the heart of the novel and its conception of the ghost story:

“Okay, let’s try again,” he said. “What are you?”

For the first time since he had taken her into the car she really smiled… “You know,” she said.

He insisted. “What are you?”

She smiled all through her amazing response. “I am you.”

“No. I am me. You are you.”

“I am you.”

Straub is perfecting a thesis here he proposed first in Julia, namely that the Ghost is really ourselves. He frames Ghost Story with the myth of Narcissus, because for him the ghost is our own reflection and our morbid obsession with it. Julia is haunted by her past, by the death of her daughter. Miles Teagarden is haunted by the memory of Alison and the effect her death had on his life. The Chowder Society is haunted by the woman they killed. None of these people can let the past go, and by staring back into the abyss of their traumatic experiences, the abyss in turn stares back into them. 

Straub went on to write several novels in multiple genres. Shadowland is a fantasy novel about a magician who learns real magic, Koko is a novel about Vietnam, The Hellfire Club is a straight up thriller, et cetera. But to my mind, his ghost stories were a high water mark, not merely for him but for that form of literature.  

NETFLIX AND THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE

FILM AND LITERATURE are two very different mediums, and it is pointless to expect a smooth translation from one to the other.  There are reasons why Arwen was at the Ford of Bruinen rather than Glorfindel in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings; reasons why Mat Hooper doesn't hook up with Ellen Brody in the film adaptation of Jaws; and yes, even reasons why Ozymandias's sinister plan in the cinematic Watchmen doesn't include tentacles.  It's pointless to rail against such things.  Very few films are scene-by-scene faithful to the books that inspired them.

There are a few.  Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby is essentially just the novel put up on the big screen.  Robert Mulligan didn't stray far from Harper Lee for To Kill a Mockingbird.  And in 1963, legendary director Robert Wise did an adaptation of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House under the title, The Haunting.  There have been two subsequent film versions, one in 1999 and now a ten-hour television adaptation for Netflix.  Wise's faithful version is widely considered one of the finest haunted house films ever made.  The two subsequent versions missed the entire point.

Now, I did not object to the complete overhauling of the novel's plot; Jackson's legendary novel is far too short and to the point for a ten-hour binge-worthy Netflix adaptation.  Making the protagonists a family, rather than a collection of strangers brought together to investigate a haunted house, was not on the face of it a bad idea.  Nor was it a bad decision to flash backwards and forwards between the characters as children--when they lived in Hill House and it destroyed their mother--and adults still dealing with the echoes and the fallout of that tragedy.  But when fate has handed you one of the scariest pieces of fiction ever written to work with, you might wish to pay attention to the engine that makes it work. That engine is Hill House itself.

What distinguished Jackson's novel is that we are never really certain if Hill House--despite a reputation for being the "Mount Everest of haunted houses"--is really haunted at all.  Are there ghosts in Hill House?  We never see any.  To borrow a line from H. P. Lovecraft, "What I heard in my youth about the shunned house was merely that people died there in alarmingly great numbers."  That is the essence of Hill House.  People have terrible accidents there.  People kill themselves there.  But the implication is not that specters walk the halls, it is that the house itself is bad. Stephen King understood this, referencing Hill House directly in his 'salem's Lot.  His own Marsten House--like Hill House--holds evil in its "moldering bones."  King, like Jackson, is asking us to consider the possibility that a house, like a human being, can be wrong.

In the novel, and the superb Wise adaptation, there are poundings on the doors, there is writing on the walls.  But not all of the characters hear the poundings, and we are never really sure if it was a ghostly hand or--far worse--one of the characters wrote the words themselves.  To sum the Jackson novel up in the colloquial, Hill House is fucking with their heads.  People died there, but did they actually leave any ghosts?  Not according to Jackson;

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Hill House, "not sane," stands "by itself."  Whatever walks there, "walks alone."  The problem with the 1999 adaptation, and now Netflix's, is that the house is not alone.  It is filled to the rafters with ghosts.

Don't get me wrong, the Netflix The Haunting of Hill House is a bit more subtle about it than the 1999 version, and is superior to that one in nearly every way.  Right up until the tenth and final episode you can't be certain the ghosts are real or just hallucinations.  But it is in that final installment that the writers and producers demonstrate they either never fully understood the point of the novel or they simply did not care.  Hill House is bad, yes, but the ghosts are real and some of them are "good."  A husband is reunited with his wife there and they two of them live happily ever after as ghosts forever.  The Dudley's die there so they can live eternally with their child.  And in a rewritten line that is essentially a giant middle finger at Shirley Jackson, "whatever walks there, walks together."

