Will I love Ghost Story?

I love Ghost Story because it didn’t just scare the hell out of me, it scared the hell out of me in a very personal way.

It felt like it was something that could have happened to me. Worse, it felt like something that still might happen to me. And at any time. It lingered in my psyche, like the threat of something waiting to occur. The ghost of terror yet to come.

Though this book is divided into different perspectives, the main character is a writer, someone filled with imagination, who often questions his sanity and is being haunted. As a matter of fact, most of the characters in Peter Straub’s book are. But what exactly they are being haunted by becomes the question.

I love Straub’s portrait of the town of Milburn through the eyes of his guilt-ridden protagonists, The Chowder Club, who torture their guilty consciences by telling each other ghost stories. The way Straub time jumps around in this book is dizzying but truly gorgeous. Right at the prologue,… show more.

I read this book when I was young, maybe 11-12, and was immediately hooked. It’s not written for kids, but I still loved the slow burn of encroaching horror. The sense of the entire town, trapped by a snowstorm, being unwound by the evil entity’s presence, was a masterwork.

This may be the book that made me want to write horror books. Is it actually about a ghost? No. But somehow, it’s still one of the best ghost stories out there.  

There are certainly many different types of lists on which this book belongs. I always tell people Ghost Story is the scariest thing I’ve ever read. I was fortunate enough to relay that to the late great Peter Straub at a horror writers’ conference many years ago. Though I’m sure he would have liked praise for a more contemporary work, there’s a timelessness in the terror he evokes in this book. But that’s not the reason I include it here. It’s because I think ghosts are a form of Fate. Violence, injustice, visceral reactions—these are the things we associate with… show more.

One of the greatest horror novels ever written, in my opinion, and a book that has stood the test of time. The book centers on four elderly men who harbor a long-kept secret that comes back to haunt them. The setting of a small New York town in the middle of winter makes it even creepier.

As a movie producer, I developed the screenplay and produced the movie, Ghost Story, at Universal. The movie featured Fred Astaire, John Houseman, Melvyn Douglas, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Universal bought the rights to the book and asked me to develop the screenplay and produce it. Larry Cohen, who’d written Carrie, wrote the screenplay. What a thrilling experience to adapt a wonderful, complicated book into a movie. I worked very closely with Larry and came to know the book very well. There was too much material in the book for even a long feature film, so we had to find… show more.