Ghost Story

Ghost Story is an uneven—yet at times startlingly effective—supernatural horror with memorable characters and a vivid small-town setting. Just don’t expect traditional ghosts.

The plot concerns a group of prominent elderly men in a small upstate New York town. The “Chowder Society,” as they’re called, meet weekly to enjoy whisky and cigars and share stories. But since the death of their friend Edward Wanderley a year prior, their stories have turned dark, with each member plagued by recurring nightmares. Seeking help, they reach out to Edward’s nephew, Don, a young author whose breakthrough novel had a paranormal element. But Don is haunted by demons of his own, and soon the men find themselves falling prey to forces beyond their understanding.

The setup bears some similarity to Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot—a supernatural force descends on a small isolated northeastern town turning its residents into undead monsters—and it also features a young author as the central protagonist. Heck, Ghost Story even opens with said author travelling south with a young child.

Straub acknowledged the inspiration, saying, “I wanted to work on a large canvas. ’Salem’s Lot showed me how to do this without getting lost among a lot of minor characters.”¹ That said, the antagonists in Ghost Story feel more akin to those found in what would be King’s next novel, The Shining, so perhaps the inspiration went both ways.

Like King, Straub’s strength here lies in his characters. The best of which—lifelong friends and law-partners Ricky Hawthorne and Sears James—prove so charismatic they could carry a story devoid of plot. I especially loved James, a gruff bear of a man whose Orson Welles similarities surfaced even before Straub calls them out. In contrast, Ricky evokes a frailer image. I pictured an older, American Peter Cushing.² Both endear themselves such that, as the action ramps up, you fear for their safety.

But Straub struggles to make the rest of his sprawling cast as resonant. Lewis, another Chowder Society member, and Stella, Ricky’s wife, fare the best, while others, like Chowder member John Jaffries, feel more disposable, introduced but kept at arm’s length until they’re utilized to advance the plot.

The worst example of this is Jim Hardie, a high-school-aged bad-boy. In the book’s weakest section, Straub diverts from the Chowder Society and Don to follow Jim and all-American next-door kid Peter Barnes on their alcohol fueled bad-idea adventures.

These include some surprisingly well-constructed scenes, including one where the boys break into a darkened house, and creep up the stairs which—upon my first reading—was the first and only time I’d ever been startled reading a book. A book jump-scare. I wouldn’t have thought it possible.

The trouble is, Jim is such a grating, one-dimensional character you can’t understand what Peter sees in him. He’s not thrilling or charismatic in the slightest, just myopic and unhinged.

Straub’s other struggle comes with his chief antagonist. While she’s villainous enough, her nature is muddled. This is borne out of Straub’s approach. He says, “Very much on my mind was doing something which would be very literary, and at the same time take on every kind of ghost situation I could think of. Also I wanted to play around with reality, to make the characters confused about what was actually real. So: I built in situations in which they feel they are 1.) acting out roles in a book; 2.) watching a film; 3.) hallucinating; 4.) dreaming; 5.) transported into a private fantasy.”³

The result is a being of near omniscient power in some scenes, and surprisingly little in others. A shapeshifting being who predates humankind, regards humans as insignificant and inferior, and yet, when asked what she is, she responds with “I am you.”

In Danse Macabre, Stephen King opines, “It is usually easy to divide horror novels in another way—those that deal with “inside evil” (as in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and those that deal with “outside” or predestinate evil (as in Dracula). But occasionally a book comes along where it is impossible to discover exactly where that line is. The Haunting of Hill House is such a book; Ghost Story is another.”⁴

I can appreciate the ambiguity King admires, but would argue that Straub fumbles the execution. King himself proved far more successful in The Shining, exploring the inner evil of an alcoholic father and the external evil of the malevolent hotel.

Here, Straub over-explains, calling his antagonist a being of pure malevolence. This prompts the reader to wonder: wouldn’t immortal shape-shifters have better things to do? And if they exist only to torment mankind, wouldn’t they have been stamped out by now? The more you explain, the more you diminish your supernatural creations.

Consider how she can turn her victims into revenants. Not spirits but corporeal entities capable of interacting with the physical world and bound by the laws of gravity and physics. Not your traditional ghosts and not quite as scary when you can beat them up.

All that said, Ghost Story remains an ambitious effort that shines more often than it stumbles. That it’s perhaps too ambitious proves its biggest fault, though fans of early King should feel right at home in the small-town world.

Footnotes

1. King, Stephen. Danse Macabre (Chicago: Pocket Books, 2010), 294, Kindle. ↩︎

2. Fred Astaire played Ricky in the 1981 movie. A reasonable choice. ↩︎

3. King, Danse Macabre, 294. ↩︎

4. King, Danse Macabre, 294. ↩︎