Yes, there are legitimate reasons to rewrite books for films.  The film version of Goldfinger, for example, turns Ian Fleming's daft idea of the ultimate bank robbery into a far more chilling act of terrorism.  Yet despite this change, Goldfinger remains fairly true to the core of the novel.  This Hill House doesn't give a damn about Jackson.  It just wants to cash in on the title.

If you like well-written family drama, if you like uplifting tales of familial love overcoming obstacles, this is a good series for you.  It has genuinely scary moments, and the final revelation of the secret of the "Red Room" is brilliantly done.

But if you were looking for The Haunting of Hill House, go rewatch Robert Wise.    

RAMSEY CAMPBELL'S "NAZARETH HILL"

Literary critic and Lovecraft expert S.T. Joshi was perhaps a bit too lavish in his praise when he called Nazareth Hill the equal of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.  On the other hand, it's easy to see where the comparison comes from.  Both are a very specific sort of haunted house novel, leaving you wondering at the end if you had just experienced a supernatural event or simply been witness to a psychological break-down. But in Jackson's novel we never actually see anything, and can never really be certain if the house killed Eleanor or she self-destructed under her own internal pressures.  Nazareth Hill by contrast has for more in common with The Shining--more the Kubrick film than the King novel--because there are ghosts aplenty, and it seems pretty clear that they are trying to drive a father into committing unspeakable violence.  All three pieces may be in the vein of the psychological haunted house tale, but Hill House is infinitely more ambiguous than either, a trick only Jackson and Henry James truly mastered.

That out of the way, Nazareth Hill is still an excellent horror novel. Insurance agent and arachnophobe Oswald Priestly forces his eight-year-old daughter Amy to confront her irrational fear of Nazareth Hill, a burned out ruin in the center of town, one Sunday while the family is out walking.  He holds Amy up to a window to peek in and prove there is nothing there to be afraid of.  The problem is she does see something, and is so shaken by it she represses the memory.  

Nearly eight years later Amy's mother has died leaving she and Oswald alone.  Nazareth Hill has been refurbished into a luxury condominium complex, and the surviving members of the Priestly family are now actually among the people living there.  It's an exclusive place, and there is a whiff of "lord of the manor" English class snobbery around its residents.  The real estate company that revamped the place, meanwhile, is keen to keep its history hidden.  Nazareth Hill was once the haunt of a local witch coven, some of whom were eventually caught and hung from a tree there, and later of an insane asylum that was consumed by a suspicious fire, burning all the inmates alive.  Coincidentally perhaps, many of those inmates were survivors of the old, local witch families.

Neither Amy nor her father are the most stable of people.  Both are still damaged from the loss of Mrs. Priestly.  Oswald is priggish, over-protective, and a bit too concerned with propriety.  His arachnophobia is also off the charts.  Amy meanwhile suffers from headaches and takes homeopathic pills for them, and is working overtime to be the rebellious teenage daughter.  Oswald fears she takes after her maternal grandmother, a superstitious old woman obsessed with tarot, tea leaves, and spiritualism who eventually went around the bend.  There is some implication in this that Amy, through her maternal line, might have descended from the local witches that died at Nazareth Hill. More on that later.

The second half of the novel could be read in very Haunting of Hill House terms, as it follows Amy's descent into obsession with the history of the building and her father's parallel descent into paranoia that Amy is being consumed by the madness that took her grandmother.  The first half, however, makes a purely psychological interpretation harder.  After all, a photograph taken of Nazareth Hill shows a hideous face in one of the windows, the photographer is subsequently killed by the burned to a crisp undead that haunt the house, and an old man sees the apparition after.  So it is fairly clear the place is haunted.  This makes the shift into the second half all the more jarring, as if Campbell was not quite sure if he was telling The Shining or Hill House.  There is a terrifying scene later in the book that might lead the reader into thinking poor Amy really is going mad (it involves handwriting), but because Campbell played the ghosts so strong in the first half it is easy to pin the blame of them.  If the first half had been as subtle as the second, Nazareth Hill might have been more like Hill House or Turn of the Screw.  

