Ghost Story: The classic small-town horror filled with creeping dread

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The devices Straub incorporated in this book are so subtle that they had to be corrupted or ignored entirely when a movie was made based on this book. The town of Millburn is described as a small town, but it completely lacks any awareness and interaction. Most readers probably know him as the fat bastard who celebrated with Mr King on The Talisman and Black House . It begins with the frigid voices of old men swapping ghostly stories, then settles back and unwinds as the demons of these old men's stories come to possess the world of the present.

For the past 50 years these best friends have gathered together and told each other stories and have been great companions.But over time he began to notice strange things about her and felt that there was something unnatural about Alma. The creepiness builds over the whole novel, and one thing I thought was very good was the way Straub shows the uncanny breaking into human life.

And because Straub inhabits his characters so fully, and gives us real time with them, it actually means something when the bodies start piling up right after Christmas. See I was in Morocco battling food poisoning, lying naked in the warm, steamy tub when suddenly the shower poll fell from its fixture, clanged on the tiles with the curtain trailing after, and nearly gave me a heart attack. It went against his principles and his politics and probably the puritanism of his long-vanished religion too, but Sears’s library – Sears’s whole splendid house – was a place where a man felt at ease.As the car descended, Eva stirred inside, screaming and hammering at the back window as the car sank. We spend time with the town’s ne’er-do-well, who’s hellbent on corrupting his best friend before the other boy goes off to Cornell; we listen in on the chatter at Humphrey Stalladge’s bar, and at a couple different dinner parties; we follow Ricky Hawthorne’s wife on a few of the dates that her husband ignore with grim determination; we hear a long, probably true story about Sears’ past; we duck into the mind of Milly Sheehan, Dr. We pick up their story a few days before the one-year anniversary of Edward’s death—a year that the men have spent telling each other ghost stories, and only ghost stories. It's a long book and told from multiple points of view (even changing from third person to first person) yet never flags, never drops the interest. You can only assume America's favourite Trump-basher was still coked out of his asshole when he said this was the scariest novel ever written.