Undeniably a page-turner, and packed with ample scares, the book also has something to say about domestic violence and the domination of men over women.  Nazareth Hill, the locale and not the novel, was the site of a circle of powerful women broken and hung by patriarchy.  The mental institution was more of the same, with "hysteria" replacing "heresy."  And as Oswald falls deeper under the spell of the place, he becomes very much the stern, puritanical Christian father we might find in Miller's Crucible.  The house has a pattern of men caging and trying to break women that threaten them, and this is brilliantly played out between Amy and her father.  Again, their are hints here (Amy's response to the house and it to her, the suggestion that her grandmother was--like the earlier witches--locked up for her interest in all things pagan and unChristian, and the climax of the novel) that make you think Amy descended from that original coven, and that she is doomed to suffer the pattern of male domination as a result.  Campbell prefers to imply rather than tell, and that works just fine for the atmosphere of the novel.

Nazareth Hill is certainly one of the better haunted house novels, but I am reluctant to call it "Haunting of Hill House" good.  It does (as the better novels of the genre do) strip the trappings and frills off the ghost to expose it for what it really is...the past refusing to let go of the present.  This definitely elevates it above hundreds of other haunted house tales.  It's a must read if you like "pressure cooker" haunted houses, and books that have a bit more to them than just a fear of the dead.

BEHIND THE SCENES: UNQUIET SLUMBERS

Don't read this until you have read "Unquiet Slumbers." available on this blog, first.

In Danse Macabre, his non-fiction examination of horror, Stephen King discussed the "Tarot Hand" of archetypes that dominate the genre. There is the Ghost (the great granddaddy of all horror archetypes), the Werewolf, the Thing Without a Name, and the Vampire. I don't recall off the top of my head if there was also an archetype called the Bad Place, but if there wasn't there should have been. At any rate, horror stories revolve around these archetypes, whether singularly or in tandem. If it scares you, it probably can be traced back to one or more of them. Unquiet Slumbers, a story I wrote about back in 2003 feverishly and over three days, was a chance to play with a hand of three of those archetypes; the Ghost, the Vampire, and the Bad Place.

Of all those cards, the one I am most cautious to play is the Vampire, an archetype that has frankly been done to death. It is so overused that it is barely ever scary, acting as a "sex symbol" instead (and I mean that both in the sense of being sexy and as being a symbol for sexual relations). The ravenous medieval monster is now a sparkly Mormon messenger telling good girls to save it for their wedding nights. Of course, I wrote Unquiet Slumbers before the world was made to suffer Twilight, but things were already headed in that direction. Vampires had hired PR agents and were rebranding themselves as misunderstood anti-heroes with BDSM overtones (it's not coincidence that the BDSM novel 50 Shades of Grey began as Twilight fan fiction). Even Dracula himself was now a romantic hero, Coppola's curiously named Bram Stoker's Dracula was about as far removed from Bram Stoker's actual Dracula as you could get. I didn't want to ride the Frank Langella/Anne Rice bandwagon.

So what I decided to do was to try and write a very retro vampire story, something almost medieval, stripped of even the 19th century gothic fascination bestowed on the creature. My model was the famous "Mercy Brown" incident, a very real and curious event. For those who don't know it, in Exeter, Rhode Island, at the end of the 19th century, a family named Brown became plagued by tuberculosis, which picked them off one by one. Friends and neighbors persuaded George Brown that it was the work of the undead, and in 1892 he exhumed three family members to find one--the corpse of Mary Brown--still apparently fresh and full of blood. This was taken as a sign that Mary was responsible, so her heart was removed from her body and burnt. Poor George died two months later anyway. But this American vampire story, so close to the 20th century, had been in the back of my head for some time and became the blueprint for Slumbers.

The Vampire was of course the central card in my hand as I told Slumbers (though I decided to never actually use the word "vampire" in the entire tale, a trick I would borrow for a different monster in The Man Cub), but the Ghost and the Bad Place cast shadows over the story too. In my own mind I have never been sure if the spectral apparitions the narrator sees outside the living room windows are vampires like Stephan or the forlorn ghosts of his victims. I lean towards the latter. And the idea of the mountain being dangerous in winter, and of the nasty bend in the road where the narrator lost his parents, were flirtatious with the Bad Place.

The same year I wrote Unquiet Slumbers, I also wrote the novella that would grow up into the novel The Man Cub. I considered likewise expanding and fleshing Slumbers out, but in the end decided I liked this little tale the way it was. But the Vampire, the Ghost, and the Bad Place is a hard hand to beat, and I knew I hadn't written them out of my system yet. So this year I have picked them up to play again in my newest project, Sinclair House, in a larger and more ambitious way. I don't want to say any more about the project at this stage, but despite being very different animals, Sinclair House and Slumbers share a bit of DNA. Stay tuned.